Two new things

Possibility always inspires gratitude

Note: I started this post one week ago, but only managed to finish it today - so the dates are slightly out of sync… but I couldn’t bring myself to take it out of the present tense, so I am adding this caveat instead!

Tonight, the sound of Big Ben rang out just as I was stepping into the Tube station. So I took a moment to step back outside, and look up at the clock tower brightly lit against the dark sky as the sound pealed out for eight deep chimes.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, all the ways we try to turn time into something tangible: into sound, into visuals. I wonder, what would it taste, or smell like? Is our draw toward fermented foods, where age becomes a marker of flavour, simply another way of doing this?

It’s always funny to me that Autumn is a time of so many beginnings in life (due largely to the educational calendar), just as nature is embracing endings.

But I love the excitement that hovers in the area during this season. And I’ve had two exciting areas of new possibility bloom this week.

Number one: I had found myself in Westminster to attend a training event for Harvard alumni interviewers. I’m feeling quite excited to meet some of the wonderful young folks who are dreaming big for our collective future.

This session wasn’t primarily a social event, but it was lovely to connect with people whose interests and professions are wildly different than my own. It’s like getting a peek into different worlds.

Number two: I also found out that I’ve been shortlisted for a really exciting poetry thing. I don’t know whether I’m going to get it, but every inch of progress in this field feels like a gift, so I was pretty delighted to have made it this far.

Pondering these opportunities, I was struck how much easier it is to feel grateful when we have positive new things entering our lives. For me, I can access my gratitude most easily when I am not only appreciating what I have, but also the potential of what may be - whether or not those things actually manifest in the future.

It’s easy to become unhelpfully caught up in the perpetual drive for the new, so a bit of skeptical distance can be helpful; but all the same, embracing newness in some form in our lives is also an amazing way of getting unstuck.

And speaking of new…

What’s New

• A post from 2022 about how I leak poetry

• Along with: the poem that inspired those thoughts

• A poem I wrote for Rose a year ago today

• Odds and Ends 12 - a collection of interesting things from two years ago

• A poem that I wrote today from my ‘words I just learned’ series (pablum!)

Good Art Friends

• Maimuna Menon kindly participated in a cabaret we did for the Women’s Musical Theatre Initiative a few years ago, and has only become a bigger star since then. She has a new gig-theatre piece called Manic Street Theatre coming up that I cannot wait to see.

• If you want to be sonically transported somewhere beautiful, check out this single Boulanger: Attente just released by soprano Katharine Dain (full album Attente coming 17 November!)

For now,

Alli

Photo by Christian Holzinger on Unsplash