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

Tag: literature

  • Prompt 24

    What are the most important things needed to live a good life?

    The three most important things for a good life are made of these: good stable employment, love of self, and a sense of humor. As we are both social and individual beings, the aforesaid are the essence of happiness in life that would provide me with a sense of security and a healthy environment in which I can find my inner potential creative power without worrying about the ills of reality.

    While money isn’t everything, anyone must sustain a livelihood, such as clothing, food, and housing. Without it, the deprivation of material necessity will impede a creative, lively spirit’s yearning and opportunity to express under the burden of life. Which will also lead to a despaire of oneself. IT is not to say that only those with secure jobs are self-confident, but it is also challenging to maintain a level of confidence when you are down and out, moving from one job to another, like a wandering nomad. True that even a panhandler can be content with himself, but then it must be he transacendes the ways of this world, completely detached from the needs of this world into his own earthly nirvana. Lastly but not leastly, a sense of humor is a handmaid to goodness that will change a heaven hell and a hell heaven. At the moement of despair, any humorous dialogue or scene from a comedy movie or a funny moment of life will moementarily take off the clouds of disappointment or depression.

    You and I deserve happiness and the good life because we are such starstuff as dreams are made of, harvesting sunlight from the heavens excellently brilliant. I hope my reader will have good lives because we are worth it.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • Prompt 21

    What is your career plan?

    I always think that a career is for those who have social ambitions to climb up the class ladder or to gain fame, such as professionals or celebrities. As a commoner who works for bare necessities and the accompanying mental equilibrium brought by financial security, I would say the word “job” is unassumingly fitting to me. Hence I will change it to “job plan.”

    My immediate job plan is to pass my ninety days probation period, which will end in early or mid-June of this year at the current job. I am a new Case Manager Assistant at a personal injury law firm where the Spencerian of the survival of the fittest is at its most tacitly manifested and vociferously encouraged. The high turnover rate is famously average, so matter-of-factly typical that it’s like a revolving door of a department store. But the generous pay rate and timely payment compensate for the reign of terror. I have seen many the hungry ocean gains advantage of the kingdom of the shore, and the firm soil wins over the watery main with loss and gain, gain and loss. So if I get paid at a decent pay rate every other Friday, I am content. So, I pray that I will pass the probation period, and that’s all,

    I work hard and well, but I don’t want to become a case manager that is a 24-hour job under stress. I want to be an excellent CMA, competent, efficient, and prompt, and that is my prayer.

  • Wandering Cat

    The hate fills you with spite
    the heart is a barren desert
    the mind is a desiccated tree
    basked in the heat of hate;
    There’s a cat who walks
    by himself by the proud tree
    and his eyes full of memories
    that once beheld the leaves
    dancing in the breeze of peace;
    He catches in silence at the sight
    by the awe of the forlorn fate
    that wails into a void of ether
    and continues on his wander
    into the end of distant rainbows
    bridging over the skies yonder.