#246: Beauty cleans the mind ✨

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." -Anne Lamott

Dear reader,

Are you tired? I know it’s only Monday, but I’m feeling rather drained. The more I speak to people close to me, I feel this fatigue resonates with everybody. Was it August that flew by too fast? Are we collectively forgetting to breathe in and out, slowly and intentionally?

I try clutching onto the small wins, and it helps, momentarily. Matt Haig’s words do too, momentarily:

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
-Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

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Poetry Corner

Pere Magloire on the way to Saint-Clair Etretat by Gustave Caillebotte

As I try and regain my sense of routine and self, six poems I found on my search for beauty, that breathed some life into me:

1) Enough by David Whyte

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

2) A Game of Hot Potato Starring My Heart as the Potato by Amy Saul-Zerby

Sometimes all I want is to be a person
who takes comfort in hot baths

sometimes all I want is to be a person
who takes comfort in anything

sometimes all I want is to be a person
who takes

I am so tired of having myself
handed back to me

as if I want it.

3) The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (Excerpt)

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

Read the full poem here.

4) Bed of Moss by Schuyler Peck

Take me back to the evergreen trees;
to the sunlight through 
the leaves,
the bending ferns and fronds.
The pitter of rain,
the smooth rocks sleeping
under moss.
Take me back to the life I knew
before this body.

5) Clearing by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

6) Wolves by Louis MacNeice

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed, by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

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Links of the Week

• The surprising reason birds sing - Partha P. Mitra

• How To Find Out Who You Really Are by Anne Lamott

• Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs from 1903

• Summer Camp Island Title Cards (yum)

• Staying with this thought by Olivia Kaplan:
  “There’s some beauty in not editing yourself.”

• Do: The Squeeze Hug

• Work-Life balance is bullshit

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A parting thought

via

“Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.”
-Nayyirah Waheed

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Please be softer with yourself, dear reader. I shall too.

Sending gentle vibes,
Rohini