Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: article

  • prompt 73

    What is your mission?

    Image from Google

    Sometimes, I just want to call it a day in my life. Blue or Black, Low or Dark. You call it depression, but I call it existential despair, which is not clinical but – well – existential that empirical situations shape the way I look at the world, not knowing what the purposes of my life are.

    I’ve read Dr. Viktor E. Frankl’s books about logotherapy, including his memoir because he is someone I could associate with in terms of his remarkable resilience and mind power to overcome his horrific experiences at the death camps during WWII. He said three values help us to find the purposes of life, which are Creative Value, Experiential Value, and Attitudinal Value. Of these values, I am practicing the Creative and Experiential Values by reading and writing because these are something I have been doing well since my childhood. Or I should think so.

    That said, my immediate mission is to finish the books I have downloaded on my Kindle, such as Think Again by Adam Grant and The Greeks by Philip Matyszak, to write book reviews on them. Writing book reviews is another habit I have been doing since the beginning of my nine-year-old blog. But these days, under the pretext of exhaustion from the job, I haven’t done it, so this will be my immediate mission.

    Another mission is to keep living a life, even if I don’t know what it leads me to. These days, I frequently contemplate why I should continue to live. But those who come back from near-death experiences or death said living is much better than death. Since I have not been dead yet, I can only believe them. After all, you must believe someone who has gone through such an ordeal, right? Like Dr. Frankl, who survived the Auschwitz.

    I think of the motto I created, which will be my credo for missions in life: “There’s Hope, There’s Light. Clear Mind, Open Heart. Keep Calm, Always Write.”

    Peace. 🌼💫🧚‍♀️🌍

    My motto created by me⭐️

  • Prompt 72

    What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

    I heard that Cher has publicly defied growing old. Sometimes, youth comes with beauty, which is what Cher has achieved under the spell of medical magic. Has she made deals with spirits or consulted Dr. Faust?

    The Greek gods knew too well that aging is a mortal’s Achilles Gun. So when the immortals favored selected mortals, they deigned to bestow eternal youth on them either by giving them ambrosia or throwing them in the amber of a fire. But then you have to make deals with whoever promises you with the gift of youth.

    Cicero said nature has its things in place, and each age of human life has its place in nature. So, not acknowledging it is asking for trouble, such as Vampires. There are also Madonna and Cher, who may be vampires in the beautiful woman’s hiding. They are strong-willed, successful women with money to purchase their tickets for youth. Besides, they never reveal their actual ages in public. Are they ashamed of being considered as women of their ages? Don’t they also advocate women’s rights? Isn’t agism another tacitly recognized form of discrimination in our society?

    Regarding aging, I also think about the movie Logan’s Run, where people aged 30 and over become executed under the pretext of being rejuvenated. It’s a society of youth and a cult of beauty. If you are not young, you are not beautiful anymore. That is a formula in our world today.

    I am growing old, and to be perfectly honest, I am also scared of it because I can see the streaks of my hair being shades lighter. As a working woman, looking young is essential to survive in the workplace, whether you agree or disagree. But I don’t want to become a Vampire by making a Mepistolean pact. I want to be like Cleopatra, whose age can not wither, nor custom can stale her infinite varieties. Mind you, Plutarch, in his Heroes, commented on Cleopatra that her intelligence and manner of speaking were the jewels of her beauty. Or like Sophia Lauren, who still looks divinely beautiful without looking like a Vampire because it matters how your inner self looks.

  • Prompt 71

    What could you do differently?

    Plane Dreaming is now planespotting. Image Credit by Me🤓

    “If” is such a big word with such a short syllable. There’s even a book titled What If, packed with hypothetical answers to scientific questions. In my Book of Life, these are my what-ifs.

    I could have continued to pursue a flight attendant career shortly after graduating from college. I once applied for a position with United Airlines in college. I made it to the open interview, where only two people were selected. I took it as a sign of not calling it a vocation, so I decided not to pursue my childhood dream. But my inborn wanderlust calls me to the vision of being a flight attendant working skybound, traveling, and meeting people worldwide.

    I could have acted differently when my team manager told me last Thursday that she would soon leave the firm this month. She was one of a few commendable supervisors/managers I have worked with. She asked me if I could work with her at her new firm. Ecstatically, I said “Yes!” because I felt insecure about my future after her departure. Being a neurodivergent, I can thrive under a patient and understanding person. My current team manager is a neurotypical supervisor who lets me work independently and contribute to the best of my abilities. While I was grateful for her kind gesture of inviting me to join her at her new firm, I should not have expressed my acceptance forthwith lest I should burden her with the weight of responsibility carried to her new place. I could have acted professionally courteously and instead congratulated her on her new future, not giving her the impression of latching on to her.

    There’s no use cryng over spilled milk, and I feel like the sorry milkmaid. Foolhardy maybe, foolish not. I could become more mature, now that I have reached the second stage of my life. But I don’t want to be harsh on myself for not being what my parents and brother and some people think I should be. Earth moves around Sun, and the Sun comes up from the east and goes down in the west. Not to acknowledge the nature of things is to ask for trouble. Likewise, I don’t want to pine for things I regret not having done or being the way I want, for life is too short to hold my what-ifs in the chapters of my life.

  • Happy World Introvert Day⭐️🍀🧚‍♀️

    Alone but Curious🧚‍♀️

    Without my subscription to the newsletter “Letters of Note” by Shaun Usher, I would not have known that today was “World Introvert Day.” In celebration of the Feast of Introverts, I want to share some of the scintillating comments on the solace of solitude relished by the great writers of all time, which are selected by Usher, the founder of the Letters of Notes series, now also presented as in live shows where famous thespians – primarily British – including the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch, narrate many of the great letters from the series.

    Elizabeth Bishop must have felt the same as I do many times when I am forced to be in situations where I must pretend to be outgoing and all-around friendly to be with, joking and laughing in nonstop chattering: “After being so social… I don’t feel like myself at all. I’m exhausted all over but particularly the dace, which I suppose comes from wearing a horrible fixed grin for so long.” From her letter written on November 10th, 1948.

    But Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letter to David Garnett, written on September 2nd, 1970, won the olive wreath with a gold medal: “I live in a house too large for me, with three cats, and when the telephone rings and it is a wrong number, I feel a rush of thankfulness.” It’s a witty felicity of comfort in the company of romantic solitude. No, it doesn’t mean she is antisocial, but not everyone is outgoing, and outgoing people are not always positive, adept, or healthy. You can’t put people on the polar ends of the continuum of personalities and see them only in black and white.
    Surrounded by the crowds of vocal extroverts at work, where quiet is synonymous with sullen and too severe, I cannot help but agree with the writers mentioned earlier, for my sentiment shares with theirs. Perhaps it’s because we write, and writers are different tribes of people who hear and see things not recognized by those who are not.

    But for what’s worth, it doesn’t matter if you call yourself an Introvert or not because, as Ernest Hemingway chipped, just be content with what you are and how you are: “I don’t know what an introvert is, but if that is what you are may all my children be then.” Ditto.

    For your eyes only ✨

  • Prompt 22

    What does freedom mean to you?

    People think of freedom as a philosophical concept in belief when it is the fundamental right to exercise humanness, the state of being human. Freedom is not a prerogative of specific class or status or group, but a sovereign privilege of every human being to be who they are and to express themselves under the aegis of regard for individualities that can be at their most creative and effective when well-guarded by enlightened society with humanism.

    Freedom to speak against injustice, freedom to keep one’s character, or freedom to think differently defines freedom in a civilized society characterized by low unemployment and high long-term employment rates. Unlike Europeans, Americans are unashamedly puritanical about the rights of at-will workers, meaning they are always expendable at the whims and caprice of tyrannical employers. Here in the States, an employer can let an employee go any time out of the blue. A yearly leave of absence with pay averages ten days, which can’t be used at once but sporadically. Would it be a bit of a stretch to see a feudalistic or ancient slavery system in today’s American employee-employer, which includes all those foreign-born doing business in the States, relationship?

    Jean Jacque Rousseau lamented that we were born free but are in chains everywhere. Activists clamorously campaign for Freedom” to showcase their political causes in the media, but they may also have been perpetrators of someone’s freedom. Freedom is not a cause celebre but a fundamental right to practice a will to live. Abraham Lincoln called the “Jewel of Freedom in the Family of Liberty.” Ditto. Freedom is accessible only in a civilized society.

  • the world in my eyes

    On one fine day, a tiny Bushman in Southern Africa comes upon an empty coke bottle thrown from the cockpit of an airplane to desert sand. Thinking it is a gift from the gods, the man sets out a journey to return it to them. Along the journey, the Bushman encounters a pastiche of humanity in a kaleidoscope of the events he comes upon till he reaches an edge of a high cliff mysteriously enveloped by the rings of clouds and throws the bottle into the deep, exclaiming, “The Gods Must Be Crazy!” As I see now, I am in the chorus with him on the top of the cliff overlooking the world.

    Nevermore than now have I witnessed the epic moments of history that appear to be atavistic in terms of nature, motive, and consequence. A convenient way of relating the human tragedies to the scourge of gods and God will only put me on a par with Pangloss, the ever-positive pious philosopher who thinks all is God’s will for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The Taliban chanting the name of Allah in their will, Christians taking pride in being a new chosen people, and other zealots of any religion all have had recourse to their deities and used their belief systems as weapons of dominance over others. From the Coronavirus pandemic that forever changed our ways of life to the collapse of democratic Afghanistan by the Taliban and the devastating effects of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, I see a phantasmagorical display of people’s faces in sorrow and distress in my mind’s theater.

    Following the news about the current situations of Afghanistan and its people links me to the Trojan War, which lasted about ten years with the Greek allied powers destroying Troy in the end. From the burning city of Troy comes Aeneas, a royal warrior who escapes the mayhem with his family, carrying his elderly father on his back, holding his little son’s hand besides. That image is always particularly heartfelt because of the Trojan hero’s humanness, unlike his more glamorous Greek victors. What happened in the past happens now and will always, such as the images of parents passing babies to soldiers across the sharp razor wire two young, Afghans falling from a plane climbing high in the sky, and the lifeless bodies of the young and the old, women and men strewn over the dusty ground outside the airport in the aftermath of suicide bombing.

    Back in the States, Hurricane Ida ravaged Louisiana, leaving thousands of people stranded, homeless without power (for about a month from now), and sufficient supplies of sanitation, clothing, and food. They lost everything, and nothing is what they have now. I cannot erase the image of a woman from a news interview who said the hurricane took everything from her family, then breaking into tears. Then there is news about an elderly man viciously attacked by an alligator in a flood presumed dead while his wife took a little boat to get help outside their flooded isolated community. Would the man have been swept away by the rapid stream of the flood? Would the alligator that had attacked the man have returned to him for more? Or would the man knowing or believing that was his end have let himself dissipated into the murky waters?

    Is this the same kind of significant feeling of epic moments I am experiencing as what George Orwell should have felt when witnessing the death of a Burmese condemned man on his way to the gallows, the carnage of WWII, and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War? Orwell posited that one of the reasons he wrote was to record historical moments he was living with his own perspectives and feelings, not necessarily popular or compromising. My intention to write this essay is similar to Orwell’s but more with sheer egotism of getting the heartfelt sorrow off my chest and tears away from my eyes. But I am not so sure if that proves effective with the images still vivid in my mind.