#110 - It's time to be slow
Hello!
I hope you're all (still) staying safe, and still wearing your masks and maintaining social distancing.
I cannot believe it's September already.
Where did this year go? When will it end?
The good news is that pandemic or no pandemic, I'm going to show up in your inbox every Monday, and bring you poetry and art to get you through this...
Art by David Hettinger
Time to be slow by John O'Donohue
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
Some poems on writing that I discovered today on an impulsive binge (who knew!):
"A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day."
-A Word is Dead by Emily Dickinson
“I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I’d write to the point of suffocation
I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I’d write about you
a lot more
than I should”
-I wish I wrote the way I thought by Benedict Smith "I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off." -Metaphors by Sylvia Plath
And here's a poem by Shel Silverstein that we could all do with in our lives:
Recommended Listening: Spring Breathes - Diane Coffee Born Alone - Naive Thieves (so glad I found my way back to them) Moonshine Freeze - This Is The Kit Music For Airports - Brian Eno Sounds of the Forest (BEST!) Jeweled Space - lasos
Links of the Week:
A Mirage In The Night
Photograph by Nayan Jyoti Das
The 2020 Nature inFocus photo award winners ^
Pandemic, a film by Pedro and James
Happy 10th Birthday, Colossal! You've kept me inspired for so damn long <3
You’ve got mail. India’s newsletter ninjas are here to charm your inbox (So pumped to be featured in The Print. Thank you, Fiza) Subscribe: The Art of Distance (a new ‘Paris Review’ newsletter to help you feel connected in this time of uncertainty.) I've seen 3 Malayalam films this weekend: c u soon, Manoharan and Take Off. If you haven't yet explored Malayalam cinema, I urge you to do so.
This is my newsletter #6 - Meera Ganapathy on Nostalgia
-from Meera's newsletter titled Random Access Memories
Meera is the editor of Soup, one of my favorite journals from India. Check out her newsletter takeover here, and subscribe to This is my newsletter for a special newsletter by a surprise curator every Sunday!
New on the Website:
-As part of a collaboration with Speaking Tiger, I picked my favorite poems from poet-archivist Michael Creighton's beautiful collection, New Delhi Love Songs. Read the poems here.
"Mother,
our old house burns gently
in its slow blaze like water
that you used to berate me for leaving
on the stove for far too long until
it simmered itself away."
-from Mother by R.P.Sawant
"I started to use flowers and plants in my work after a couple of years into my practice when I decided to use props, and plants and flowers were widely available for me. As my personal style kept developing, they became a staple element in my practice, becoming my way to express my connection with nature, growth and natural energy." -Floral Self Portraits by Fares Micue
"Somewhere the hurt
in your attic heart
grows old and soft
and exists as a spot
with no name."
-from Somewhere by Amit Shankar Saha
Jackfruit by Soni Somarajan
One the Liberal and other the Conservative—
trees my sister and I thought were twins.
Their fruits different, the first mashy,
easing down the throat, chewing unnecessary;
the second firm, fleshy, last bastion of taste.
Both the same, even the body language—
a knife, oil-laced, slices them clean,
waking yellow bulbs banished to sleep.
To that question of what’s best for us,
we remain at loggerheads, ever since we
feasted on them the first time.
-from Soni Somarajan's poems on fruit trees, with detailed botanical illustrations by Alisha Dutt Islam
That's all for this week, folks!
-Rohini
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