It's Alright

I am writing to you on a serene morning of Easter Weekend.

It is mostly quiet, an hour or so after sunrise and a quiet drizzle plays over the rooftops. This is the most tranquil I have had the chance to be in weeks.

My last entry here was a Lesson on Movement. If you haven’t, give it a read. I talked about how the position we put our bodies in; walking, running, sitting, praying, puts our minds in a similar state. Well, in the past weeks, my mind has been in a state of hurrying. Which without saying, explains where my body has been to.

It is no fault of mine; life happens, we have pressing responsibilities to attend to.

Yet, when I eventually sorted everything out a few days ago, that evening, I was unable to turn the dial down. It still felt like I was a marathon runner with five miles ahead to go, and not that I had completed the race, for now at least. [Ha-ha]

Glad to be alive all the same. Glad to be here, writing to you. How have you been?

Whenever you read this, what are you grateful for this Easter weekend? In this particular moment that you live in?

To paraphrase Marie Kondo, what is sparking joy in your life today?

And how have you been able to keep that up? To lean towards it instead of the [legitimate] hassle of everyday life.

Well, I am more than happy to tell you about what that has been for me. {And what I have been up to]

FIRST

Music.

I used to be a person who didn’t even listen to singles for a period of my life. It was full length albums or nothing. I wanted to be immersed in the world the artist had made. I wanted to find entirely new corridors and rooms within the album that you could never pick up on in the first listen.

Nowadays, I listen to maybe ten songs from widely different artists over and over again.

Sometimes only one song on repeat for a long time.

One of the songs I have been really enjoying is Heat waves by Glass animals. Because I looked this song up on YouTube music after seeing a cover of it on a friend’s WhatsApp status. I have been enjoying all of the live performances of this song that I can find.

This is my favourite of them.

Everything in the song just hits me in a particular way, the strings in the background are like a return to innocence of sorts. Like being a preteen enraptured by the pink of a sunset. It is definitely something that [weirdly?] makes me want to slow down my pace and just enjoy a quiet evening sitting in a cool breeze.

I need to do that soon.

Other than that, there is this song that was used for a Tik Tok challenge. It is by Celine Dion. Honestly the covers were hilarious, and some were absolutely creative. I love the song and was a little surprised that I didn’t know a popular song by the very popular Celine Dion, so I typed the lyrics into Google and found it.

Honestly, It’s all coming back to me now, is such a fun thing to sing along to. I’ve been singing it in my kitchen and laughing at myself when I miss all of the high notes, or low ones {You know what her voice is like, Ha-Ha].

I think you should give it a listen, it has a bit of a sad subject matter, but it is definitely something that has a lot of light in it too. Sing it along with your friends and have a good laugh.

There is also this song by an Ivorian band called Magic System. They apparently have been very popular for decades in Francophone Africa. I have been wanting to use music to help build up my French speaking and listening skills so I was happy to find this song Premier Gaou a month or so ago.

As always, I found them while I was through surfing social media.

It was such an interesting find, and I cannot get over the fact that the musical style sounds so much like Nigerian Highlife, with a few tweaks here and there.

And even the language, I know it is French, but if I don’t listen close enough, the cadence sounds so much like my own native Yoruba. I love the song so much, I read through the lyrics [in French!] and what I was able to gather was that it is a story about someone trying to woo a girl or something. [I eventually went and looked up the translation of the lyrics, and well. It is definitely something]

Purely to my own ears though, the song sounds like what should play in the background on a nice trip to the beach in Senegal, something I hope to do someday.

Maybe I came up with this because it was playing in the background of a YouTube short where a woman was visiting Ivory Coast on holiday.

There were palm trees, blue seas, beach for miles and a really nice sun hat that I [everyone really] should get.

I think listening to music in this way - singles instead of whole albums - has allowed me to curate my experiences with music better. I get to decide what sonic world I want to shape, and not necessarily be led along by another artists’ vision. Either way is fine, but it is good to switch things up from time to time.

OTHER THINGS…

I haven’t been reading a lot of books. But I watched Bridgerton 2. Does it count?

Anyways, I am amazed by how much it differs from the book, which I read. I don’t want to create any spoilers, but it is very, very different from what I was expecting based on the book. In a good or a bad way? Honestly, I have not been able to decide.

In my time away from here, the only books I have read are; the one that was recommended to me by a friend, and these two I got on a whim - Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, and The Baby is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite.

The recommended book is a favourite. I have not been that immersed in a book in a long, long time. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. It is a book that centres the experiences of Japanese-Americans who immigrated in the early twentieth century, before the Second World War.

It is written in this prose-poem fashion, and the ‘protagonist’ speaks in the first person plural i.e using “we” instead of “I”, I believe, to capture a more communal feel of their experience.

For example instead of saying;

“I had long black hair and flat wide feet and was not very tall”.

This more lyrical format is used

“Some of us were from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came on the boat and wore the same old kimonos we had been wearing… some of us came from mountains and had never before seen the sea”

It is beautiful work, read it if you can. The story goes on to focus on the lives of these new immigrants, the families they create, their laborious work on small farms, their hopes and passions. It ends at the time when the Japanese were forced into internment camps because an entire racial group was suspected to be “Spies” working against the war efforts. This is something about Asian American history that is not spoken about enough. It was eye-opening, but also quite a calm read for me.

The other two books, well, I think Gingerbread needs a review of its own, a separate entry.

Although this book is… what it is, I now think that it bears a similarity to the works of Ben Okri, a Nigerian writer of surrealist works. I read one of his books, The Famished Road, a full-length novel that in many ways reads like an epic soaked in poetic language. It is not a book that is meant to be read so much as experienced.

Gingerbread, I still need to figure out what I think it is.

On the other hand, Oyinkan Braithwaite writes books that are very fast reads. This one was around 100 pages, and was about two women arguing over who is the mother of a baby. I did not miss the biblical reference of the Solomon story where he has to decide among two women who both claim to be the mother of a baby.

The way it ends is a bit open ended, you even begin to wonder who the father of the baby is in fact.

The author is a writer of crime fiction, so she definitely did not disappoint in this. It is written in simple language, in some ways it is a simple story, but its execution in the end makes you realize you can’t take it in that surface level way.

HERE IS TO HOPING…

That you are good, gentle reader.

I asked in the beginning how you are finding this time period, and I really want to know.

Has life been calm? A cruise? Something that needs readjusting to? I am not one to pressure people into doing first-quarter-of-the-year-reviews, but I am curious to know how people find ways to spark joy in their lives. If only as a way to check in.

So, leave a comment below and let me know. I am more than happy to hear from you.

Take care.