It’s that time of the year. Out with the old, in with the new, as the saying goes1.
Although, I wouldn’t recommend burning your old sofa.
If you ask me how I’d like 2024 to be, I’ll tell you: “casual, warm, normal.”
The time for me to wish for the ecstatic has ended. I have learnt my lesson.
(Don’t lament, be grateful.)
These days, all I yearn for is the modest tenderness of the mundane. I dream of transiting in the flow of life, present to myself and my body, steered by a gentle surrender to all that is cosmic. I believe trust can be a portal into the magmatic depths of our being. A portal I am ready to step into.
The adventurous life of the reader holds pockets of magic which reveal themselves in quite the serendipitous manner. Indeed, in the span of a few weeks, the wisdom collected in this letter fortuitously gravitated towards my orbit. It seems that books are attuned to the vibrations emitted by our hearts and gift us with the most nourishing ideas at any time.
Ron Padgett’s How to Be Perfect is chock-full of inspiration. He admonishes us, “don’t give advice,” but admittedly, his prescriptions on how to be perfect humans are as aspirational as they are grounding.
Here’s a condensed list:
Hope for everything. Expect nothing.
Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.
Make eye contact with a tree.
Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't
forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length
and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball
collection.
If you need help, ask for it.
Look at that bird over there.
Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week.
If you feel tired, rest.
Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the
pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a
cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep.
After years of stillness, both voluntary and involuntary, my 2023 was defined by movement and dynamism. Caught in the whirlwind of labor and a partial re-entry into civilisation, I found little time to read, or write. My intuition tells me that I subconsciously opted for intellectual repose, however, I now feel the urge to burrow my way back into old habits. For the sake of survival.
Fittingly, Wendy Cope named this poem “Health Advice.”
“Health Advice” lives in the good company of equally insightful poems in the collection “Anecdotal Evidence.”
An excerpt from the title poem in Fariha Róisín’s latest poetry collection, “Survival Takes a Wild Imagination.”
I came across this luscious photo on Pinterest, but I couldn’t find the rightful owner. I’d be happy to credit the photographer should anyone know them.
What if I told you that I had been reading one of Alice Walker’s poetry collections, but it was the following epigraphs by June Jordan which left me transfixed?
Alice, you’re still loved.
June, thank you for articulating so poetically what I believe to be the true purpose for us human creatures on this earth.
Both quotes can be found in Alice Walker’s “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems.”
If we are to truly honour “our commitment to all the living, without deceit, and without fear, and without reservation,” like Jordan writes, we must demand and hope for both a ceasefire and an end to the occupation.
Illustration by Katie Lennon.
Today’s letter was inspired by this viral tweet by our Mother of Poems, Ada Limón:
Indulge me, please. What are your wash settings for the new year?
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This expression always reminds me of Gramsci’s equally famous quote from The Prison Notebooks: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Maybe the new is being born after all. A luta continua!