vol 11. monthly recs & rabbit holes
a hundred roots silently drinking, blind date with a book, perfect days
a snippet from issue no. 54 of Rabbit Holes:
every week, Patricia Mou hand-picks the most psychoactive internet rabbit holes that explore this question: What does it mean to live a life of meaning and beauty?
without further ado.
Here are the visuals, words, poetry, and art so far that stirred my soul for the month of October:
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 iching reader
7. 🎵 press play for music. Listen while you read this issue.
hit play for vibes.
poetics & art.
Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Instructions for Traveling West”
places.
Japanese Villa by And To Architects
words.
[essay] Year of Output: What is Andy doing in 2024?
It is 2024, and I am leaving my grad studies. I have no job prospects, and no startup money. I have enough savings for a year of living. If my life were a company, this would be my runway. To extend the analogy, I am trying to find Andy-Market Fit.
I always felt that if I were given free rein to follow my curiosity for a while, I would be able to make something cool and useful. At the end of high school, I tried to take a gap year. My parents told me to do it after I finished college. As college ended and I considered grad school, I wanted to take a year off to work on personal projects. My parents encouraged me to get my graduate degree first.
Now, after a year of graduate studies, I realize this will never end. I wanted security, and there is never enough security. There is always more school to finish, more money to save, more career to further before making any leap. I am going to use what I know now to sustain myself. I am going to stop sinning.
[essay] don't deceive yourself
What disturbs me, what keeps me up at night, is how I lie to myself. “Self-deception,” Joan Didion wrote in 1961, “remains the most difficult deception”:
The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.
Let’s say there are 3 forms of self-deception. You can deceive yourself about who you are. You can deceive yourself about the choices you can make—or the choices you’ve already made, and why. And you can deceive yourself about the world you live in.1
[interview] The World Is a Prism, Not a Window
This is a central struggle: the fact of human language being quite limited in its ability to convey actual realities about the world. This, as a writer, is—and I’m sure you experience this—we are all just drawing these perimeters around concepts. The writer Clarice Lispector, who I love, wrote once that she was trying to unite the symbol with the thing itself. And the symbol here is the language, and the thing itself is the reality.
…
When we do open up to intelligences that lie beyond the human, we also open ourselves to a category crisis. To begin to view plants with a lens of intelligence not only destabilizes the way we organize taxonomy, but destabilizes our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself. It starts to upend the structures that we’ve created around plants and humans.
…
I think the more time we spend considering the ways in which our lives are absolutely interwoven with the non-human, the more it settles us back into our rightful place in the world in terms of not this pinnacle on some evolutionary hierarchy, but rather just one more node of biological creativity.
[essay] There Is No Show More Beautiful Than This
Every autumn, hundreds of thousands of tiny Vaux’s swifts migrate from their nesting grounds as far north as British Columbia to their overwintering homes in Mexico and South America. Stopping over each year in a schoolhouse chimney in Portland, Oregon, the birds offer a moment of joy amid uncertainty.
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For the last three years, I’ve spent as many September nights watching the swifts as I can. It never fails to move me—the spectacle of the birds and the awe of the people who come to watch them. Last year, when I separated from my husband, I went once a week—volunteering on a couple nights to tell people more about them. I was lonely for the first time in a decade. The birds filled the sky.
[service] Hinoki travels
Hinoki Travels creates signature travel experiences designed to reconnect you to your senses and enhance your well-being in nature. Each unique trip design is centered on one of our four themes:
Reverence: exploring global spiritual practices that revere the natural world
Provenance: exploring the distinct flavors of local foods in rural & remote areas
Interdependence: connecting with remote communities who are adapting to climate change
Rewild Yourself: adventures in remote places that challenge us to find a freer version of ourselves