A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter F

Find one's feet

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To become comfortable and confident in a new situation; to adjust to unfamiliar circumstances and begin functioning effectively.

Detailed Definition
This idiom captures the process of embodied adaptation—learning to stand and move with confidence in terrain that was initially strange. In poetry, it appears in coming-of-age narratives, migration poems, and works about recovery, describing the gradual process by which the disoriented self reconstructs its relationship with the world. Poets invoke it to honor the small victories of adaptation, the quiet courage of those learning to navigate grief, displacement, or new responsibility. Its physical concreteness—feet on ground, body learning balance—suits the lyric tradition's insistence on embodiment, connecting psychological adjustment to the literal act of standing upright in the world and learning, slowly, to walk forward.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about immigration might describe the slow, careful process of finding one's feet in a new country — the language learned, the geography mastered, the social codes decoded, the body gradually at home in unfamiliar space; A coming-of-age poem might track the speaker's finding of their feet — the passage from adolescent uncertainty to the embodied confidence of knowing who one is and how one moves through the world; The physical concreteness of the idiom — feet, ground, balance — suits poems in the confessional tradition that insist on the bodily reality of psychological states, refusing the abstraction that separates mind from the flesh it inhabits; In a poem about recovery from grief, finding one's feet is the small, incremental victory — not the grand recovery but the modest, daily reestablishment of the capacity to stand and walk; A poem about a new job, a new city, a new relationship might use find one's feet to honor the patience required in the period before confidence arrives — the time of careful step, of attention to where the ground is solid; The idiom suits poems that celebrate process over arrival, honoring the gradual rather than the sudden, finding meaning in the daily practice of learning to navigate what was, not long ago, entirely unknown
Additional Notes
This idiom is useful for poems about adjustment and growth. To “find one’s feet” implies gaining balance after entering unfamiliar ground: childhood, exile, widowhood, university, work, or new love. It pairs naturally with walking, shoes, shorelines, dance, and uncertain floors. The idiom suggests confidence gradually learned through bodily experience.
Also Known As
Find one’s bearings Get comfortable
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