#235: Beauty in Transit
Time Poems + Ted Lasso love + The Art of Living Alone
Hello!
Sometimes, we’re just half awake through the experiences life throws at us. For the fleeting conversations and quiet glances exchanged with strangers who seem familiar. I feel like I experience life from moment to moment, staying present while gently accepting that soon enough, the purity and rawness of those feelings will fade. Change is hard and inevitable, might as well make the most of your waking life.
I’ve been floating through a daze of jet lag and trying to slowly process all the visual stimuli of the past two weeks of travel. On this recent trip, I’ve been allowing myself to to articulate less and just experience the “beauty in transit”, as a friend put it.
A few important moments that felt transformative:
Poetry Corner
A few brilliant poems on time and the transient nature of life:
1. The Room by Mark Strand
It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open
and into his room the misfortunes come --
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.
There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.
2. What Is June Anyway? by David Budbill
After three weeks of hot weather and drought,
we've had a week of cold and rain,
just the way it ought to be here in the north,
in June, a fire going in the woodstove
all day long, so you can go outside in the cold
and rain anytime and smell
the wood smoke in the air.
This is the way I love it. This is why
I came here almost
fifty years ago. What is June anyway
without cold and rain
and a fire going in the stove all day?
3. Passing Time by Maya Angelou
Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk
One paints the beginning
of a certain end.
The other, the end of a
sure beginning.
4. Making Sense by Carrie Newcomer
Finding what makes sense
In senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithfully recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.
You can believe in a tree,
With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way
of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.
A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,
It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where
and when It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.
In a senseless time
Hold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.
It is all still happening
Even now.
Even now.
5. Love Poem Again by Linda Pastan
there are times when
anything feels
like a love poem
standing on line at the post office
for instance
waiting to lick
a stamp
I will buy with
the last loose
change in my pocket
(my own dna
anointing
the envelope)
so I can send you
this message
Links of the Week
Among the Trees by Carl Phillips (so lovely)
“The essence of trauma is loss of contact with yourself, loss of connection to yourself.”
-Dr. Gabor Maté
Alphabettes (women in type, typography, and the lettering arts)
I like this idea: Brainstorm questions, not ideas. (via)
For the love of Ted Lasso :’)
Parting thought
Ending with these powerful words by May Sarton via The Marginalian:
I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago — or just yesterday — of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.
-May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone (The Marginalian)
Love,
Rohini
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