Hi friends,
It’s the first Cold Brew of 2022, and today I want to look at the below poem by Ada Limón, one of my favourite contemporary poets:
This year, instead of setting resolutions, I set intentions. A minor semantic change but, at least in my mind, a wholly different animal—the premise being that, unlike traditional resolutions, intentions are not rooted in implicit scarcity or self-criticism. Less rooted, too, in the external (appearance, finances, etc) and more about the internal: how to show up in the world, show up for the self. Maybe not even a change from an element of the past year, just a doubling down or conscious continuing of it. We set intentions often in yoga, which is where I got the idea. Anyway I’ll stop before this starts reading like a GOOP blog post (too late?)
All this to say that I’ve loved this particular poem for a while but it feels especially resonant this week at the head of a new year—that arbitrary inflection point to which we ascribe human meaning and purpose. When we look to the sky and read stories in the clouds and in the messy narratives of our lives, when we walk amongst tall grasses and sway as if part of their great waves: call it God or call it nature, Limón shrugs, it’s the same thing by another name. This is not to say that any of it is unimportant; in fact, quite the opposite. What matters most, the poem seems to suggest, is the observing. The wonder. What we call this—how we delineate it or parse it out—is a distant, almost irrelevant, second.
Linguistically, the poem gently detangles itself as it goes. Repeatedly, mellifluously sibilant descriptions of scenes from the natural world are followed by post-hoc digestion or rationalisation. Heart, followed by head. And the pivotal juncture where the speaker disavows a belief in God sees Limón employ enjambment to striking effect: lending a sense of pause (hesitation or finality, uncertainty or emphasis—depending on how one reads it) to the moment. As the title itself suggests, this is a poem that may be read through all manner of lenses.
But more than any of this, the poem (at least to me) feels like it touches on something larger, which is the open mystery of reaching similar conclusions from different vantage points. In other words, the definition of community—and what it means to live as part of one, small or more broadly human. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of naming and how important it is to our humanity and sense of well being to define our personal experiences with language… I do not believe there is a God, nor do I believe in organised religions, but I do greatly value our connection to the universe, to nature, and to each other—I find the exploration of ‘naming’ that ‘sense of connectedness’ continuously exciting,” Limón says in a 2014 interview. What more apt way to kick off the new year than by setting intentions around how we identify our connection with the world around us?
Lil tings:
From Atmos (with some lovely imagery): How Storytelling Can Change Our Brains and Our Hearts.
Filed under the many gut-wrenching indignities of the American prison-industrial complex: Writing is My Main Freedom. One Day My Work Disappeared, by Demetrius Buckley for the Marshall Project.
The Year I Got Back Online, by Claire Carusillo for Gawker. A bit myopic to a specific brand of people (New Yorkers and Extremely Online readers will perhaps ‘get’ this piece the most?) but worth reading nonetheless for a self-effacing take on the cesspool that is online discourse.
Humble-brag moment that my first (and, for the foreseeable, only) peer-reviewed paper was published last week! It’s an open-source journal—yay for decolonising/de-ivory-tower-ifying the academy!—so you can read it here. It’s about the afterlife of fine-art imagery reckoning with the complications or inadequacies of South Africa’s TRC. If you take the time to skim it I will be forever indebted to you.
I went cherry picking last week, and it was delightfully wholesome. As per the above poem, I’m personally like 70/30 on there not being a higher power… but I may have to reconsider those odds after eating perfectly ripe sour cherries plucked fresh off the tree. God-tier experience! Stone fruit szn 4evr bby!!!
That’s all for today! Catch you next time,
Maddy