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

Tag: life

  • Prompt 23

    How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

    When a toy is wound up, it has to be released to get it moved, or it will be broken without performing its feat of vitality. Likewise, when stress is raised to the highest on a mercury thermometer, my body shudders in a quiver, and my hand turns to a white slate, inhibiting my speech faculty, which results in murderous migraines. It’s a genuinely psychosomatic experience, which makes me dumbfounded and speechless by a poisoned arrow to the heart.

    Such is my present status of mind. The stress from working under a manager who lacks experience in leadership, patience, understanding, and knowledge is so high that going to work every morning feels like a daily ritual of torment. She belittles my ability by magnifying the mistakes I make. She constantly intimidates me in such a toxic environment that I see no point in demonstrating my capabilities to the extent possible. However, this ordeal of mental torture can’t go on any longer because it affects my physical and mental health. I deserve respect and recognition. So, I have decided to bring this issue to my supervising attorney, as encouraged by my colleagues at work, who have also witnessed the mistreatment by my manager. I will tell him on Monday that we are incompatible with working because of personality issues, which prevent me from performing my work to the extent possible. Even if my voicing out will bring about a counteractive result, I must tell it to him in defense of my abused spirit.

    Shakespeare said, “We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.” That is what I am experiencing, and because of it, I have lost my motivation to do things I used to love doing, such as writing and reading. Even if I lose a job, I want to let my crying soul be heard and protect myself from her ongoing raving rants like a foaming rabid dog.

  • “A Man Called Otto” (2023 Film)

    If you run into Otto on the street or in a store, your eyes will see him as a grumpy old man who would cavil at one cent for everything. But if we look at him with the mind, he is quite a character for sure, and you will fail to dislike him once you know him and his secret. He is very good at fixing machines, from dishwashers to radiators, bicycles, and cars. He is also a fine babysitter and a great driving instructor. But as God is arguably fair in evenly distributing talents in us, Otto has a hard time mastering one thing: the art of killing himself. And boy, shouldn’t he thank God for such failed experience?

    Otto is a lonely man in his sixties who lost his love of life and dear wife, Sonya, to cancer. Sadness comes not in a single spy but in the battalion, for he has just been forced to retire from his long-term job due to the juggernaut of changing generations at his workplace, as with other places. He has no children but himself, and as Sonya was the beacon of Light in his already reticent and shy life, he sees no light, joy, or meaning in life. The world suddenly turned grim and dreary. Otto is wrapped in his sorrow and besieged in loneliness under the roof of distress. We are privileged to look into the psychology of the destitute in the darkest night of the soul distressed in utter loneliness, which can be broken with a light of kindness and humor as shown by Otto’s new lively and lovely neighbors Marisol and her family. 

    Humor is a handmaid of Hope, which Otto needs on the dark night of his soul. So, as the name suggests, Marisol and her pleasantly vivacious family bring the beauty of Sea and Sun to Otto’s Dungeon of Despondency with lots of laughs followed by tears and more laughs that will make anyone harnessed with a yore of life lightened. And since Otto is secretly a big-hearted person – literally and clinically – he slowly but surely warms to the warmth of friendship and love and shows his true colors as radiantly gorgeous as afternoon sunshine showering the brilliantly golden orange trees in summer. Oh, and there is a homeless cat that seems to be Sonya’s familiar in cat skin sent by her from heaven to be his company.

    Otto is one lucky person to be surrounded by a loving community of neighbors, who becomes an alternate form of a family with emotional support and care, often overlooked and ignored by overtly advocated individualism with no face of humanity. Indeed, that doesn’t mean returning to agrarian society or something to the effect of the notoriously puritanical Salem, where everyone cast a jaundiced and suspicious eye on the targeted loner in the community, with trademark gossiping and ostracizing. Showing care shouldn’t be complicated because one can just say hi by trying to understand why the person behaves the way they are. I believe that is how we can prevent suicides by detecting sadness from the person instead of devolving the person to a therapist or counselor or ignoring them as if they were invisible or a burden to care. Just like Marisol and his family have shown, Light defeats Darkness. And everyone deserves Laughter.

  • At dawn

    The dawn’s breaking
    through the gray curtains
    of the shadows of the past
    and releases moon frosts
    sprinkled with star flakes
    on the leaves of the trees
    and pours them onto the grass
    that makes the whole meadow
    a sumptuous panoply of pleasure

  • Prompt 20

    List the people you admire and look to for advice…

    There used to be a section in the New York Times Book Review where an established writer was asked whom they would invite for dinner, alive or dead. So today’s prompt is relevant to the dinner list, (well for me lunch or coffee time list is more fitting) which comprises people I wish to have as wise and pleasant counsel.

    I want to have people who are well-read, open-minded, understanding, cultured, patient, and confident, with a sense of humor devoid of sarcasm. I want them to be older than I am, at the Judge or old stage according to Shakespeare’s seven stages of life, because they have withered the vicissitudes of life to live to tell. Of course, not all mature people are wise. However, still, I would feel more comfortable being in company with them to talk about the woes of life than with MZ generations who regard the preceding ones as something medieval, if not ancient or prehistoric.

    Therapists or counselors are paid to give us advice, but what if you don’t have the resource or are unlucky to meet a good one who can show you precise feedback with a touch of humanity? So I envy those who have people whom they can turn to for wisdom, not criticism under the pretense of grain of salt.

  • Sound of Wind – Vol 1

    Mountains landscape in Vorarlberg, Austria

    Monday, May 1st, 2023

    Today’s Article: Labyrinth

    Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you tried not to make the same mistakes, you would turn a full circle as if trapped in a labyrinth? If you have, then you are not alone, and you are not uniquely flawed. Put it bluntly, you are not a loser and will never be. 

    We live in a society – or in an era inclusively – where uniformed measurement of success in status represents who you are regardless of how long a way you have come despite everything, Unlike Ancient Greeks who valued what individuals had endured and achieved as much as they possibly could under the most depraved circumstances, we look at what our eyes see in the face of the mind because of the misguided belief that only the fittest will survive in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Here in the States, people believe those subsisting on welfare are lazy losers because they are uneducated or less educated. But that’s not the case. People with college degrees also find themselves mired in the rut of life, eager to get even a mime-waged job just to get by lest they should be thrown out to the streets. Sometimes educated people live in poverty, not because they are substance abusers or mentally deranged, but because they have different personal reasons that are not to be generalized under specific circumstances. We are all different, and different people have different needs. Didn’t Depeche Mode sing in “People are people?”

    Failure discriminates against none, embraces everyone, and we are one in it. The Beckettian philosophy of failure as a championing, not championed juggernaut of doom echoes the Nietzschean credo of what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Try again, fail again, succeed again. Or fail worse. Better worse. Fail worst. Till you get sick of it for good. Throw up for good, ad nauseam. If you are doing it, you are not alone; I am not alone. We are not alone. Don’t forget about it.

  • cat’s eyes

    The eyes harvesting sunlight
    see a day moon and stars
    under a golden veil in the skies
    that no one sees at a glance
    that no one could care less
    unless you have the eyes
    like his that sees the spirit
    and the soul and the heart.