#157: Healing in nature + Body poems + Internet gaze
Dear reader,
Happy Monday! I hope you’re feeling fresh and brave enough to face the new week.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in parks this month, forming new habits to stay close to greenery. And I cannot emphasise just how healing my time in nature has been. It’s been a feeling I’ve always known, but after the tedious two months indoors during the lockdown, what a joy it is to sit amidst plumeria trees, sipping on my flask of hot coffee and doodling in my sketchbook.
This quote by travel writer Gretel Ehrlich embodies the true belonging I’ve been feeling at the park: “Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”
I invite you all to go visit the parks in your neighborhood or city either alone or with someone whose company you cherish. Look at the different trees and flowers growing there, maybe even pick up a flower and place it behind your ear as I often do. When you find a nice spot, sit down and take a few deep breaths. Write, read, doodle, or take a photograph of the moment if you feel like it. Or just stay immersed in the moment. I’m sure you’ll come out less burdened and more joyful.
Please feel free to send me your park photographs and doodles. Always happy to experience nature vicariously. :)
Poetry Corner
I’ve been diving through the archives of literary journals I look up to this month, and have found some stunning poems that talk of hard truths, identity and the body. I am intrigued by the power of these words and verses, and hope you unravel aspects of your own truth in reading these:
The Truth by Natasha Rao (via The Adroit Journal)
I am only kind to my father
in poems he will never read.
I try to imagine him small
the way my grandmother tells it:
patient, deerlimbed, pondering
polynomials. Wanting only
a Toblerone bar for his birthday
to eat alone in his room
away from the violence of exploding
raindrops, pitiless Madrasi summer.
I wonder if he is proud
of his life like I am proud
of my poems—the best
we could do. In another world
I would go down the stairs
to where my father is sitting alone
with his wine glass and I would tell him
I’m sorry. But I am a woman
the same way my father is a man: always
a little embarrassed.
Somehow it is easier to say I hated
practicing piano in the morning
than it is to say I loved
the way you turned the pages for me.
I cringed being woken up each morning,
pulled blinds and tough light, but I loved
your capable hands on my forehead
brushing away the remnants of a dream.You-Shaped Hole by Tara Mohr
Sometimes the world feels inhospitable.
You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit.
You see what’s missing, how it all could be different.
You feel as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t meant for you,
as if the world is “the way it is” and your discomfort with it a problem.
So you get timid. You get quiet about what you see.
But what if this?
What if you are meant
to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track
in just the particular ways that you do?
The world has a you-shaped hole in it.
It is missing what you see.
It lacks what you know
and so you were called into being.
To see the gap, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.
Filling it is speaking what is missing.
Filling it is stepping into the center of the crowd, into a clearing,
and saying, here, my friends, is the future.
You don’t have to do it all, but you do have to speak it.
You have to tell your slice of the truth.
You do have to walk toward it with your choices, with your own being.
Then allies and energies will come to you like fireflies swirling around a light.
The roughness of the world, the off-track-ness, the folly that you see,
these are the most precious gifts you will receive in this lifetime.
They are not here to distance you from the world,
but to guide you to your contribution to it.
The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it.
In that way you are important.
In that way you are here to make the world.
In that way you are called.Felon's Logic by Alice Fogel
Dear body I do not resent,
experiment with me.
I feel my mind grow broad as orchestras,
I feel its oceans weep. How I fall
awake. How all the alphabet
falls from my hands. I feel beneath my skin
the little needles of a life. I listen
whenever an intersection calls, I obey
its schizophrenia, an understanding of the art
in me that cries for me to act.
What I mean by hurt is that the hours,
they lie to me. I have been, but am not limited to,
a tense. Scars personify the mouth, too fragile
to sing or be. At the sills, estuaries. At the sorrows,
speech. I drink at the dream’s atmospheric
embrace, I feel the mouth that bites me.
I beome what is running through the woods.
Like armor unworn, I pose my battle
along the wall, plain as a god, singing like a verb,
sadistic. I wince and bleed with the world
and all its seamless ways to be rid of me,
until its complications octopus in my irises,
until the moment becomes my mother’s sleeve
I once forgot to grasp.River Inside the River by Gregory Orr
"Memorize those lines you love,
As you tried to memorize
Every part of the beloved’s body.
Memorize, and then forget—
Let them vanish
Into that dark that’s large as death.
They’ll come again
When you most need, least expect.Poem by Aida Mysan
There is a place in your body
that beckons to you
Through this one-point
you enter into all the worlds
Deeper than thinking,
deeper than feeling,
alive with the breath
it tells you of your deepest dreaming
echoes ancient drumming
attends to your truth
There is a place in your body
that gives birth to stars
that is the end of all longing,
repletion of every emptiness,
the pivot around which
all your worlds are turning
There is a place in your body
where you are born
where you belong
where you are welcomed
with all-encompassing love
Imagine that!
Recommended Listening
Links of the Week
Find Momo (I’ve been following Andrew Knapp’s beautiful series for nearly seven years now and was so sad to hear about Momo’s demise. This was the most endearing travel photography series I’ve ever seen, and showed such a special bond between Andrew and Momo. Please visit the website and play the game. You’re sure to fall in love with Momo!)
Where is the line between inspiration and copy?: Carissa Potter
My inner voice is ugly and critical. I can’t figure out why. (a comic by Aimee Pong)
NPR's Joy Generator (YES!)
I've been playing Google Doodle Champion Island Games in my free time
FIELD GUIDE (A new audio experience and art project from the creative team behind California Sunday and Pop-Up Magazine)
This is my newsletter: Shivani Kshirsagar
Internet gaze. Male gaze. Female gaze. Queer gaze. “Seen”. “Read”. “Views” — a language of sight, yet most of us have voluntarily blindfolded our eyes.
Shivani Kshirsagar takes us through her thoughts on gender, emotional nakedness and the need to be seen, and the wavering yet intoxicating attention of the internet in her takeover of This is my newsletter.
An excerpt from Shivani’s newsletter:
“Love is attention; the Internet has a lot of it. But attention is not synonymous with Love. Wordplay. Life is a play. My performance is a part of it. Without applause, can I even call myself a performer? The stage is always solitary. I am solitary, no matter the fellows on the stage. Without the cheers, how do I know if I am enough?
A question that aches with wanting. An absence that never seems to go away.
And so, loneliness.”
Read the thought-provoking newsletter here.
Parting words by Ava, whose words have been a source of strength and light for me this year:
"Don’t live with one foot in an imagined world, ungrateful for the life that you created. We flourish when we stop fantasizing about the unlived life and accept the one we’re in".
-Ava
Here’s to living fully,
Rohini
Thanks for the links, a few were really interesting.