vol 2. monthly recs & rabbit holes

new wellness wisdom offering

Going into 2024, i’ll be starting a newsletter series within wellness wisdom called “monthly recs & rabbit holes”, a lite version of Rabbit Holes.

Some of you may already know that for the last 2+ years, i’ve curated the most heart-opening, awe-inspiring, and intellectually-stimulating content i’ve come across in a publication called Rabbit Holes.

It’s my favorite part of each month, as I comb through hundreds of visuals, poetry, essays, and links i’ve scavenged from the far corners of the internet. I mainly curate for 900~ subscribers within the areas of: philosophy, art & poetry, culture & society, architecture, personal development, spirituality, & world-building. Here’s a breakdown of the newsletter format:

the anatomy of a rabbit holes issue

Going forward, I’m planning on sharing a lite version of each rabbit holes issue here. Just 10 pieces of content here (out of the 100~ or so) from the larger version.

If you’re curious to get a taste of Rabbit Holes I recently put together 10 of the most popular Rabbit Holes issues to date, which you can get here.

Without further ado here’s the first issue of monthly recs & rabbit holes below:

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Here are 10 of visuals, words, poetry, and art so far that stirred my soul for the month of November from issue no. 43 of Rabbit Holes:

1. ☕ Grab hot tea or coffee

4. 💨 Take 5 breaths

5. 🎵 Press play for music. Listen while you read.

[airbnb] Earthships

For christmas this winter i’m staying in colorado for 2 weeks at an earthship as a hideaway to read and write :)

An Earthship is a type of sustainable and eco-friendly home that is often made from both natural and recycled materials. These buildings are designed to be self-sufficient, utilizing solar and wind energy for power, rainwater harvesting for water, and natural ventilation for cooling.

[photographer] Marta Syrko

Most of Marta Syrko’s photographs don’t look like photographs at first glance; her subjects multiply before our eyes—their edges not quite worldly—existing within plumes of colored smoke, in reflections, or in what appear to be paintings. It’s surprising, then, to hear that all these images are created with analog techniques. She tells writer Diane Smyth about the natural elements she uses to create her supernatural photos, and why she wants to keep the viewer guessing, inviting them to question their own relationship with images.

[architecture] This Off-Grid Design Studio Feels Like It’s Floating in a Forest

Sharon, a graphic designer and illustrator, and Mike, an interface designer and entrepreneur, met at Apple in San Francisco before moving to a 10-acre off-grid home in wine country. They wanted a remote studio for conducting research and creating without distraction; a place that didn’t just offer views of nature, but that felt woven into it. "We envisioned a design studio where we could work [while being] deeply connected to the environment," Mike says.

[interview] John O’Donohue The Inner Landscape of Beauty

John O’Donohue entered seminary at a young age and was a Catholic priest for 19 years. But in the 1980s, he went to Germany to study the philosophy of Hegel. He eventually left the priesthood and devoted himself full-time to meditating and writing on beauty, friendship, and how the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual, intertwine in human experience.

He believed that the human soul does not merely hunger for beauty, but that we feel most alive in the presence of what is beautiful. “It returns us, often in fleeting but sustaining moments,” he said, “to our highest selves.”

Exerts:

O’Donohue: Where beauty is, I think, is — beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

O’Donohue:German mystic. And one day I read in him, and he said, “There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing. And if you cash it out, what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

[essay] The Two Energetic Poles of the Universe

(Energy 1)
Instinic Qualtiy = Its nature is Freedom
Deepst Gift = To offer its partner Fullness

(Energy 2)
Instinic Qualtiy = Its nature is Fullness
Deepst Gift = To offer its partner Freedom

In addition to the more broad macrocosmic scale described above, both of these primary energies also manifest microcosmicly in relationships between two humans.

Most obviously we see these dynamics in our romantic encounters. The ideal relationship would match the descriptions above. One partner consciously taking a particular polarity of energy and his or her partner taking the opposite pole. Another alternative, would be to be in a relationship in which each partner spontaneously feels into the context and situation and then selects the appropriate pole -- easefully gliding between one perspective and the other. For maximum efficiently, evolvability and progress in the universe -- in other words to be aligned with evolutionary principles -- each partner must play the balancing role to its fullest manifestation.

The key to a healthy romantic relationship that involves not only partnership but communion that maintains sexual attraction is to play the appropriate role fully and consciously. This is true whether you find yourself playing one of these roles more than the other or if you and your partner can switch back and forth -- trading poles with ease.

[interview] James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78

BALDWIN: When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

[interview] Meet the professor who self-administered 73 high-dose LSD sessions

Surely you learned and experienced a ton during those trips, but if you had to choose the most important thing that you learned from all of them, what would it be?

This is a hard question to answer. The most important? That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power, that we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment, that we are growing ever-more aware of this connection, that physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously, that Light is our essential nature and our destiny, that all life moves as One, that reincarnation is true, that there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives, that everything we do contributes to the evolution of the whole, that our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die, that we are loved beyond measure and that humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level. Take your pick.

[video] Couple rents a 600 sq m house for 40,000/yr, and live the Buddhist life in the suburbs of Beijing

Born in 1989, Beiliu couple Yi Peng and Penderler are freelancers. In 2016, the two rented a 600 square meter abandoned yard in the Shunyi countryside, 50 kilometers away from Beijing, and transformed it into a dream house by themselves! The couple are sunbathing here, planting the land, painting, and watching sunrise and sunset.

[lecture] “You And Your Research,”

Richard Hamming delivers “You And Your Research,” a lecture about doing great work, and what the great scientists he worked alongside or studied had in common.

Some highlights

• Drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' 

• Dispose of this matter of luck as being the sole criterion whether you do great work or not… Newton said, ``If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.''

• One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

• When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. Early recognition... seems to sterilize you.

• What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad.

• Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest…The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. 

• Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well… If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. 

• If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work… You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. 

• I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. 

• You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative.

[museum] Mona

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is an art museum located within the Moorilla winery on the Berriedale peninsula in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. It is the largest privately funded museum in the Southern Hemisphere. MONA houses ancient, modern and contemporary art from the David Walsh collection. Noted for its central themes of sex and death, the museum has been described by Walsh as a "subversive adult Disneyland".

Mona is the playground and megaphone of David Walsh, who grew up in Tassie (just down the road from Mona), dropped out of uni, played cards, won, did some other stuff, and opened a small museum of antiquities to which no one came. He declared it a triumph and decided to expand. The result is Mona, a temple to secularism, rationalism, and talking crap about stuff you really don’t know very much about. We won’t tell anyone. Come and play.

[archive] Whole Earth Catalog

The Catalog's publication coincided with a great wave of convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude associated with "the counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and outdoorsy people of many stripes.

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation ... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.