When I read the story of the stranded Beluga whale who died in France’s Seine River in 2022, I felt like my spirit was in communion with hers because I could feel what she might have felt—what was once hopeful turned into disappointment and loneliness.
No one knew what caused her to separate from her pod and end up in the river, but I think she wanted to see the world herself, with the images of kind humans she had once seen on the ocean in her memory. So she came to our world full of expectations for welcoming faces and smiles, but instead, she found herself in a murky gray urban river that made her loneliness more conspicuous, more incongruent.
Likewise, that’s how I feel when I find myself surrounded by crowds that make my presence awkwardly conspicuous, shielded by an invisible wall of willing ignorance.
Don’t say good night, for you will not see it, you’d better not say it it’s better that way so your spirit won’t leave for a night’s work across the starry skies riding on the moonlit waves of silence to the ghosts, it knows from your pasts you know not to inform them of your secrets deepest, darkest. So, you see it better that way that you say not good night at least for a while and let not your spirit tell it all to the ghosts haunting you even if you do not want.
The bliss of peace is made of these: a baby’s laughter, the soft flurry touches of my cats on my face, and their purring and meowing, listening to my favorite tunes and singing along alone, getting my hair done nicely, saying I love you to my cats with their little hearts on my heart.
Peace may be transient, a precariously illusory daydreaming, or a timed reprieve from existential responsibilities. Still, peace is happiness when the breeze of peace envelopes me with a fragrance of acacia and takes me to the sea of skies.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Three books that have planted Tree of Golden Apples in my mind’s garden are the following elementals:
1. Recollections: An Autobiography by Viktor Frankl – Dr. Frankl was the father of Logotherapy, one of the three Viennese Schools of Psychotherapies, who practiced what he believed and experienced. Far from an armchair scholar in the Ivory Tower out of touch with the crowd, Dr. Frankl gave hope, not as a delusional escape from the burdens of reality or dangerous daydream, such as Thuclides defined as the nature of hope, but as a beacon of light in the darkness of the soul crying for help. It’s because he was a survivor of the hell on earth, called Auschwitz, and other circles of hell under Nazi-ruled Austria. He wrote other books, which I have read, but this book pales others because it shows him not as a scholar but as a human soul whose spirit we all possess and, therefore, can relate to.
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – This is the book I can never get bored with. Since I received the book at the tender age of twelve in Korea, I have always loved it and returned to it when I feel lonely, very lonely, and lonely in this big, wide, cold world. Jane is my soul sister, and we have things in common. And I see what kind of woman Charlott Bronte was different from many people who like to claim. I like her works more than her contemporary peer, Jane Austen.
3. Why I Write by George Orwell – This is a small pamphlet-like book. I carry it around when I feel like doing nothing, yet doing something resourceful and thoughtful to keep myself from mentally procrastinating. People tend to think writing belongs to intellectuals when it isn’t. It’s a record of personal existence through written communication to express one’s inner world within the outer world. But many people, including professionally established writers, like to think that writing is a form of art that belongs to the ether. It’s not, and the purpose of writing is simple. Orwell’s points of view agree with mine.
These are the books that I always come back like trusty bosom friends who can keep secrets besides my two cats.
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
all the heartaches give me headaches.
I try not to overthink about things I can’t change or control. I care too much about people’s reactions and feelings at work and home because, as someone with acute sensory perceptions, all my nerves are tuned to the reception, making them exhausted and pained.
For example, I get very agitated by the total silence created by the other in a room. I have a co-worker who says nothing all day, as if I were invisible in the same office. It bothers me and makes me uncomfortable. I then try to analyze and reason for such behavior, always finding faults in me for being introverted. It only makes my already complex psyche intricated like Gordion’s Knot that only can be let loose by one fell swoop of Alenxader’s sword.
Alexander and the Gordion’s Knot
But I don’t need Alxander’s help to cut the Gordian’s Knot because I have the sword. It is Excaliber in my mind that is waiting for me to wield it. With one fell swoop of the blade, I will be able to cut the intricate knot of wrecked nerves, troubled neurons, and interrupted connections between the sparks of the thoughts that will clear away the impurities on the mind so that I can have a clear mind and lively spirit.
It’s always unexpected. This moment of Eureka of life. Or so it seems. Finding meaning in life is like searching for a lost star destined to be mine and yours when it falls from its journey to see you and me.
I am still looking for my lost star, but sometimes, I want to give all up, facing stripes of existential dilemmas, crossing the vicissitudes of life that I don’t want to. At those times when I want to quit everything and leave this world, my eyes meet the eyes of my cats, who need my care and love. Then they come to me and rub their little flurry heads against my hands, legs, and heart, sending me the pulses of life all over my body, entering the palace of the soul.
Small pleasures and simple joys keep me going like the Energizer Bunny beating the drum in an energetic march of celebrated longevity. My cats need me, and the need for care gives me a reason to continue this search for my star in life.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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