#221: In praise of oranges, fridge poetry and filling one's life with awe

Hello,

Spring is in the air, I’ve been gorging on fruits like pitaris and oranges that are keeping my palate full of delight, and my plants are thriving. I just returned home to Bangalore after a week with my family, totally nurtured.

Life has shown me time and time again that the good times don’t last. As my therapist says, “Life is about falling down and picking yourself up, and having enough energy to stay consistent with that process.” And I’ve been actively noticing that there’s something about bearing witnessing growth and wholesomeness (within myself and those around me) that creates a Feed-Back loop, that feeds my very being/soul in return.

So in this newsletter, which I hope brings some joy to your week, I’m going to share only lovely things that have been a breath of fresh air. Paying it forward and all, you see?

Staying with this quote this week, and trying to be one of these ‘some people’:

“Some people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.”
-Abraham H. Maslow

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Poems with Oranges in them

I tried a delicious Orange and Elderflower agua fresca at Pandhal Café & Deli (David Hall) in Fort Kochi, and have been obsessively eating / trying to recreate the recipe since. In honour of oranges, one of the best fruits ever to exist, a few juicy poems:

Oranges on a Branch / Winslow Homer (1885)

1. Abundance by Amy Schmidt
in memory of Mary Oliver

It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.

2. Oranges by Mary Oliver

Cut one, the lace of acid
rushes out, spills over your hands.
You lick them, manners don’t come into it.
Orange−the first word you have heard that day−

enters your mind. Everybody then
does what he or she wants−breakfast is casual.
Slices, quarters, halves, or the whole hand
holding an orange ball like the morning sun

on a day of soft wind and no clouds
which it so often is. “Oh, I always
want to live like this,
flying up out of the furrows of sleep,

fresh from water and its sheer excitement,
felled as though by a miracle
at this first sharp taste of the day!”
You’re shouting, but no one is surprised.

Here, there, everywhere on the earth
thousands are rising and shouting with you−
even those who are utterly silent, absorbed−
their mouths filled with such sweetness.

3. Kiss of the Sun by Mary Ruefle

If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

4. How We Take Our Grief by Kimberly Grey

We take our grief privately and in the morning.
And drink our coffee and drink our tea.
We hold the newspaper out with our arms
and we hold the fork that holds the egg that holds
hunger. We put it in our mouth. We put it
in our mouth. Twice the clock strikes three
and privately we sit together. We think
the orange juice is too bright. We pour it
in a glass and think. We drink the brightness
and it disappears. We take the last muffin and
split it into three.
Our two mouths hold each other.
Privately, we think it’s the mind that holds us.
We sit striking the thought. We hold the clock
that holds the mind. We think the clock is
in our arms. We think the clock is our arms.
Privately, the thought disappears. We pour
the morning. We drink the morning together
and split the brightness. We take the morning
out of us and put it in our mouths. We drink
it. We hold our grief out in front of us.
We think this is private. We take our grief
and pour it in a glass. We think we have
mouths we think we have arms to hold it.    

5. Among the Orange Groves by Lissa Miller 

wherever i am the stars are
and the stars dissolve, resistant
perfume of a dizzy mood, shadows
can’t keep still beneath the trees
nobody misses the past, its dark and
darker green, its flocks of crows
by a dry riverbed, the crows settle
the crows leave trinkets in the leaves, the weight
of citrus comes and goes, the river fills with light
the trees are trimmed to round
and stars are blossom shaped,
sometimes the oranges hang so low, i know
no other sun would drop like that, no sun would bother
to varnish the oranges

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The February Playlist

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Cool Links I Devoured

A fridge poem from this evening (via)

• I found an online website that lets you write fridge poems! Sharing mine above. I’d love to read yours too. :)

• I Am for an Art: Claes Oldenburg’s Artist Statement (“I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps.”

• 2023 Intentions: Swissmiss (I’m going to proactively Embrace Softness too)

• Going through Daak Vaak’s archive. I particularly enjoyed this one.

• January eases into February (Priyanka’s newsletters are so soothing)

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A parting thought

jamievaron

A post shared by Jamie Varon (@jamievaron)

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And with that, I take your leave. Until next Monday, dear reader.

Be there for you,
Rohini