emily dickinson – Nourish-n-Cherish

April Highlights: Poetry Month and Stress Awareness

April is a beautiful month of Spring. It also is Poetry Month, Stress Awareness Month, and plays host to several days such as Earth Day, World Reading Day, International Dance Day, and we found out quite recently, World Quantum Day.

Trying to accommodate all these different aspects into reading and experiences can be quite the adventure if you let it.

For Stress Awareness Month, we released the fourth episode of Sitare Spotlight. This time, our guest was Salima Banu Iezzey. Salima is a fitness coach, adventurer and nutritionist. The conversations with her were a good reminder for all the tenets of good living. Simple things we can do for daily well-being, bigger adventure goals and healthy eating. Please check it out here:

Sitare Spotlight Ep.4: Salima Banu Iezzey on Fitness, Adventure & Wellbeing

https://youtu.be/Tpirxjy_u8U?si=2-3P_Q7ltAgjpChA

For Poetry Month, apart from dipping into poetry collections from time to time, this time I also read about the life and times of Emily Dickinson. It was fascinating to see how the few poems of hers that did make it to publication during her lifetime were published anonymously by her friends and family members.

Book: Becoming Emily – the life of Emily Dickinson – Krystyna Poray Goddu (what a fascinating way to spell Krystyna?)

It was only after her death that her friend and niece got her poems published – a little tug of war between them to see who had access to more poems. It is also interesting to note that like Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson too hailed from a family that valued education, and somehow, even during those times of limited financial independence for women, were unmarried. That probably explains the prodigious work they were able to turn out in their lifetimes.

On Earth Day I gazed down upon Earth as we took off and flew over arid deserts, lush green forests, snowy stretches, oceans brimming with life, on my travels. All the time marveling at humankind and our ability to create a safe mode of transport in the air when we neither have the wings nor the air-borne buoyancy required to pull it off. Our innovation helping us gaze over the beautiful planet and peer into the maps being flashed on the screens”

Flying over Deer Lake, Cat Lake, Big Trout Lake, Sam Lake, Kingfisher lake, Wunnumin Lake – past Saskatchewan and Ontario

Quaktaq – Past Hudson Bay – where I remembered reading about the Great Bear Sea and the Arctic Unicorns (Narwhals)

Then I zoomed and chuckled over whimsical, interesting and beautiful names: Pikangikum, Quaktaq, Akulivik Puvirnituk.

One of the many futures of AI innovations may whisper in my head the meanings or origins of each of these names, but for now, it was enough for me to muse. Imagine nonsensical little things about their etymology, the languages, or the peoples who named them. I wonder why we don’t spend more time as amateur cartographers, naming the little nooks and corners of our daily walks. I remember telling someone to meet me at Reflection Pond, and then remembering that there was no Reflection Pond on the map. It was simply a name the children and I had come up for the dear pond on one of our many strolls. It was the time of sunset, the pink and orange hues above our heads were beautifully reflected in the serene waters below, and we sat there, each of us lost in our own reflections.

A Hopeful Future

There is nothing quite as special as walking in nature after a long day or week. Every step seems to take one tiny bit of stress away, and replace them with happy endorphins dancing to a beat in the body. As the eyes lift their gaze towards the skies, the clouds, trees, and birds seem to join in on one harmonious orchestra together welcoming the soul to relax and rejoice in the moment of being, and participate in the steady march of time. Hummingbirds, bluebirds and the occasional butterflies flit overhead, while the ravens and geese noisily make their way home.

Summer is creeping in, the jacaranda trees are in bloom in the neighborhood, the gingko leaves have come in fully, and though the world around us is in shambles, confused, anxious and worried, Mother Nature seems to have no such problems. She brought on Summer just in time.

The park near where we live has a steady smattering of high school students social distancing as best as they can and taking graduation pictures. In little knots of 2s & 3s, they cluster around giggling and looking hopeful. I stop at a distance admiring the high schoolers celebrating their graduation day with pictures in gowns. The smiles of confident youth look just as marvelous as the summer blooms they stand amidst, and their perfumes amidst the heady scent of the flowers is heaven itself. There is no doubt about it: The summer evenings seem doubly enjoyable and bright because of the young talent making their way out into the world.

These children did not get the graduation party like their seniors did, or their juniors will, but they seem to be coping with grace. A few photographs with their best friends would have to do. I hear loud peals of laughter puncture the evenings as they decide on how to take their pictures. I hope every child in these uncertain times has good friends. The laughter rings in the obvious: everything seems to be manageable with the right set of friends.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

Emily Dickinson

In other news,
Trump Rally Registered Million Attendees but Actual Count 6000!

Thousands of teens registered for Trump’s rally , after his initial Juneteeth rally was moved to Sunday, and then didn’t show up. What’s more? They deleted their tik-toks soon after!

Standing there that evening with the world on pause from the Corona virus, and the city’s curfew just ended due to the Black Lives Matter movement, I felt hope stir again. The angst and idealism of youth was intact. These young adults saw us flounder at a critical moment in their lives, and the exuberance with which they are eager to take the torch makes me hopeful.

“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.” Kahlil Gibran

Time in the Garden

Regular readers know how much I enjoy nature and gardens. It is one of life’s ironies that my plants only thrive despite my loving care, and many is the time I have made bloomers in the little patch I tend to. However, never one to shy away from blooming from the bloomers, I picked up this book, Life in the Garden, By Penelope Lively.

life_garden

Lively begins by examining the gardens in Literature starting with the Garden of Eden, and working her way through other fantastical gardens in the books, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland and the beloved gardens of dear, absent-minded Lord Emsworth’s at Blandings castle.

She examines the writing and finds out which of the writers are gardeners themselves and which of them have merely picked up the scenery from a gardening catalog. She teases the co-ordination of colors, the seasonality of the plants themselves in the landscapes and has given me an entirely different appreciation of gardens.

Some passages are especially endearing and made me want to read them again. Especially her meditations on time, the gardener and the garden itself.

I quote from her book:

“To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time. You garden today for tomorrow; the garden mutates from season to season, always the same, but always different. … In autumn, I plant up a pot of “Tete-a-Tete” daffodils, seeing in the minds eye what they will look like in February. We are always gardening for a future we are supposing, assuming, a future. I am doing that at eighty-three; the hydrangea paniculata “Limelight” I have just put in will outlast me, in all probability, but I am requiring it to perform while I can still enjoy it.”

“The great defiance of time is our capacity to remember – the power of memory. Time streams away behind us, and beyond, but individual memory shapes for each of us, a known place. We own a particular piece of time; I was there then, I did this, saw tear, felt thus.”

She goes on to say,

“A garden is never just now; it suggests yesterday, and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress. “

Certainly, for me, part of the appeal of gardening is this ambivalent relationship with time; the garden performs in cycles, it reflects the seasons, but it also remembers and anticipates, and in so doing takes the gardener with it.”

As I look out the window at my clover-filled backyard with some foxgloves looking happy amidst the narcissi blossoms and the newly sprouted cherry leaves after their spectacular show of cherry blossoms, and the rose buds ready to burst forth in a few weeks,I cannot help feel the lessons nature is teaching us. Be forward looking – always, nurture what is important, and enjoy the passage of time. One moment at a time. Every flower has its chance to bloom and fade.

do-nothing-garden_1

Gardens are enduring lessons in hope. I cannot tell you the number of times, I have planted something in October and been surprised when they bloom in April, or the number of times, I have been pleasantly surprised that something thrived at all.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

Emily Dickinson – Hope

I am lackadaisical at best with my gardening and it shows. I have a minuscule patch that seriously has more air-time on the blog than the square feet it occupies. Yet, it gives me immense pleasure, peace and calm. Spurred on by the book, I went outside to take a more active role in the tending of my plants. I have been admiring the sweet peas plants that have sprouted in the garden. Some time ago, I got a packet of sweet pea seeds from our local library. Thrilled at finding them, I scattered them by the apricot tree and forgot about them. The plants are thriving now, quite tall, and seem to be sagging. So, I went – “Coming dears! Here I am to take care of you!”, I said, in my best nurturing voice and tried to prop up the plants as best as I could, in the process, breaking off one of the plants’ main stems.

If the plants in my patch could talk, they would’ve chorused – “Go inside – we know you love us, just let us thrive! Breaking off our stems indeed!”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: