Breathing room

making space to swim

This year feels new

The past few weeks have been so full, too full, excessive, to the point of madness and I have reached and surpassed my limits. Just the past few weeks, or the past few years, you tell me.

How do you create, when you are so full of nothing? A nothing that is glutinous, waxy, insubstantial and untextured, yet so weighty that you don’t remember what it was like without this thing attached to yourself.

How?

The real question for me, now, is — why? Why actively create, when what I need, what I really, really, really need is space. Space not intended for creation, but space to breathe. Breathe in this new year, this new year that feels like a new year, and touch it with my tongue. Before words, there is something.

Before words, there is something.

Something.

Feeling. Being.

I need to swim here for a while.

Swimming with new friends

There was a time when I gobbled writing workshops like Chiclets. Are Chiclets an Indian thing? I gobbled writing workshops like gum, one after the other, non-stop chewing, chewing, chewing, no flavour, all the juice gone — if there ever was any — and gobbling them chomp chomp chomp for the satisfaction of moving onto a new little thing to gnaw on so that I don’t pause to actually be with my writing.

It wasn’t really great for me.

I stepped back, stepped away, and gave my writing to myself. And there I grew.

This new year, new month, I joined a writing workshop after a very long time. It felt right to. It was my first

Ochre Sky Stories

workshop by

Vimal Chitra

,

Raju Tai

, and

Natasha Badhwar

called The Rhythm of our Stories.

I wrote my first Urdu sher! I wrote a love letter to my body. I felt the sun on my back on days that were hard and I shared that with the lovely faces of my cohort on zoom.

This wasn’t a Chiclet writing class. This was a long picnic by a lake where I swam under the open sky, came back to shore for a snack, and dipped back in to swim again. I will be here for a while, swimming and snacking.

What I have given myself through this workshop*

A list:

New friends
A gentle touch
Deep listening
Theraav
True voices
The grace to be moved
Sweet space
Barrier-free expression
Warmth
Encouragement
Love, yes
Time
Khula aasman**

*written as our last exercise
**open skies

Sharing and keeping

I wrote a few things in this workshop that cracked me open. As I navigate what this newsletter is to be, what I want to share and what I want to be private, I don’t know yet if those words will come here in that same form, but you best bet they’re going to show up in some way, behind the curtain.

Please join the next cohort of this workshop if you want to access to a gentler time with yourself.

Until next time,

Shobhna