Hello, 2025! 🙏✨🌱
Dearest reader,
It’s been a fairly hopeful start to the new year, with warm poetry, late night cyanotypes and cozy socks for company. I’m keen to recognize and start fixing old patterns in the months to come, and be more comfortable in my vulnerability.
I’m so grateful to you for being here with me, as I dispatch gems I’ve discovered into your probably overcrowded inbox. Wishing you much joy and curiosity in 2025. ☀️
“One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about…”
-May Sarton, At Seventy
Poetry for a new year
May happiness
pursue you,catch you
often, and,should it
lose you,be waiting
ahead, makinga clearing
for youThe Most Important Thing by Julia Fehrenbacher
I am making a home inside myself. A shelter
of kindness where everything
is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch
of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,
where all that has been banished
and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released.
A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.
I am throwing arms open
to the whole of myself—especially the fearful,
fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing
every seed and weed, every drop
of rain, has made the soil richer.
I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather
around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl
if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through
any perceived problem, any prescribed
perfectionism,
any lying limitation, every heavy thing.
I am making a home inside myself
where grace blooms in grand and glorious
abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows
all the truest things.
I whisper hallelujah to the friendly
sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom.Someone said my name in the garden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far,
like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.The New Year’s Burden by Catherine Davis
I will not, though I would, resolve,
As the New Year’s Eve comes on,
To do, not do, review, revolve
On the past year, how it has gone,
Taking not all, but still enough
(Seeing I had not much to lose)
Of what, for all my falling off,
Might have been mine, as then, to use:
But if I cast off heaviness,
This is my burden, none the less.
Links I’m Devouring
(Finished) Reading: Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
Exploring: Public Domain Image Archive (Yum)
Sipping: Tulum’s Swell Blend (Fave coffee of 2024)
Watching: Reply 1988 (The wholesomest K-drama there is)
Listening: Every Noise At Once
Walking (Virtually): One Minute Park
Time Travelling: Kyosen’s Collected Illustrations of Japanese Toys
Reading: The Random Lifafa’s curation on Food x Love
A prayer for 2025
“To live in the world of creation — to get into it and stay in it — to frequent it and haunt it — to think intently and fruitfully — to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation — this is the only thing — and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine.”
-Henry James’s notebooks, Entry of 23 October, 1891
Be brave as you wander into your inner wilderness,
Rohini
agree that reply 1988 is the best drama
So beautiful 🌈❤️❤️💌