Sharing oranges with your loved ones

On Wendy Cope’s poem, & the magic of the everyday.

This is a poem that I stumble upon almost every other week on Instagram and Twitter. It continues to hold as much wonder for me as it did the first time I read it. It’s as though you can reach out into the poem, touch it, and bring some of it back for yourself. It captures the moment just as it were— it returns it to us unfiltered.

Does it also make you rewind to a similar time in your lives, when you did something simple but beautiful? And then forgot about that simple delight? Does this poem help you bring it back?

The one true test of having a joyful moment is when one is so rooted in the presence of it one forgets to have thoughts about it. The experience of it may even feel fleeting. How it happens, & you move on to the next thing. The next task of the day. There is a flow-like quality to such moments. There is a poignancy in the realisation that we’ve had these simple moments of presence in our lives, too. Moments when our lives slowed down for a while. We were listening. We were there.

There are moments in our lives that are not epiphanies, but are equivalent to them. Especially in hindsight. Did that really happen?

At lunchtime I bought an orange.
The size of it made us all laugh.

I found myself drawn back to my school days— my friends and I sitting in a circle around each other during the lunch break. Laughing. Sometimes I want to bring that laughter back. Not just my laughter, but the laughter of my friends. Friends I no longer see. What I want to bring back is the laughter of that moment itself. What is it, to want to retrieve a moment you can no longer touch: save in memory?

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And that orange it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It’s new. The rest of the day was quite easy.

(Apples and Oranges by Paul Cezanne)

So many people say that this poem makes them both happy and sad. The sheer ease with which the speaker moves from one moment to the next is evocative both of delight, and a heaviness. Where does the heaviness come from? Perhaps from the memory of the days on which life was indeed that easy.

Look at the line: The rest of the day was quite easy.

There are days on which joy makes you space for some more joy. More rest. Those days that perhaps slipped your notice when they happened. How some things can become fuller only in retrospect. And then that last sentence, how it jolts us back into the this-ness of things.

I love you. I’m glad I exist. Another way of saying I’m grateful for this existence that helps me record all the beauty I live within. Something poetry itself does. It’s a way of saying: life may not be easy now but it once was, and that’s enough for us to seek solace in. 

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Three Prayers

1. May I find grace everywhere. Like Mary Oliver says: “May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”

2. Let me remind myself that cold, lonely places are amongst the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

3. Let me be a witness to beauty, and not intrude upon it. Let me remember that beauty doesn’t need to be hoarded. That it’ll remain intact even if I watch it from a distance.

(Melissa Launay, Marmalade on Toast and an Orange)

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Dreaming of Honeyed Apples: A Food Writing Workshop

I’m holding a Food Writing Workshop this summer, called Dreaming of Honeyed Apples. It’ll be held from May 18th, 2024 to June 22nd, 2024. If you’d like more of what you’ve read: if you want a deep-dive into food (& our memories of it) - you can register for the workshop. We will be re-opening the archives of our family recipes, our fondest memories of food as children, foods we long for.

We will be documenting and journaling about recipes from our families, childhood’s comfort meals, your first memories of food as a child, what cooking means to you, the ways in which it has been healing for you: amongst so much else. Come join us now!

Here’s the registration link for currencies from over the world.

Here’s the registration link for Indian residents & citizens, in INR.

You can find more details on the workshop in the link below. If you have any more questions, you can email or DM me anytime. Looking forward to seeing you there! ✍️