Easy Like Sundays

#Poetry

And I make boring stews on Sundays

Meat too flat, and tender

Hissing in the frying pan after a boil

My functional saviour

The savour of red pulp on white rice

Sometimes

Some Sundays, the Lord rests in me

And I taste the sun on my palm

Cover the pot to simmer again

On a Holy day /On any day

This could fool me /

from www.easylikesundayclt.com

I genuinely wrote that poem on a Sunday.

And I remember that Sunday in particular; it was just like any other restful Sunday. I woke up, with the sun breaking past the cold of a 6 am morning.

Like any other Sunday I fell into a similar routine; I went to church. Maybe I had a nap after.

Maybe I had a quiet lunch and stared outside my window at the bright, multi-coloured landscape of the roofs in my neighbourhood.

What I am sure of is how I was making stew for dinner. Boiling meat on the stove, frying it in cooking oil. It was very mundane. The sun was streaming bright into my room, it was almost evening, and I sat down to write this poem.

The mundane is such a gift.

I have always thought of it to be antithetical to art, and truly, I do grow bored of it sometimes. But by the time I wrote this poem, I had grown to be appreciative of it.

Usually, a quiet day to day with nothing big to plan, with no dream to work on seems to be exhausting to me. I become restless in it.

I am that sort of person – I love big moments in life, I love big moments in art. All of the moments where you come upon a sudden realization of a profound and crucial truth. All of the moments when you come upon the solution to a question that has bothered you for MONTHS. I love planning, and working and seeing everything come together neatly like a song. ;

This Sunday gave me something like that, but in a different way – I realized the role that a mundane evening like that could play in my life, and in my creativity. To just look outside, genuinely hear the quiet of a late evening, and just exist in it.

Does that sound boring? I promise, it isn’t.

WHERE I WAS WHEN WRITING THIS PIECE?

I think this is an important question to ask.

The where I am talking about is not the actual location of where I was. That is pretty boring – I was in my room.

I mean the where of where I was mentally.

I have known for a long time that where you are at a point in your life is important when it comes to your creativity.

It affects what you end up writing. For this poem, where was I? I was in the interlude between two very busy months.

There is something about being busy, especially if you are someone who is lucky enough to enjoy the work that you do – being busy gives you this feeling that you are constantly moving forward. Even if you might be standing in the same spot you were in when you started.

Now, I was genuinely moving forward in the things I was doing; school, work and my relationships with the people I care about, but I was pretty stuck when it came to creative work, I was stuck to a degree when it came to this part of my internal world. I had been ignoring the feeling too, largely due to frustration. I didn't know what to do with the feeling.

2021 featured me being in that odd position where I was a poet that just didn’t get the idea of poetry anymore.

Well, not the idea really, but I knew I wasn’t connecting with poems as much as I used to. None of the metaphors, the subtext and not even loud imagery was intriguing to me then. I was upset by this feeling, so I pushed all notions of even trying to read (and write!) poetry aside. But I knew it was only for a while.

Thankfully, it is ended up being a short while. A Sunday happened, and this poem happened too.

Sometimes, I wonder if the poems we write, no matter how lazily we approach them, are the poems that we need in that moment. The poems that we need to read, the poems that open something up inside of us.

This poem, in its simplicity, in the fact that it was just a poem about an ordinary day in my life; that gave me a kind of joy, a feeling that I could be seen. Seen as I was, in this ordinary day in my life, no frills, no suffering to spin into a divine thing, just me, ordinarily enjoying a Sunday. That could be art, too.

It felt revelatory.

And why is this important? To be able to see the ordinary in our lives as art?

Well, because not everything we do will feel extra-ordinary. That doesn’t mean we are not doing something extra-ordinary - just breathing here on this planet, being alive. Just going about a regular Sunday evening.

And, I think it helps me get over a certain kind of worry that I am prone to because of the work-loving nature that I have; that the value I have is tied to the work I do, to how well I do it. Or (especially not this) to be constantly, constantly working and having something to do. All. The. Time.

COMPARED TO NOW?

I have not been focusing so much on what I do on Sundays, this year.

The routine is the same, really. But for several months this year, I have had to go to the hospital for work things on Sunday evenings. So, a day like what was described in this poem, hasn’t happened quite as often this year.

I have been even busier this year. I have been writing, and working a lot more than I did last year. I am only like 12% busier, if we are being totally honest, but the added work that I have had to focus on this year has made me feel a bit… a bit like I have a shorter attention span.

It is only now, writing this to you dear reader, that I am realizing how probably unnecessary that might be. Trying to do things in shorter bursts of time, instead of organizing it, building it together (like a song ha-ha) is not very effective.

But I have felt like it was all too much, and I never even bothered to ask myself if it were genuinely too much. And I think that might be also (even if only slightly), because I have been ignoring poetry. Ignoring reading and writing it. This time, not only because I am busy, but because I am worried about what I will find under everything after I use poetry to examine the truth of what is really going on.

There is something about poetry; for all of its use of metaphors, its deceptive simplicity and beauty, a good poem always holds a kernel of incontestable truth. And you have to be able to walk, bare-faced and naked emotionally to get that truth out sometimes. But doing that is scary.

Recently, I was reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.

When I started reading it, I was a bit disinterested, not really enjoying the flow of a book that seemed to be a documentation of war happenings in a small, European town that was so distant to me.

But while reading it, I became sad about something or the other. And I was forced to look at everything I had read again. And… it began to make sense?

It was mildly surprising to me. But I think at some point we all look towards art to find comfort. Whatever that art might be; a song we love, a movie we cried over, a book we really enjoyed. For me, I chose to read a collection of poems.

And slowly, I have been unravelling this very ordinary problem that was slowly leading me towards a mild, but constant feeling of sadness (and short attention span ha-ha). I’ve been given the courage to look at it a lot more frankly. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t complete work yet. But I am doing it, one day at a time, and isn’t that extra-ordinary?

WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN UP TO?

When I am not accepting or (stubbornly trying to) overcoming the mundane?

Well, I am

- Writing cool essays about the healthcare system. This got published in September, and it is a piece on Nigeria’s latest cholera outbreak. Did you know what communities are most affected? Well, read it and find out.

- I’ve been listening to A LOT of music. Also, the title of this piece was inspired by this song from the 2017 movie, Baby Diver. The song is called Easy, and it really feels like an easy Sunday morning. (Ignore how aggressive the video thumbnail is, the song is quite sweet)

- I have been eating a lot of stir fry creations ha-ha. My current favourite is fried sweet potatoes with eggs fried with whatever vegetable I have in my kitchen; carrots, green bell peppers or spring onions. (let’s not make this post about food though)

- And I’ve been enjoying my quiet time, waking up later (if you count 7:08 am as late)

- Also, I am writing this to you, today, with the hope that I have found in poetry (and in God), that we all get over the challenges we might be facing. And that we are courageous in the face of any obstacle. And that we enjoy many, nice and quiet Sundays while doing them. Extra-ordinarily.

Take care of yourself, always.