#267: My Garden of Earthly Delights 🌳

Dear reader,

I hope you’re doing okay. I *finally* went to Cubbon Park after craving it for months. And while the pink trumpet trees are gone (a reminder that my wintering phase is over), I am smitten by the yellows and greens and purples all around.

I’m also obsessively colour foraging every time I get myself to leave the house.
Look at my Cubbon Park haul. Ooof!

Spring Palette ‘24

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Poetry Corner

Art by Joseph Raymond Wintz

1. Happiness by Stuart A. Paterson

   I’ve made my own Museum of
   Happiness, which isn’t built of brick
   or stone or wood, its walls the thickness
   of the day, a flapping tongue of canvass
   held in place by rope & peg to stop
   it flying off & joyously away
   up into everywhere in time & space.
   
   I’ll carry it around with me to pitch
   beside the sea, in a field or by
   that river, a billowing rickety marquee,
   a travelling show of personal delights
   performing one night only & forever.
   
   What sights! What wonders! See those things unseen
   except in meanwhiles, vivid dreams,
   smile, laugh & gasp & live a lifetime
   somewhere in between the daily grind
   of minutes into hours, be amazed
   by happiness’s alchemy
   transmogrifying days of certainty
   to joyous, raucous aeons of impossibility.
   
   Step right up, pay nothing, be called in
   to watch the carnival of you begin,
   the show to beat all shows where nothing’s
   out of bounds & every good thing goes
   around & comes around again, not down
   or out & you’re the hottest act in town,
   the permanently top display, the troupe
   of you booked solid every single smiling day.

2. Thanking by Anna Kamienska

   How to leave without thanking
   animals and particularly the cat
   for his being so separate
   and for teaching us with his whole body the wisdom of concentration
   
   Thank you walls
   the great invisible photographs of my life
   thank you air
   for the patient imprints of my loneliness
   
   Thank you narrow table
   untiring secretary
   how many tears have I written into you
   I’ve already changed into one of your lame legs
   
   And you I thank for knowledge
   breakable cup
   it’s you have always taught me departure
   there are things more precious than ourselves
   
   Just as before a wedding I’ll have no time to thank you
   all the corners and radiators
   I thank you every spoon
   God bless you since who else is to bless you
   
   And now all go away along with a crowd of holy statues
   I am fed up with you and fed up with thanking
   the still night is looking at us
   with a chasm-like eye
   what are we in that dark iris

3. Tree by Jane Hirshfield
   
   It is foolish
   to let a young redwood
   grow next to a house.
   
   Even in this
   one lifetime,
   you will have to choose.
   
   That great calm being,
   this clutter of soup pots and books—
   
   Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
   Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

4. March 1912 by Natasha Trethewey

   At last we are near
   breaking the season, shedding
   our coats, the gray husk
   of winter.  Each tree
   trembles with new leaves, tiny
   blossoms, the flashy
   dress of spring. I am
   aware now of its coming
   as I’ve never been—
   the wet grass throbbing
   with crickets, insistent, keen
   as desire.  Now,
   I feel what trees must—
   budding, green sheaths splitting—skin
   that no longer fits.

5. Going There by Jack Gilbert

   Of course it was a disaster.
   The unbearable, dearest secret
   has always been a disaster.
   The danger when we try to leave.
   Going over and over afterward
   what we should have done
   instead of what we did.
   But for those short times
   we seemed to be alive. Misled,
   misused, lied to and cheated,
   certainly. Still, for that
   little while, we visited
   our possible life.

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Links of the Week

• Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of a world that doesn’t exist

• Unmute Gaza, a movement in support of photojournalists in Gaza

• Bengaluru Talkies, a celebration of the city’s single screen theatres

• Designer Sun Young Oh’s cat flow charts

• How to Make a World: A Poem by Maria Popova

• ‘Arquitectura Libre’, a website collating the colourful, rule-bending buildings of India & Mexico

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Words I’m mulling over

“No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.”
–Brooke Hampton (via swiss miss)

“…so much of life is about loss, because that is the nature of time. It takes everything away, without being melodramatic. When you’re young, you move from one school grade to the next, you make new friends but lose some of your old friends, your grandparents die, you move to a different neighbourhood. You get older, and people lose their youth, their looks, their partners and friends and so on ... it’s just so much a part of human life. And you share that with everyone else, which I suppose is largely what makes it bearable. But by the time you are a certain age, so much of your life, so much of what you had, isn’t there anymore. But you will get nostalgic about it: you will remember that time and all the excitement that came with it. It’s the way of the world, feeling that you’re mourning all the time, because every day you’re saying goodbye to something.”
–Sigrid Nunez

“Most of what I want simply flows away like water slipping through a net. What remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images that sink into countless strata in my mind.”
-Daido Moriyama

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Time to make myself some broccoli pasta and return to House S8. 🌳

Nom nom,
Rohini