#237: The joys ands peril of keeping it real 🤷🏻♀️
Hello my dear reader,
Are you okay? I ask myself ~13 times a day. I’m finding myself healing slowly from something gnawing at the surface. All I can hope for is to lead a curious enough life. To stay connected to myself and the things that bring me joy.
After months, I spent time reading my favorite newsletters, unread and waiting in my inbox because of general overwhelm. One of the sources of joy. I was instantly reminded of how words find me when I need them the most.
A few gems I’m utterly grateful for:
“Recovery is a seed, so many dots, forever beginnings, that meets the system where it starts,” wrote Holly Whitaker in her newsletter. There is hope.
Then there’s Heather Havrilesky, with her freeing words: “The real challenge of being alive isn’t making sure you never mess up, making sure you get everything right, making sure that everything looks and feels and sounds perfect – or else you’re a loser, or else you’re an idiot, or else you’re doomed to fail and be miserable. The real challenge of being alive is to savor the moment and give your love freely in spite of the clown show unfolding around you.”
And finally Austin Kleon, who always makes me feel seen! “As for what I read, I have no idea how to separate out personal interest and professional research. It all goes into the gumbo pot in my brain, and it all influences my work, somehow.”
We can lean on each other and be okay. We don’t have to do this alone.
Poetry Corner
1. Don’t Look For My Life In These Poems by Eunice De Souza
Poems have order, sanity
aesthetic distance from debris.
All I’ve learnt from pain
I always knew,
but could not do.
2. Night Sky by Joanna Klink (Excerpt)
If you have grieved you have loved. Twinned,
like the sun’s thread-corona, the moon’s deepening
pearl. The violent deaths of stars an expanse
through which everything moves—lights thrown
from collapse. You are coastal, throatless,
roaming through people that hold tight then let go.
You are the blue forest through which sunbeams
sweep. And you are nothing but actions of the loom
threading aster and hunger. You are nothing but roads
interrupted by wheels. What will be left in us
but pure admiration? Dust released into night.
Read the full poem here.
3. When the World Comes Clear by Andrew Colliver
When the world comes clear,
changeless in its changing
and everywhere revealed,
the sun might be lighting
a rendered wall inscribed
by winter tree's shadow;
when the world comes clear
light might seem to shift
to show a morning free of any other time;
when the world comes clear
something pulling tight within
your mind might fall away
to leave a formless space,
a fathomless space in which
eternal life cannot be granted,
or even offered,
but only recognised, so simply,
as what you are.
4. The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Links of the week
For the love of @m_d_n_f_ ^
On my wishlist: How to Not Always Be Working by Marlee Grace
I feel an immense sense of gratitude to you, dear reader. Thank you for following along and giving these newsletters an open home.
Have a restful weekend,
Rohini
Every week without fail, your newsletters bring about a sense of calm solitude and quiet joy. Thank you for doing this!