My Inspiration for April 2025

Apr 30, 2025

2 min read

This April felt very vibrant, flowery and green, yes, green above all. And the greenness was especially intense in the rainy afternoons. Gazing at the drops of rain on the swaying bamboos in my garden was something poetic and precious. Secrets whispered between the blooming cherry trees and violet wisteria blossoms. Enjoying chicory root coffee and hazelnut cake on my balcony. Sweet, tender moments of bonding with my guinea pig who is having some health issues. To match the melancholy beauty of rainy afternoons I would listen to the song ‘Megham Karukatha’, written and sung by Dhanush, and for dreamy afternoons when the sky is the pigeon-grey colour, the Malayalam song ‘Neela Nilave’ which is especially beautiful when translated. The artistic stars this month were the three female painters whose birthday were all in mid-April; Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Eva Gonzalès, and Olga Boznańska. I wandered back into old friendships and unexpectedly found new ones, as though spring had opened something within me. I found myself drawn, again and again, drawn to the colour blue which, from the perspective of chakras, corresponds to the throat chakra which is associated with communication, self-expression and truth. I thought often of Ophelia’s drowning and her aesthetic melancholy, in paintings, in poems, and Renoir’s spring-fresh greens, Redon’s soft flowers, all seemed to echo this mood of sweet confusion and a quiet becoming.

“…my longing for sweet air and sunshine.”

(Kahlil Gibran, in a letter to Mary Haskell)

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”(Anatole France)