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

Tag: life

  • prompt 76

    What snack would you eat right now?

    Snacks are like faerie food comprising chips, crackers, nuts, and sweets, an airy guilty pleasure gratifying but vanishing at one fell swoop. And I would eat the following faerie food if it materialized now.

    Gummy Worms – Not by Haribo, which is too hard to chew, but by Black Forest, which is Delight.

    I love it 😍

    Keebler’s Reduced Fat Club Crackers – I love this! I have been in love with this faerie food for 20 years. Softy, buttery, and airy! It’s a pinnacle of faerie food.

    Wheat Thins Reduced Cracker – It’s 100% Whole Grain, and I love the texture of it, not to mention the taste.

    Last but not least wholesome nature 😅

    Lightly Salted Cashews – Almond is too hard, pecan too big, but cashew is the fittest. I can see why the nuts were popular snacks during the Elizabethan period in England, especially for theatergoers.

    So these are my favorite faerie food I would eat right now. My lunch hour in the office is also beginning to end. Signing off. 🤓

  • prompt 70

    If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

    Made by Me 🌻

    Life is an alternative cause between hope and despair, joy and sadness, and gain and loss, as gallantly depicted in Verdi’s La Traviata.

    I made the above billboard to serve as my logo for the new stage of my life this year. I hope to maintain it as a narrative for the rest of my life.

    In participation of creative experience, I shall rekindle the love of writing; however bad or good it may be, to leave my legacy of existence that I exist in the actualization of who I am, lest my life should vanish in the dust of the wind, like Lucy Maud Montgomery, who disciplined herself to devote herself in writing every day at the desk even if she didn’t felt like doing it. After all, didn’t Aristotle say we are what we repeatedly do, and excellence is not an act but a habit?

  • Prompt 68

    What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

    One of the reasons I like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte is their happy ending with the most unexpected gift in the bliss of munificent largess that turned around their lives as la dolce vita. Likewise, (and frankly speaking) my Dickensian style of the greatest gift could be a recovery of my father’s stolen ancestral land in the will left by my grandfather.

    A Shakespearean play, it may seem, my father’s land was forfeited by his half-brother, who falsely attested to the probate court that my father was lost in contact and, therefore, presumed to be dead. We have recently learned about it and still can’t believe this preponderance of lies. With the purloined land, the half-brother enriched his family, helping his two sons to set up their businesses. The promised land would have significantly helped our family, and we would have lived in a better environment with a Dickensian happy ending.

    That happened to Charles Dickens. It was a small estate inherited from his paternal grandmother, which released his impecunious family from a debtor’s jail so that they could settle down in a fixed abode. So, yes. I should be so lucky if we could get back our land. That could be the greatest expectation.

  • Prompt 50

    What cities do you want to visit?

    Cities are a symbol of civilization and well of culture. It’s cosmopolitan and utilitarian in that all social classes mingle and become a parliament of humanity. I prefer cities to the lesser versions of human dwellings because of these reasons, and there are cities I want to visit on my bucket list.

    Rome – Built by the Rolumus and Lemus, bred by a wolf mother, Rome was an eternal city with boundaries stretching from the east and the west, the North and the south. All roads led to Rome, and I want to walk down the same streets that ancient Romans trod upon with their own stories. So much so that Edgar Allen Poe summarized Rome thus: “The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” People say that today’s Rome is nothing like ancient Rome, but they don’t see that the place memories enveloping the city’s aura are lingering, affecting the minds of the people living or visiting there. Thousand years have passed, but the spirit of the place is immortal.

    Vatican City – My primary purpose will be seeing Michelangelo’s magnum opus on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel. Reading Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King has egged me on to witness the magnum force of art as a manifestation of the ideal appreciated by the faculty of the mind affected by imagination. It would have been much more wonderful to visit Vatican City when Pope John Paul Second was the Bishop of Rome.

    Other cities have histories of millennium years, but Rome and Vatican City still exist with vivacity and alacrity. They may be crowded, expensive, and trivialized, but they were, have been, and will be so in posterity. This also makes me think that our posterity might feel the same way about the places where we live now. Hence are my wishful cities. 🧚‍♀️⭐️🌍

  • Prompt 48

    Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.

    Toro Then 🌸

    I can never forget the first time I adopted my first cat, Toro, from an animal shelter when I moved from New Jersey to California in 2018.

    I still remember the first day I saw Toro, who was nine weeks old, at Ventura Animal Shelter in Camarillo, CA, where I lived for the first time in California. They say it’s not you who chooses your cat; your cat chooses you. It is only true because when my brother and I approached the sheltered cats, Toro came to us with his tiny paw, trying to touch our fingers through the compartment’s opening. He was playful, curious, and affectionate. While waiting for my brother to finish the adoption process inside, I could never forget Toro’s eyes becoming curiouser and curiouser at me from the cardboard carrier, full of wonder about the new world.

    I still treasure the first time I met Toro, now three years old. I feel his little heart when he climbs on my back and shoulder, and I am glad it’s not a dream. 🌻💕💫🧚‍♀️

    Toro Now 🌼

    P.S. Something went wrong with my prompt posted earlier today; it was uploaded but then disappeared 🤨 Hence, this is a repost of today’s daily prompt. Sorry for the readers whose likes went with the post🐱

  • Prompt 46

    What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?

    On the top of the world

    My favorite physical exercise is hiking on the top of the hill, and I love looking at the world down under and the skies high above, to which I feel closer with a touch of my hand.

    The pleasure is watching the wind from faraway seas herd a flock of clouds like a celestial shepherd. And an eagle breasting the never-ending abundance of air follows a trail of the Sun Chariot to return to the castle east of the sun, west of the moon.

    The delight is listening to the sussurs of the trees. It’s the wind speaking through the leaves, carrying the messages from my guardian angel I long to hear.

    Hiking is not only a physical exercise but also a mental refreshment that nourishes your holistic wellness free of charge in the luxuriant Nature’s Spa. ❤️🌸✨🧚‍♀️