Sundays
Some Sunday mornings, something stupid snatches the rested part of my weekend brain, now two days removed from the workweek, sprinkled with motivation for the week ahead but not before an intentional pause. But other Sunday mornings, I harness the power of future-me regrets and decide to chase away the stupid with something more thoughtful. There is nothing more consistent than the positive outcome of this decision.
A guy I dated in college had a family life I always admired, with two high-energy, ambitious sisters, and parents who were very active in their community, well-read, hilarious, with deeply-rooted family traditions. His dad regularly had “Beethoven Sundays”. It’s as simple as it sounds. He listened to Beethoven on Sundays. Because it brought him joy. We’re no longer in regular communication, but I’ve always hoped that he still does it. This idea has stuck with me and marinated for a long time.
A couple years ago, I subscribed to Maria Popova’s weekly blogpost “Brainpickings”, self-described as “an inventory of the meaning of life”. It is emailed out on Sunday mornings. See how many quotation marks and commas I just used to compose the first sentence of this paragraph? Now imagine everything I put in quotes were links - a diving board into concentric swirls expanding into those rested weekend brain cells.
On the Sunday mornings when I indulge in Popova’s curations, I spend at least two minutes reminding myself that she is the age she is, 35 at this writing. 35 - the age I “finally” got married and felt like a real adult or a complete adult or some kind of adult I thought I was supposed to feel like because I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it instead of writing extremely well-crafted blog posts and sharing that out into the world. After those two minutes, I move on and remember that she started this whole thing as an experiment while working in an advertising agency (one of four-part time jobs while attending college full-time). She noticed her co-workers sharing inspirational things around the office for motivation - all related to advertising, their field and ambition. The next part is what’s super interesting to me: Maria feels that creativity is sparked most by exposure to topics outside of your familiarity. So she began sending a weekly office email with five things unrelated to advertising. It was obviously well-received. All because she thought it, then acted on it. If that’s not some Gandhi-esque stuff right there…
Her posts also include links to art prints. I once focused an entire morning learning about the connection of hand-drawn botany sketches and early medical journals and was convinced I needed several prints for our walls to welcome us home and that I should enroll in an online botany course and start really learning the names of plants, pronto.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that learning the names of plants has come up in connection to writing or the arts. A writing class I’m currently taking has mentioned this more than once. I’m taking note.
This particular Sunday morning’s reading has led me to discover an entire EVENT in NYC that Maria forgot to personally invite me to - Universe in Verse - a celebration of science through poetry, read live by famous musicians, artists, writers, astronomers, and similarly eclectic types. In my favorite city in the universe. Um, I can sweep floors, Maria. . .
Anyway, the last paragraph alone had six links. I read two of them - one by Walt Whitman and one by an astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson. Her poem was fine and had parts I loved, like stars that were “pepper hot and sharp”. But that link took me to the event aforementioned and THEN I listened to a reading of a poem by Ross Gay, and. . .I have to stop at the name Ross Gay for a bit because. . .
I’ve been mad at Ross Gay for a while now. Why have I harbored anger towards a man I’ve never met? Because he published a hugely successful book that I was gonna write myself - his “Book of Delights”. My word of the year in 2019 was “delight”. I tracked daily delights for the majority of the 365 days. I still have the better part of a year’s worth of that book in my google drive and in lists on my phone. Turns out while I was writing it, he was publishing it. Bugger.
To be fair, he is great. His book is great. I bought it. But I haven’t read much of it yet.
So I listened online to one of his poems read live from the 2019 Universe in Verse event, further solidifying my desire to attend one day. Specifically, his “Poem to My Child, If Ever Shall You Be”, read by Bill T. Jones, well-known choreographer and artistic director of New York Live Arts. And this poem, as well as Jones’ amazing four minute reading, is...stunning. Just. Stunning. It’s full of that wonder, that hope, that acceptance of what is, paired with dreams of what could be - told with strikingly simple visual language. Harsh and soft in the same phrase. I tried to pick an excerpt to share here but every word of it is so, so good and I’d have ended up with all of it.
Probably someone who wrote something so beautifully human and beautifully hopeful deserves his book of delights.
I used to write poetry. Notebooks and notebooks of it. Poetry is how I started writing. I would climb up the cherry tree in the front yard and read and write for hours. The tree was so perfect for it with several nooks and branches to nuzzle into, and there were even guest spots for friends in the neighborhood. I think the poetry started in second grade. I adored my teacher that year, Miss Della Smith. My poems were seven-year old to pre-teen typical - usually silly, occasionally serious, more-often rhyming and rhythmic - to pair well with all the music I was exploring in my weekly organ, ballet, tap, and figure skating lessons in those times.
A guy doing spoken word just won the latest season of “America’s Got Talent”. His name is Brandon Leake. He’s a poet and teacher and founded an artistry initiative “Called to Move” in California. I know that AGT is not always a true indicator of great talent, and it certainly isn’t the type of thing on Maria Popova’s radar - she’s on a much higher plane. But the fact that spoken word as an art form even made it past the audition phase and onto television gives me a little more hope that people are, at least, open. His performances on the show were beautiful and I was happy that he won. In a time where it seems the lowest common conscience prevails, it was nice to witness a little elevation.
This week, Maria just hit her 14th anniversary of starting Brainpickings, marked by the date that she first sent an email to seven friends in her office. For each anniversary, she chooses a central learning from her past year of dissecting the poetry of life. This year, an obviously painful one, her central learning is: choose joy.
“Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus -- an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice.” (Popova, 2020)
Shout-out to Maria Popova for bring both choice and joy to my Sunday mornings.
To check out Maria’s blog “Brainpickings” and/or subscribe, click here: https://www.brainpickings.org/
To read Ross Gay’s “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be”, click here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92016/poem-to-my-child-if-ever-you-shall-be
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