#175: If I had my life to live over again
Hello there.
How is your Monday going? I found a poem titled If I had my life to live over again by Nadine Stair on one of my favorite blogs Swiss Miss recently. Nadine, 85, writes:
If I had my life to live over again,
I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.
I’d relax.
I’d limber up.
I’d be sillier than I’ve been this trip.
I would take fewer things seriously.
I would take more chances,
I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
You can scroll down to read the full poem in the Poetry Corner. But something in Nadine’s words stirred me, because the year has been about realisations and confrontations, and because I really want to change how I speak to myself. To live more, regret less.
The poem also made me think of some solid advice from author Louise Hay:
“You’ve been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try accepting yourself and see what happens.”
- Louise Hay
As we walk into the future, together and alone, shall we give self-acceptance our 100%, if only to see what happens?
Poetry Corner
Some deep poems about the future, age and moving forward to keep you company on cold winter nights:
If I had my life to live over again by Nadine Stair, Louisville at 85 years of age
(via Swiss Miss)
If I had my life to live over again,
I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.
I’d relax.
I’d limber up.
I’d be sillier than I’ve been this trip.
I would take fewer things seriously.
I would take more chances,
I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would, perhaps, have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones.
you see, I’m one of those people who was sensible and sane,
hour after hour,
day after day.
Oh, I’ve had my moments.
If I had to do it over again,
I’d have more of them.
In fact, I’d try to have nothing else- just moments,
one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute.
If I could do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had to live my life over,
I would start barefoot earlier in the spring
and stay that way later in the fall.
I would go to more dances,
I would ride more merry-go-rounds,
I would pick more daisies.
Future Plans by Kate Barnes
When I am an old, old woman I may very well be
living all alone like many another before me
and I rather look forward to the day when I shall have
a tumbledown house on a hill top and behave
just as I wish to. No more need to be proud—
at the tag end of life one is at last allowed
to be answerable to no one. Then I shall wear
a shapeless felt hat clapped on over my white hair,
sneakers with holes for the toes, and a ragged dress.
My house shall be always in a deep-drifted mess,
my overgrown garden a jungle. I shall keep a crew
of cats and dogs, with perhaps a goat or two
for my agate-eyed familiars. And what delight
I shall take in the vagaries of day and night,
in the wind in the branches, in the rain on the roof!
I shall toss like an old leaf, weather-mad, without reproof.
I’ll wake when I please, and when I please I shall doze;
whatever I think, I shall say; and I suppose
that with such a habit of speech I’ll be let well alone
to mumble plain truth like an old dog with a bare bone.
Haiku by Helen Ogden
climate change
against all odds
I plant seedlings
New Every Morning by Susan Coolidge
Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.
The Eyes Of The Future by Terry Tempest Williams
The eyes of the future are looking back at us,
and they are praying
that we might see beyond our own time.
They are kneeling with hands clasped
that we might act with restraint,
that we might leave room for the life
that is destined to come.
To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle.
Perhaps the wildness we fear
is the pause between our own heart beats,
the silent space that says we live only by grace
wildness, wilderness lives by this same grace,
wild mercy is in our hands.
Let this be our prayer, reimagined.
Loading the Woodshed — 2012 by David Budbill
I finished loading the woodshed today. Every year
I tell myself, This is it, the last time. It’s just too
much work, too painful, and I’m too old.
And then, the next year, when fall rolls
around, the air gets cold, and the geese go south, I
load the woodshed again.
How long will this go on? I’m seventy-two.
Every year it takes me longer to recover,
yet every year I keep doing it.
It’s just, now that I’m done, I can go out into
the woodshed, sit in a chair, and look at all those
neatly stacked rows, six and a half feet high, six feet
long and sixteen inches deep, two sets of rows like that,
left and right, four full cord — not much by some standards —
but enough to keep us warm all winter.
When I go out and look at what I’ve done, I get such a deep
sense of satisfaction from this backaching labor that I can’t
imagine a year without going through all that pain again.
Recommended Listening
Just Like Heaven - Christian Lee Hutson feat. Shamir (The Cure cover)
Black Beatles 1963-1972: Black artists interpret the music of the Fab Four
Links of the Week
I recently discovered the art by A. Ramanchandran and have been going through his entire body of work. Smitten! My personal favorite are his oil paintings between 1991-2000 (incidentally the first nine years of my life).
Earth Black Box, which will record every step we take towards this climate catastrophe
When Hallmark Commissioned Salvador Dali to Create Christmas Cards
India represent!
I wrote about Lokame Tharavadu for Hyperallergic’s The Best of 2021: Our Top 10 Exhibitions Around the World year-end list! :)
Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, the first-ever edition of Lokame Tharavadu (The World is One Family) features over 3,000 works by 267 artists who trace their roots back to the coastal town of Alappuzha in Kerala, India. The show explores a variety of artistic perspectives, across mediums and styles, on home, gender, identity, belonging, and the universal spirit of humanity in the midst of a global pandemic. A celebration of the diversity of artistic practices coming out of Kerala, it has introduced art and aesthetics to a small town in South India by thinking locally and acting globally.
Poetry for climate change
One of my poem seeds was picked up for Ñaat? When Is Now, a global, collaborative work of linked verse and murals. Ñaat? comes from Marshallese, meaning “When?”.
More than any other time in human history, the climate crisis forces us to live today with the echoes of past actions and the uncertainty of our futures. We are Here: in the midst of simultaneous biophysical, socio-political crises that demand the remaking of our world in a Now, where the boundaries between technical policy, science, art and stories no longer hold.
The Agam Agenda, a special project of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC), is inviting poets and artists around the world to express the question “When?” to unlock doors that lead to reckoning and acts of restoration. When will world leaders listen and act with the urgency required by the climate crisis? How soon? How quickly? An answer exists. For those already experiencing the impacts of climate change the answer is now--or even yesterday--and as fast as possible.
You can read more about the project on whenisnow.org and respond to my poem seed with your own verse in the link below. I’m also working on a mural for the project this week with a friend! More details on that soon. :)
Leaving you with this gentle tweet:
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support this labour of love, you can sign up to be a Patron, paid subscriber, or buy me a coffee, or forward this email to your friends.
Take care,
Rohini