Hello friends,
Last week, Will Dowd of The Lunar Dispatch wrote about the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki, who spent the later years of his life bedridden. Despite this, he continued to write, even composing three poems about his death on the day he died. He prioritized realistic depictions of nature, finding beauty in everything. Will, like Shiki, has dealt with his own health problems, but he’s learned from Shiki to savor the little marvels of the world.
“The world presents us with an endless procession of sensations, which most people ignore. But when pain cracks you open like a walnut under a tire, you are defenseless against these small pleasures.” — Will Dowd
When I read that, I felt myself crack like the aforementioned walnut. Like Will, I’m nearing seven years since my health troubles began. I disappeared from the world and emerged with sorrows for wings. So much was taken from me. But I learned to savor all those things I’d failed to notice before.
Also, like Will, I’ve become completely enamored with the natural world. My new, slower pace forced me to open my eyes. I could sit in the same spot all day and never get bored of the machinations of the world around me. I spend my days gazing at the sky and listening to the birds, noting each small pleasure as it passes. Every sunset is a poem, every thunderstorm a symphony.
The other day, I sat in a parking lot waiting for my mom to finish physical therapy. The sky was a perfect blue scattered with wisps of cotton. The clouds floated on the lazy wind and left streaks of themselves behind in the process. It was as if someone brushed their hand gently through the soft white fluff, painting fingers of clouds in their wake. They looked so fragile and yet wholly unbothered by their ephemerality. I slowed my breathing to match the pace of the sky and let myself drift back to all the places I’d been before.
I want to feel like I’m part of the world. I’m not concerned with being remembered or leaving some mark on this place (although I admit my ego relishes the idea). No, my goal is to fully embrace the sensations of life. I want to lose myself in delicious food. I want to find ecstasy in the wind on my skin. I want to watch a solar eclipse and feel small and ancient at the same time. I want to listen to songs that make me weep for reasons I can’t quite explain. I want to be present for everything.
Until next time,
Yardena
WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
Marie Mutsuki Mocket details her time at a Japanese plague festival. If you’ve never read her work, I highly encourage you to check her out. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, is one of my favorite books.
A poem:
EMERGING
By Pablo Neruda
A man says yes without knowing how to decide even what the question is, and is caught up, and then is carried along and never again escapes from his own cocoon; and that’s how we are, forever falling into the deep well of other beings; and one thread wraps itself around our necks, another entwines a foot, and then it is impossible, impossible to move except in the well— nobody can rescue us from other people. It seems as if we don’t know how to speak; it seems as if there are words which escape, which are missing, when have gone away and left us to ourselves, tangled up in snares and threads. And all at once, that’s it; we no longer know what it’s all about, but we are deep inside it, and now we will never see with the same eyes as once we did when we were children playing. Now these eyes are closed to us, now our hands emerge from different arms. And therefore when you sleep, you are alone in your dreaming, and running freely through the corridors of one dream only, which belongs to you. Oh never let them come to steal our dreams, never let them entwine us in our bed. Let us hold on to the shadows to see if, from our own obscurity, we emerge and grope along the walls, lie in wait for the light, to capture it, till, once and for all time, it becomes our own, the sun of every day. —Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid