lennysnewsletter.com

What if you’re not supposed to have a long-term plan?

In an emergent career, you are both the individual bird and the whole murmuration—the one following the rules and the one becoming something those rules couldn't have predicted. Every decision you make, every person you work with, every risk you take or don't take—those are your local rules in action. You can't see the pattern they're creating from inside it. You can only see the next step.

whyisthisinteresting

The Bait Ball Edition

Here's the irony: the bait ball also attracts more predators due to its concentrated nature. The same behavior that makes you harder to pick off as an individual makes the collective impossible to ignore. The logic that protects the individual exposes the group.

themarginalian.org

The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

themarginalian.org

How Flamingos Got Their Pink

It is not simply that flamingos metabolize archaea, digesting them to turn their pigments into plumage coloration — modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea still live intact in the feathers of flamingos, perhaps the way our own past moves through us, lives in us, colors our present with the hue of something deeper than memory, something shimmering with the mystery of what makes life alive.

themarginalian.org

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

Every tree is a jazz player, in just this way, although where a long Coltrane piece might last a quarter hour, a tree's performance may go on for half a millennium or more.