#170: In love, with love, of love
Hi,
I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of love out there, about how I love and the kinds of love I want to receive. I keep returning to the fact that self love is what I crave most in my life right now. A better understanding of myself. More compassion. I still don’t understand why self love just doesn’t come as easy as I’d like. But I do know that being gentle helps.
A small lesson from Rumi that I’ve been mulling over:
“Never give from the depths of your well, but from your overflow.”
A love/life lesson from Thomas Merton that’s showing me how to love better:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
POETRY CORNER
Reading Alex Dimitrov’s poem Love got me looking for unusual love poems.
The Bed by Jonathan Potter
That Sunday morning we arose from love,
In love, with love, of love, from the bed
We shared, that lovely bed we'd made from dreams,
That sweet bed that held us as I held you
As you held me, that bed, that bed, that bed.
Our love transformed that humble bed into
The bed of beds, our love unhinged that bed
And sent it floating, flying, bending, wed
To all the love the world has ever known,
To all the joy two bodies can contain.
We rose up from our bed, our happy bed,
And found our way downstairs to breakfast,
Our love transforming every sip of coffee,
Every bite of melon, every taste
And touch and sight and smell and every sound.From the Inside by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
In these days when the torrents of grief flood deep,
when sorrow pools like blood on the floor,
in these days when I can do nothing but meet this moment,
when I am too spent to say hello,
love comes to meet me where I am.
It holds me while I cry. It cradles me where I sit.
It steps with me as I walk. There was, at first,
a moment when I tried to push it away,
alarmed by this onslaught of love.
Too much, I protested, arms up in resistance,
but love obliterated my no.
It moved in to hold me from the inside,
slipped into my tissue, my bones,
it infused itself into each tiny cell, each organelle,
and made inside me a home. Since that moment,
I am never alone. Now it is love that moves my hand.
Love that shapes each word. Love that helps me rise.
Love that pours the tea.
Love that wakes with me in the middle of the night.
Autonomic love that makes the heart beat,
autonomic love that makes the lungs breathe.
autonomic love that meets the impossible grief
and surrounds it with an impossible grace.
Love that grips me around the heart
as if to save me from drowning.
Love that murmurs again and again,
I’ve got you, Sweetheart, I’ve got you.The Road by Raymond Carver
What a rough night! It’s either no dreams at all,
or else a dream that may or may not be
a dream portending loss. Last night I was dropped off
without a word on a country road.
A house back in the hills showed a light
no bigger than a star.
But I was afraid to go there, and kept walking.
Then to wake up to rain striking the glass.
Flowers in a vase near the window.
The smell of coffee, and you touching your hair
with a gesture like someone who has been gone for years.
But there’s a piece of bread under the table
near your feet. And a line of ants
moving back and forth from a crack in the floor.
You’ve stopped smiling.
Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We’ll pretend
we’re in a foreign country. And in love.I Am Giving Up Poetry by Camille Guthrie
But he that writes of you, if he can tell
That you are you, so dignifies his story.
—Sonnet 84, Shakespeare
I am giving up poetry for kissing you, I mean it
When your body nears mine, metaphors are tedious nitpickers
Similes as useless to me as an IUD from the seventies
I don't want representation I want to make out in parking lots
When you touch my breasts, sonnets are painfully brief
Epics dull and long, too many battles, I long to be alone with you
For just an hour, no allusions to Yeats, just your weight on mine
There's no subtlety to my intentions, no puns, no ambiguity
There's no time for rhymes! The ice shelves have slid into the sea
Total hive collapse, don't you know I want to embrace you
Not ennobling truths? I don't want prizes or to be read by future girls
My words mean only what they say, this is my New Realism
It's not very political yet it's urgent and you are you
I have critical work to do like licking your sweet faceThe Truelove by David Whyte
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’tbecause finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.We Manage Most When We Manage Small by Linda Gregg
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Myth - Beach House (The nights are getting colder and I find myself returning to early Beach House albums for comfort)
Six Rare Recordings of Denise Levertov Reading Her Poetry, Illustrated by Artist Ohara Hale
This Rube Goldberg machine plays music from Spirited Away (via Creative Mornings)
Thirteen (Big Star cover) - Bedouine, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Waxahatchee
LINKS OF THE WEEK
I like this idea: Addition by subtraction.
“I imagine the unfinished projects haphazardly organized in my computer, in my phone notes, in my journal, in my head.” I loved reading this newsletter by Courtney Martin on killing her false idol of completion
How Frances Ha Captured the Romance and Precarity of Present-Day New York
Came across an Eschatological Laundry list by Sheldon Kopp.
My favorite: 'Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again.’It’s always an emotional adjustment, isn’t it? Settling into the dark.
THE GONDWANA ART PROJECT
I recently wrote a piece for Hyperallergic about The Gondwana Art Project, which elevates and upskills tribal and folk artisans in the Gondwana region in India practicing Gond, Warli, and Bhil art. Artisans in the Gondwana region in central India have been having a hard time selling their work in recent years. The project arose to bridge the widening gap between artisans and patrons, and support craftspeople.
GOLDEN ARRAY
Wanted to also share my second piece in Hyperallergic this month:
“In every Indian town and city, it is a common sight to see entangled yet functional wires hanging precariously from buildings and homes. This visual became the starting point for Peruvian-American artist Grimanesa Amoros’s largest light sculpture GOLDEN ARRAY, which invites onlookers to reflect on connections through “the invisible trajectories of a wireless universe.””
I’ll end with this comic from Carissa Potter’s latest newsletter about her struggle with mental health, Ted Lasso, resilience and how we’re all overwhelmed right now.
Be brave.
Rohini
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