#150: these are a few of my favorite things

Hello there,

It’s such a pleasant surprise to be here, six and a half years into a newsletter that started so impulsively and is now a community of over 48,000 people. Boggles my mind. From February 2015 to June 2018, I sent out a total1143 newsletters every single day. Almost exactly three years ago to this date, I decided to give more thought and time to to the newsletter and made it a weekly edition. This way, the universe has all week to reveal its goodness to me, and I keep collecting them to share with you. 

It's been an interesting journey to get to this point, 150 weekly editions later. The newsletter has become an emotional vent in many ways, with the poems and art representing my inner workings more and more delicately.  

Thank you for being here, dear reader. Every day, I feel gratitude for The Alipore Post and where it's gotten me. It has nurtured a love for poetry and community, made me fall in love with art in the most intense way, given me a platform to share the beauty I encounter in my life. 

Artwork by Andrea Serio

Today, I've decided to skip the usual format and just share a few of my favorite things: 

1. This powerful poem: ❤️

Enough by Jeffrey Harrison

It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough for you to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off your boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you’ve never said circling inside you.
It’s the rising wind that pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.

2. Two apps I love: Headspace: Doze Sleep Music (I love falling asleep to this) + Daisie, an app with free creative workshops you can attend everyday!

3. I really appreciate the vulnerability of comics by Jon Michael Frank, Kat Schneider, Lesley Imgart and Beth Evans.

4. I've been trying to journal more consistently this year. It's amazing how much the subconscious reveals to me when I reach the flow state while journaling. I do Future Self Journaling, Gratitude Journaling and use the Reflection app for prompts.

5. 2021 has been all about doodling on photographs and re-contextualising photographs by introducing new elements to it. Some of my favorite artists who do this well are Christoph Niemann, Kaviya Sekar and A Daily Cloud.

Doodle by yours truly @ro.doodles

6. I've enjoyed dancing to Red Rose and Tuzo Mog by Lorna Cordeiro, the Nightingale of Goa + feeling at home listening to my dear Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou's album Éthiopiques

7. I'm grateful for Nicole LePera, her book How to do the Work and her SelfHealers Circle that I joined recently + Catherine Andrew who runs The Sunday Soother. These two woman has been so important in my mental health journey.

8. Ava's newsletter has been a pretty big discovery and I find so much wisdom in her emails. She’s an excellent curator of words and writes everything straight from the heart. I highly recommend subscribing.

In a recent newsletter, she wrote:

"We want to be beautiful and admired and strong; we want to be the protagonist of the movie; we want to be held and never lonely; we want to replicate and persist forever. When we think we can outrun the humiliation of being human we start living in narratives and rejecting reality. But every narrative you take up residence in will be haunted until you learn that the ability to acknowledge emptiness is what makes us real. When we pay attention to emptiness instead of running away from it, we transform lack into open space."

9. This mathematical limerick made me smile:

A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.

10. I love and miss having spicy puchkas in my life!

Art by @dabble.doodle

If you've known me long enough, you know how much I love puchkas. I cannot believe I've not eaten roadside puchkas since March, 2020! This artwork by sisters Kanika and Ankita Agarwal @dabble.doodle made me cry-smile.

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The Plated Project Poetry Challenge

We're collaborating with The Plated Project for a really special poetry challenge: to capture the soul of a mystical Urdu word in a poem under 25 words? If you'd like to participate, please write a poem inspired by the Urdu word Raabta, which loosely translates to ‘an incommunicable bond between two souls’.

Submissions: Email us at thealiporepost@gmail.com with your poem and use The Plated Project Poem in the subject line.

Deadline: Friday, 11th June, 2021

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This is my newsletter: Rema Chaudhary

So happy to have Rema Chaudhary, a photographer and dear friend, take over This is my newsletter last Sunday. In her newsletter, Rema spoke about how the past year has changed her:

“When normally I would have relished a quiet day at home, having no other choice had stripped that delight. Chosen alone time and forced isolation, though they lead to the same physical state are not in fact the same at all. The walls suddenly felt higher, and closer. The outbreak placed what we took for granted on a pedestal, dangling it just out of reach. If I had to take anything from this experience at all, it is that life is short. Things will change, they always do. Appreciate the good days, the days you can smile freely and with warmth. Next time put your phone down and make eye contact. Say hello, ALOUD. Things will return to normal. Those hugs will come. Your forest is still there, patiently waiting for your safe return.”

Read Rema’s newsletter here.

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Ending this special 150th weekly edition with this gentle GIF of Bob Ross petting a tiny deer + these wise parting words by David G. Brenner in his book Human Living the Adventure Being of Life and And Love Becoming: 

Spare me perfection.
Give me instead the wholeness
that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am,
just as I am.

Wishing you wholeness and beauty in your lives. Thank you for sticking around.

Much love,
Rohini

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