After taking a much-needed break, I am here currently sitting at peace and with mixed feelings in my heart curating this newsletter for all. How have you all been?
I am still trying to struggle a bit with my life vision even after deciphering a hell lot of human psychology and elements, I struggle with obtaining wholesome peace. My heart is confused and I am finally sitting down focusing on my breaths, doing some art, and reading all the lovely poems over the internet.
“It may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness- of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. it’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something”
from- Bittersweet by Susan Cain
A few thoughts I had while reading multiple books about grief and how human mind takes and absorbs grief.
Melancholy-
Grief is not bilingual. It is a part of this incongruous mind. It never parts from my soul. The constant shade of grief makes me weaker. Not that I have never been a warrior. But the itch does not stop. The itch of loneliness and its partition play a monopoly. Why does my muscle feel weak each moment? With concoction and multiple leakages, Grief roams naked inside the head without any caution. I fidget. Almost in a deep slumber.
Of silent summers and vacations- it punches the lungs harder. Like a moss has outgrown the field and the peahens loitering inside. A banter to oneself is the harshest wound ever. I burn greedily. I burn ferociously. Very tired of this but I might use weak prepositions and adjectives- a razor-sharp hallucination.
Soar adjectives walk through my afternoons- slow sleep. Slow walks. Plain walks. At least I remember to walk.
What is God’s greatest invention I ask? Maybe just creating humans – spinning on-axis. For this existence is so intolerable yet indomitable. He happens to know the mirth of living only if living cautiously, blatantly without an overlapping life’s noise.
-Devika Mathur
POETRY CORNER-
art-Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The white rose and the red rose, 1902,
Sir Thomas Wyatt- I find no Peace
I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I season.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not – yet can I scape no wise –
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion …
Ben Enwonwu, Tutu, 1974, Courtesy of Bonhams London.
William Stafford- Peace Walk
We wondered what our walk should mean
taking that un-march quietly;
the sun stared at our signs—“Thou shalt not kill.”
Men by a tavern said, “Those foreigners . . . ”
to a woman with a fur, who turned away—
like an elevator going down, their look at us.
Along a curb, their signs lined across,
a picket line stopped and stared
the whole width of the street, at ours: “Unfair.”
Above our heads the sound truck blared—
by the park, under the autumn trees—
it said that love could fill the atmosphere:
Occur, slow the other fallout, unseen,
on islands everywhere—fallout, falling
unheard. We held our poster up to shade our eyes.
At the end we just walked away;
no one was there to tell us where to leave the signs.
Gopal Ghose, Returning Home
Sylvia Plath- Mystic
The air is a mill of hooks -
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?
The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower- nibblers, the ones
Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable -
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
The heart has not stopped.
37 El mundo - Esteban Rodriguez
Even in dreams, your father is working,
and in the version you’d been having for weeks,
he lifts a large replica of the world, places it
on his back, and because his body here defies
logic and physics, carries it up a hill, which,
after you wake up, you know is a metaphor
for twelve-hour shifts, for pounding nails
into wood, for sliding steel into slots again
and again, and for the days when his back
is shaped into a crooked punctuation,
and his feet, marking the floor into a hieroglyph,
have lost more of their purpose, becoming quiet
when he gets home, so that all you see of him
is not comparisons to language, but two
swollen limbs, a body reclined on a La-Z-Boy,
a father relieved to call this silence his own.
Links of the week-
My poems on Planet caves online published
Visual Verse- Still Evolving- a poem of mine precious to me
A playlist of all Emily Dickinson’s poem
3 principles of integral thinking- a theory developed by philosopher Ken Wilber
The purpose of life is not happiness it’s usefulness.
ALL ABOUT BOOKS-
Currently, I am reading- Bittersweet- a book about sorrows and longings.
Takeaway-
The Effort Paradox
It takes a huge amount of effort to make something appear effortless.
The best performers make something look effortless. But look behind the scenes, and you’ll see thousands of hours of difficult, repetitive, and strenuous work.
Put in the repetitions.
The Brevity Paradox
Talk less to say more.
In a world full of noise, simplicity is key. Speak and write with clarity, precision, and purpose.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
— Mark Twain
The Happiness Paradox
The pursuit of happiness makes you unhappy.
Happiness comes from an appreciation for the present and gratitude for what you have.
The key to finding happiness is to stop looking for it.
NEW IN THE MARKET-
The elixir of words- by Sameera Mansuri.- I have known Sameera through the good old days of blogging and I always believed in her own raw voice. Support her by adding her debutant poetry book to the cart.
-Morgan Harper Nicholas
I hope you loved reading this newsletter as much as I loved curating it. There is a lot more to share that I find highly intriguing when it comes to human minds, art, poems, etc. If you liked what you read please consider sharing or subscribing!! Let’s stay poetic.:)
Links for my book Crimson Skins- Crimson Skins- India
Love and Light
Devika
I am awed by this collection of poems here <3
I am speechless after reading this collection of poems and the bilingualism of grief. Oh my!