#146: On feeling the ouch + Building resilience
Hello there,
ARGHHHH!!! It’s been a triple exclamation kind of week/s. I’m grateful for the fact that I’m still alive, as are my loved ones. But my heart goes out to people who aren’t that fortunate. I’m so sorry for what you’re going through and hope the harshness of suffering softens. :(
Please give yourself a big hug today. When I think about the last 14 months of our lives, I realise how many emotions we’ve all been collectively processing non-stop and how much stronger we are today, even if the bleakness of things right now prevents us from seeing that. More than herd immunity, we’ve cultivated herd resilience. I like how Brené Brown puts it, “We don’t have to do all of it alone. We were never meant to.”
We are in this together. So please reach out to someone, anyone, when the going gets tough. I’ve been journaling a lot recently, and wrote down three personal observations on emotional resilience since the pandemic began:
1. You need to feel the ouch 🤕
It’s easier to numb ourselves with crappy tv shows, junk food and substances than get a grasp on what’s really going on inside. I’m trying to be more real, to read situations as they are and let myself feel the ouch. Only in acceptance does any kind of healing begin.
2. Resilience is built over time, not overnight 💪
It takes time to build on the deep reserves of inner strength needed to get through life in one piece. Count your small wins everyday and let them add up. Know that this is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re doing the best you can, even it may not seem like much.
3. Let nature heal you 🌿
Some of my most meaningful moments during lockdown have been spent with nature, tending to my garden, staring at clouds and sunsets and sticking my hand outside the window to feel the rain. Make time for nature, and see how it transforms your mood and well-being.
Poetry Corner
For this week’s newsletter, I’ve picked some lovely poems in honour of resilience and softness in our inner world:
The Cure For It All by Julia Fehrenbacher
Go gently today, don’t hurry
or think about the next thing. Walk
with the quiet trees, can you believe
how brave they are—how kind? Model your life
after theirs. Blow kisses
at yourself in the mirror
especially when
you think you’ve messed up. Forgive
yourself for not meeting your unreasonable
expectations. You are human, not
God—don’t be so arrogant.
Praise fresh air
clean water, good dogs. Spin
something from joy. Open
a window, even if
it’s cold outside. Sit. Close
your eyes. Breathe. Allow
the river
of it all to pulse
through eyelashes
fingertips, bare toes. Breathe in
breathe out. Breathe until
you feel
your bigness, until the sun
rises in your veins. Breathe
until you stop needing
anything
to be different.Softest of Mornings by Mary Oliver
Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
to my heart?
And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder,
before it must break?
This is trivial, or nothing: a snail
climbing a trellis of leaves
and the blue trumpets of flowers.
No doubt clocks are ticking loudly
all over the world.
I don’t hear them. The snail’s pale horns
extend and wave this way and that
as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind
the silvery path of her slime.
Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this?
How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?Letter by Lawrence Raab
Today I did almost nothing.
Read a little, tried to write a sentence
to make another sentence seem necessary.
I wasn’t unhappy. Everything
I could will myself to do I’d done,
so I said I’d done enough.
Now I’m looking out my window:
white pine, ash, a single birch,
the leanings and crossings
of branches. And then the sky:
pale, undecided. Years ago
you wrote to me about a matter
that worried you, and you said
at the end, “That’s probably the best,
and most true, way to think about it.”
I kept your sentence in my notebook.
I liked its shape. I admired the way,
young as you were, you could feel
one kind of thinking
adjusting into another, one truth
becoming a better truth.
Now you’re far off, and alone, and I
have no advice you haven’t already
given yourself. What can I tell you?
That I’m here? That today, when I saw
how tenderly the light was moving
among those trees, I thought of you?Evening Solace by Charlotte Brontë
The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;—
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
And days may pass in gay confusion,
And nights in rosy riot fly,
While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,
The memory of the Past may die.
But there are hours of lonely musing,
Such as in evening silence come,
When, soft as birds their pinions closing,
The heart's best feelings gather home.
Then in our souls there seems to languish
A tender grief that is not woe;
And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish
Now cause but some mild tears to flow.
And feelings, once as strong as passions,
Float softly back—a faded dream;
Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,
The tale of others' sufferings seem.
Oh! when the heart is freshly bleeding,
How longs it for that time to be,
When, through the mist of years receding,
Its woes but live in reverie!
And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,
On evening shade and loneliness;
And, while the sky grows dim and dimmer,
Feel no untold and strange distress—
Only a deeper impulse given
By lonely hour and darkened room,
To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven
Seeking a life and world to come.In Perpetual Spring by Amy Gerstler
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.
Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.
Recommended Listening:
-Therapy Of Art - Jon-Michael Frank (I love Jon’s work and found so much meaning in this conversation about art, emotions and sobriety)
-This Feeling - Alabama Shakes
-Thom Yorke - From the Basement
-Visions - José González (We are patiently inching our way / Toward unreachable utopias)
Links of the Week:
-Teddy bears hanging around different locations in Paris / Les nounours des gobelins
-‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe
-Learn how to draw expressions with Tanvi Bhat
-Beautiful numbers by Stefan Sagmeister
-Self-Portraits 2050 by Omar Aqil
-Need a break? Look up at the clouds
-Threads (on the beauty and complexity of parental love)
This is my newsletter: Nina Iordanova
This week’s takeover of This is my newsletter comes from Toronto. Nina Iordanova who runs the lovely newsletter Something Good talks about life in Canada, community building, her Bulgarian roots and how to cultivate realistic expectations of yourself.
Read Nina’s newsletter here: https://thisismynewsletter.substack.com/p/this-is-my-newsletter-39-nina-iordanova
New in the Journal
Art by Ishita Jain "I am Ishita, an illustrator and designer from Delhi, India though I am currently based in New York. I love to draw on location and never leave the house without a sketchbook. I familiarize myself with new people, places and feelings through drawing. My work is inspired by day-to-day life, happenings around town and the wonder that comes from being around nature."
Check out more works by Ishita here.
Children write Open letters to 2021
2020 hasn’t been easy on adults. But for children too, the pandemic and staying away from friends and teachers for an entire year has changed their lives in unimaginable way.
We decided to collaborate with Word Munchers, which provides an array of eclectic creative writing services, to get students to write an open letter to 2021, writing about the kind of year they want for themselves. Read the open letters by children here.
Sweet nothings and gunshot wounds by Bhairavi Ponkshe (excerpt)
"I could taste
the pain from my own lips.
Or the absence of it that I'm
not yet accustomed to.
It felt like an unfathomable
brush of wind on my tongue.
And it took away all the
red that was left in there."
Read the full poem by Bhairavi here.
Yesterday, I was featured in Sunday Herald in an article calling The Alipore Post ‘A space for beautiful things’. I’m grateful for the article, which made me realise how to me, newsletter offers so much more than beauty. It is a weekly act of resilience, of showing up no matter what is going in the background. An act of making sense of the world, both inner and outer, through poetry and art and music.
Stay safe, my dear reader. Please take care of yourselves and those you care about you. Go easy on yourself in terms of expectations during a global pandemic. And remember you’re not in this alone.
You got this!
Rohini
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