Issue 26, An Invincible Summer
On paying attention and how I found awe and poetry this week.
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Hi friends,
It’s been a while since I sent one of these out, I’m not going to lie, inspiration has been hard to come by. Inspiration, art, poetry, awe - all things that I know I need for sustenance and ones that I have always treated like weather, a magical spell of sunshine, a storm completely out of my hand. I guess I can say the same thing about Found Poems. It started as a way to share things I found inspiring and as inspiration became sporadically found, so did this newsletter.
This time, I am trying a new format - sharing just a bit more of serendipitous poetic discoveries each time.
I recently started The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron in an attempt to integrate an artistic practice into my daily life, as opposed to something that sits on the margins and strikes like lightening uninvited, unprepared. It felt like one of those books that I kept hearing mentioned, let it sit on my bookshelf for weeks before plucking up the courage to open it. I’m only on week three but one thing that has stood out is this:
Awe is not an epiphany
When I was on my sabbatical, burnt out, I remember focusing intently on the present - that’s all I had the capacity to then. As I got back into the flow of work, amidst a crashing pandemic every strategy of self-care fell to the curb-side. I am now relearning to prioritise time to be present, to notice, to create a daily writing routine. I find myself stopping breathless at falling leaves or the way the winter sun hits the skin just so or the one Indian rose still standing in between the asphalt in my front yard.
The poem I want to share today, is perhaps Mary Oliver’s most celebrated poem. It is one I have gone back to often, I want to share it because it shows so clearly the endless creativity and curiosity with which she looked at the world. She lived a long life filled with difficulties and disease but her poems never lost this quality of awe, wonder and urgency for the present – for paying attention.
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
For all existing subscribers - I invite you to share your moments of awe with me, as I find my way back. What have you paid attention to this week?
Things I paid attention to this week
I am absolutely enamoured by my dear friend Coleen Baik’s creative process and practice that she documents and shares in her Substack newsletter The Line Between. I have known Coleen for a long time and find it such a privilege to receive her words, ideas and images in my inbox every other week.
Live Canon worked with Soho Polytechnic to curate a collection of poems displayed all across Soho as a part of the Being Human Festival. I got to play a small part of this with one of my poems being a part of the display and a guided walk. Poetry for me has largely been a private and solitary endeavour, so to see one of my poems displayed in an art gallery and performed by an actor in one of the busiest streets in the UK was an experience I won’t forget easily.
I don’t quite recall how I landed on the series by Tabitha Soren titled Surface Tension but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them since. It’s a series of pictures capturing where our physicality meets real life events behind the screens of our phones and tablets. The fingerprints highlighting our desperate attempts at interacting, haunts me as a designer working in tech.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
- Albert Camus
As I came back from my evening walk just earlier , I noticed the little vine outside my front door has suddenly burst into green again, in November(!!) after being bone dry and nearly dead for the past months of Summer. Quite inexplicably, Spring sometimes happens in the dead of Winter.
X
Sana
What did you think of this new format? Did you find some awe? If yes, please spread the word, share your own moments of awe - I’ll be ever so grateful.
I love this newsletter so much. I have the Artists Way too. Have read it almost cover to cover but not undertaken any of the course, bar a short spurt of of Morning Pages. But I know it’s there ready for me whenever. Interesting book — not entirely sure it’s aged well (👀) but it’s certainly a thought provoking thing!
This week I’ve been in awe at Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. Particularly the episode around boundaries. Off the back off this I’ve also been in awe at myself for doing hard things — which is something I think we should be in awe of, about ourselves, every day.
Thank you for sharing! Love the new format.
You are a gem. Thank you so much for this lovely post, and for the shoutout! I was pleasantly surprised, and humbled. As for awe—I've been focused on a new life in our family, and have definitely been awed by that. Re: The Artist's Way—even if it doesn't work for everyone, I feel like it's a staple, on every artist/writer's shelf. I wasn't into every aspect of what she wrote, but did enjoy journaling the way she advised, for a while. ❤️