Poetry, big pictures & what to remember when waking

#06—the weekly roundup

📚 Poetry and other acts of attention

It was a strange week. My energy was all over the place after an intense, facilitated TRE session. I also found myself saturated with any kind of practical reading. Instead, I fell gladly into the arms of poetry and story. A friend recommended Frank Skinner’s Poetry podcast a while ago; it is accessible, hilarious and moving.

As someone who values words, I’ve always been drawn to poetry: words at their most precise and potent, evoking things only a poet can. I ended up reading this wonderful essay by

Julian Girdham

who recently joined Substack, on the value of sitting with poetry and other “acts of attention”:

In the hurly-burly of the world we all need space, and spaces. When you are a teenager perhaps you need these all the more, as you try to come to terms with what you are and what you can be… Studying a poem in class is an act of attention in a world of inattention (think of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ which enacts such attention): just the words on a page, a teacher, a group of peers, attending together to the deepest things of life via the medium of the best words in the best order, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry. You will be developing what Maryanne Wolf calls ‘cognitive patience.’ And when you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, lines of poetry you read at school will come back to you, long after you have forgotten everything else from your studies.

✍️ Big pictures & small essays

I’m a big fan of big pictures. But I have often smothered ideas by trying to neatly arrange them in some wider structure.

I realised that maybe the big picture I've spent so much time tending can only come into view when the elements sing for themselves. So instead of trying to mash ideas into a wider web that takes months to emerge, I want to grant some recurring themes the sovereignity they deserve.

You’ll start seeing these mini-essays pop up soon, on anything from authenticity to building things. They will be short, punchy and hopefully illuminating. My goal is to go from idea to publishing in as direct a manner as possible. Here’s a sneak peak at the pipeline:

Stand back, I’ve got a Kanban.

📺 Making YouTube less insufferable

I recommended Unhook to another friend recently. The YouTube algorithm is one of my least favourite. Unhook is a browser extension that removes all Recommended videos from YouTube. And pretty much anything else. It’s a wonderful viewing experience:

Starlings, undistracted

What to remember when waking

In the spirit of this roundup, here’s What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte (source).

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

Another Starling. Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash