vol 6. monthly recs & rabbit holes

kissa bars, community magic, soulmaking

The Glass Tea House ‘Mondrian’, 2014.

Sourced from issue no. 46 of Rabbit Holes:

here are a handful of visuals, words, poetry, and pieces of art that stirred my soul for the month of March:

1. 💻 Open this issue in your web browser (not phone) at a time where you have at least 30 mins to read.

2. ☕ Grab hot tea or coffee

3. 👚 Change into something comfortable and ideally sit against some fluffy pillows, with your computer on your lap at a 45 degree angle

4. Light a candle 🕯️

5. 💨 Take 5 breaths and listen to this meditation

6. Meditate on a question you have and run it by this I Ching Oracle

7. 🎵 Press play for music. Listen while you read this issue.

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poetics & art.

  ― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Hiroshi Senju: Waterfall (2009)

Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.

Katherine Henson

Vladimir Lagrange. Doves Of Peace. 1962

Forugh Farrokhzad, from a letter to Ebrahim Golestan featured in “Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad,” tr. by Sholeh Wolpé.

Philip Jones Griffiths. A young couple seek a tender moment in a doorway, London. 1960s

Hefei 1953 Juxing Grain Post Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore (Heifi, China)

Designed by SU Architects

A historic granary turned cultural landmark, blending architectural innovation with the building's historical essence.

[art] teamLab’s Newest Interactive Installation

[new exhibit] Paris Art Museum

Reflecting Andao’s sophisticated designs and the dome’s historic murals, Kimsooja’s mirror inverts the world as we know it, challenging our sense of order. “I would like to create works that are like water and air,” the artist says, “which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone.”

[curator] Axel Vervoordt and the extraordinary treasures of Castle 's-Gravenwezel

“It’s very difficult for me to put a name on my work. I’m an architect, art dealer, a collector. I think there’s no rules. No dogma. And it’s a lot about intuition.

words.

[essay] The Purpose Of Life

The purpose of life, in my mind, is to achieve the complete expression of whatever physiological code happened to make it intro production through the iterative development process that was your parents’ attempts at procreation. There’s a complete version of you waiting to exist in this world, and a million contextual tailwinds, and a million contextual headwinds that are influencing whether or not that version ultimately expresses, or some diluted derivative thereof…which in and of itself may be amazing, but shy of your truest essence.

Obviously life is about finding who you are….but I’d take it a step further and say it’s about maximizing who you are…reaching for the deepest expression, the most distilled self, and owning it completely in a sea of context because the world needs it and you need to process the world through its specific lens. How do you do this? The world is a mirror, but it’s highly prismatic. No one person, or pursuit, or event, or anything else reflects back this self as it is….each reflection is a directionally correct distortion of your true self…and through the consumption of probably trillions of reflections you consume, through some passive and some active synthesis, you connect to what’s inside you…your source code becomes legible despite its invisibility.

Why are you here? The short answer is to be you. You have a place. You play a role. It matters. You matter. And what you present to the world matters so much, because if you are presenting something that is far away from self, the reflections you get back are even more highly distorted…and your understanding of who you are drifts further and further away from who you were meant to become. This life is an imperfect pursuit. It is a curve that approaches a line but never intersects…and yet furiously moving along that curve is perhaps the deepest purpose that I see.

[short film] A Gathering of the Tribe

this short film really opened my heart:

My tears always come from a revelation of hidden truth. As if the frames of perception themselves liquidate out of my eyes so I can see clearly again. This story made me cry the first time I read it in Charles Eisenstein’s book, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” and every time I have watched it since. Because to me, it is a true story. Whether actually true or metaphorically true, it doesn’t matter.

[bookshelf] from yours truly

Recently put up a list of books that have moved me on my website here. I hope you’ll find some new reads to add to the ant-library or queue :)

[short story] Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace

the narrator of the story feels like all of his behaviours, even those that seem perfectly innocent on the surface, could be said to have scheming, strategic roots. Is he doing something simply because he likes it, or because he’s covertly trying to achieve some other end?

[essay] I Opened A Grocery Store

Alison Roman on opening a grocery store:

I don’t know how we went from “we sell local meats,” to that last sentence (Janice, if you’re reading this, let’s put a pin in that for Monday), but to get us back on track, I guess if I’m distilling it all down to one thing, it’s that cooking, for me, is to love and be loved. It’s self-care, it’s caring for others. In a funny silly little way, opening this little grocery store to sell people beautiful ingredients I find delicious and useful is my ultimate love letter, a full circle moment, my highest calling, my greatest purpose. 

[conversation] Is Value fundamental to the cosmos? Iain McGilchrist in conversation with Zak Stein

Fascinating conversation. Iain believes value is as equally primordial with time, space, motion, and consciousness. Value is there in the ground of reality - we discover them, not invent them. The purpose of life is the ability to bring forth into being, something that can respond to those primordial values. How we interpret value (good, beautiful, and true) into our values is up to us. It exists before the human. Life emerged to respond to value.

[essay] Understand the Deep Transformation of the Ayurvedic Process

A common misconception about Ayurveda is that it is merely a system for diet and lifestyle, or that it solely focuses on treating disease. Fascinating re memories being stored in fat tissue:

This detoxification isn’t limited to the physical plane. We now understand that unprocessed emotions can be stored inside the body. Once stored in the body, these negative emotions cause recurring patterns of behavior.

[essay] A City is not a Tree

One of the best essays i’ve written this month where Alexander argues that the cities that feel “most alive” are built in the system of a semi-lattice as opposed to a tree:

When we think in terms of trees we are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for a conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. Every time a piece of a city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step toward dissociation.

In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a Person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide. An ominous example of city-wide dissociation is the separation of retired people from the rest of urban life, caused by the growth of desert cities for the old like Sun City, Arizona. This separation is only possible under the influence of treelike thought.

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

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thanks for coming down the rabbit hole with me today. for the full issue you can jump down 🕳️🐇