#124: Wishing you days full of magic
Dear reader,
I decorated my Christmas tree yesterday, hung fairy lights around the house, and watched Hilda all day. A perfect day after a bout of imperfect ones.
This year is coming to an end, and I've been feeling more reflective than usual thinking about where I was in January, and where I'm at today. I'm taking time out to figure out what direction I want to take in 2021, slowly charting the path to actually make it there.
I've come to realise that poetry has been my saviour this year. So I compiled a few poems about poems, to be enjoyed on a chilly winter night, preferably aloud.
Poems about poems:
1. Sonnet Love by Catherine Chandler
I love the way its rhythms and its rhymes
provide us with a promise, a belief
familiar voices at specific times
may modulate unmanageable grief.
I love the way we’re called to referee
the mind-heart matchup in its scanty ring;
how through it all our only guarantee
is that for fourteen rounds the ropes will sing.
I love the way it makes us feel at home,
the way it welcomes fugitives and fools
who have forgotten all roads lead to Rome
from shared beginnings in the tidal pools.
Life’s unpredictability defies
clean dénouement. I love the way it tries.
2. How To Eat a Poem by Eve Merriam
Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
3. Dictionaries by Anna Kamieńska
How many poems sleep in dictionaries
buried like needles in hay
How many poets not yet born
rolled in tight webs of anger
How many tender confessions there
How many insults
How many falsehoods
And what unexplored
uninhabited
deserts of silences
4. My Poems by Robert Currie
My poems
are slim bombs
craving explosion
Their fuses lie
dark on the page
awaiting your arrival with a light.
Recommended Listening:
2. Hindsight - Madison McFerrin
3. Lonesome Town - Ricky Nelson
4. Life is But A Dream - The Tokens
Links of the Week:
1. Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’ in 50,000 LEGO Pieces :D
2. Write a grief letter to 2020.
3. Miranda July, Nichols Canyon Road, 2020 (A new short film and essay by Miranda July, inspired by David Hockney’s painting Nichols Canyon)
4. Gift yourself a copy of A Letter, A Poem, A Home by Airplane Poetry Movement! Congratulations, Nandini and Shantanu. :)
5. Muriel Rukeyser on the Root of Strength in Times of Crisis
6. I enjoyed reading #14: year of chaos, the latest edition of the newsletter Tender Tales by Letters of Kindness. Subscribe here.
7. Procreate 5X for Beginners - a free course by Every Tuesday (I just enrolled)
8. Colour Therapy / Paolo Pettigiani
9. Mari Andrews on 2020 + Jerico Silvers on 2020
10. A Beginner's Guide to Staying Warm Outside
This is my newsletter #20 - Cara Tejpal
"My heart is screaming to me that what I really want is to gift you a moment in my shoes. It sounds horrendously arrogant, but I don’t mean the banality of cleaning my teeth or clipping my nails. If you have spent enough time in Nature, you have been confronted with the delirious experience of awe. This is what I wish to give you. I have spent a lot of time in many different kinds of Nature, and I have been filled with awe. It has shown me my place in the world, buttressing me against the anxieties and depressions that plague our generation. I have gathered my awe-experiences carefully, and now I have a respectable and utterly private collection of them. Like precious love letters they are unfolded and read as often as I need their solace."
-Cara Tejpal
Wildlife conservationist and writer Cara Tejpal took over This is my newsletter #20.
Read her love letter to Nature here.
New on the website:
I compiled some of my favorite lockdown lessons in 2020 from the Chitthi Exchange form:
-You can't rush it.
-Coconut milk is a love language.
-Society is running a deficit of love
-Home has unseen corners, now noticed.
-Self discipline is an important part of self love.
-Accept the uncertain.
-Anything that seems like a lot is actually not.
-Our life on this planet is just a mirage.
-To keep chocolate ice cream in the fridge AT ALL TIMES.
-"Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight"
-The world can be a kinder place than we know, even when it’s going up in flames. Both hope and despair forever coexist.
-Time heals everything
-Focus more on doing rather than planning
-Do more outside.
-There's always room for unlearning and learning.
-Live in this moment and love yourself boundlessly
-Never stop learning. Be kind to each other and look after each other.
-Just start working on your skills as soon as you can
-You cannot pour from an empty cup
Read the full list here.
2. Evenings spent talking to Mountains by Satvik Gupta
"Tell me O! Great Mountain,
What must I write about?
Failure plagues these barren pages of mine,
As I find myself lost in your sight.
You sit meditating across my window,
Like a sage glowing in the distant sun.
Guide me to the silent glaciers,
Where untold tales lay frozen."
-from Evenings spent talking to Mountains by Satvik Gupta
Read the full poem here.
3. Remember When - A Souvenir Series
"The project burgeoned as a response to our seclusion and ambivalence, with a goal to add hope and colour to our postcards from isolation. The photographs are a recollection of our travels from the yesteryears, inspiring us to be ever more grateful.
A classic means of dialogue, the postcards add a sense of personal touch to our all-pervasive digital presence, heightened by the (physical) distance. The pictures might appear mundane at a glance, but each is embedded with a whimsical narrative of its own, allowing imagination to flow as it may. In ways more than one, the project acted as an escape from the realities of the day, a place to kindle the creativity and embrace the glory in curiosity."
-Alpana Devarkonda and Suhani Nawalkha
Read about Remember When - A Souvenir Series here.
4. Harvesttime by Kathryn Hummel (excerpt)
am barefoot in the garden     barren-handed gathering flat-crowned heads of poppies  twists of sweet pea.
Crescents at my fingertips scrape off the sepia of spring
   ten moons loaming as the apple tree
supple-skinned      cotton-green   strums its pastoral.
The soil waits breathlessly to release its resin    that miracle of scent   Â
             performed by the land with rain.
Read Kathryn's beautiful poem Harvesttime here.
5. Nargis, Sultana, Chanda, Ismat, and my mother by Harshita Mishra (excerpt)
My mother’s attic
Comes alive at night.
She hides Nargis behind the spice tray in her kitchen
Her nazms locked in the deep recesses of the cupboard.
In her dresser the fiesty Sultana
Whose jet black kajal cleaves hemispheres.
Read the full poem by Harshita here.
I’ll end this newsletter with some Brad Montague wisdom, that I sincerely wish for for all of us:
Wish you days full of magic,
Rohini
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