#287: A long, long month 🫨
Hello,
It’s been a frigging never-ending month. Lots to take in and restructure. Lots of healing within and around me. People falling sick when I wasn’t expecting it, intense conversations and experiences, things you wanted to happen happening but all at once…
I’m showing up here despite.
Because it’s easier to release and put it out into the world than hold it in. To share the saving graces and celebrate the small wins with a group of familiar strangers (and friends). Here we go.
Poetry Corner
Words that soothed the roughness of the month:
1. The Lost Words Blessing by Robert Macfarlane
Enter the wild with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you travel far from heather, crag and river
May you like the little fisher, set the stream alight with glitter
May you enter now as otter without falter into water
Look to the sky with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
And in the dead of night my darling, find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter
Walk through the world with care, my love
And sing the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you stumble through machair sands eroding
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing
Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home.
2. Flowering by Linda Buckmaster
At the ruins of the Seven Churches Inishmore
Pick a crevice,
a homey gap
between stones
and make it
your own.
Grow a life here
from wind
rain
and the memories of ancients
embedded in limestone.
The bees will use you
for their sweet honey.
The rock will soften under
your touch.
You will draw moisture from fog
and hold it.
Your presence
will build soil.
This is all we have
in this life
all we own:
a flowering
an opening
a gap between stones
for tiny tender roots.
3. I eat breakfast to begin the day by Zubair Ahmed
I create time
I cannot create time
I’m frozen in place
I cannot be frozen
I’m moving but don’t notice
I notice me moving, I pay attention
To the small yet immense yet
Small movements that guide
My limbs, my hair growth, my joint oils
I don’t think about it
I don’t feel it either
I don’t have emotions right now
I see films of divine quality
I don’t see any films
This black
This not black
To me I am
I am not to me not
I walk with this hollowness
I walk with this blooming
I’m moving outward forever
Onward eternally inward
I create all objects like shampoos
And cats, I create nothing
Like space and antimatter
I resign to the clocks that keep time
I surrender to the clocks that don’t keep time
I’m sure about it, the color white
I’m not sure about it, what is word?
Oh, the loops and unloops
Destiny unfolds in my knees
I eat breakfast to begin the day
4. September by Linda Pastan
Their summer romance
over, the lovers
still cling
to each other
the way the green
leaves cling
to their trees
in the strange heat
of September, as if
this time
there will be
no autumn.
September playlist
I forced my way back to listening to music to avoid the motion sickness in auto rides around Bangalore. A short and quick playlist, unlike September.
A few good links
It’s been a mad busy week, but these finds proved to be bright, shiny lights to find myself home.
Single Player Game, an animated short film by Chen Qiuling ^ (I miss this.)
Magnet Poetry: Write your own poems (and share them with me, please?)
One Minute Park lets you visit parks around the world for one minute each
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
—Terence McKenna
I invite you to sit with this month’s poems and musings with a gentleness. May they comfort you too.
Love and mercy,
Rohini