When kindness is misunderstood

 I said that I wouldn't post until March 5, but I need to get this off my chest.
A society that venerates rewards, exchange of favors and money treats kindness with suspicion. Making a new friend here is tough. When I connect with a person in meaningful ways, I am kind to them. Then my attitude is treated with suspicion.
 All of a sudden the new "friend" believes I have secondary intentions of some kind. Who knows what those intentions are. The new friend stands back. Strangely enough, my parents taught me to be kind without expecting anything in return.
 Friendship is about spontaneity, affection and communication. Some people confuse spontaneity and kindness with the idea of a boundary getting trespassed. It may be a cultural mismatch, or a misunderstanding. The new "friend" is distrustful.
 I have finally come to the realization that it is safer to wear a shell and to stick to my old friends. The ones who love me and accept me the way I am.
 I am curious to know if you have encountered similar experiences.

Problems are opportunities

 The double nature of some human beings baffles me.  This poem of mine published by Vox Poetica is about that.
  If you are in the mood to read something uplifting, feel free to check my two poems published in the winter issue of the Greensilk Journal. I'm sure you will be tempted to read the other poets' work too.
 Today I wrote something about "problems".
Even though we may be prone to feel irritated or frustrated when we encounter certain problems that challenge our beliefs, we can also choose to adopt a different attitude: we can  welcome these problems and treat them as unique opportunities to learn something new. We can embrace them with a positive mindset.
  Problems are challenges that invite us to think of creative solutions.
 They can encourage us to ask questions.
 From my own personal experience in the workplace I conclude that whenever problems are a consequence of conflicts related to communication in human relationships there are three elements that are relevant to handle these situations:
-the art of listening
-the art of non-judgmental persuasion
-the art of negotiation
   The goal of this post is to emphasize that a problem may have the potential to improve something. This does not always happen, though. Sometimes we know there are boundaries that we cannot trespass, no matter how hard we try to make things better. There are situations that are out of our control, and our scope of action is limited. However, we can accept these situations knowing that we have tried our best.  And these unique situations may have taught us something about ourselves, others, or the world we live in.

 I will publish my next blog post on March 5.

Reading like a writer

“All men have stars but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You—you alone—will have the stars as no one else has them.”

Reading is fun, but reading like a writer is even better. It is expansive. I will reveal the reasons why my mind becomes hyperactive every time I read something.

1)      I pay attention to the choice of words. If I encounter words that are not familiar to me, I look them up in the dictionary. Then I write them down. They become part of my “bank account of words”. Feel free to check my post on my endless love affair with words to understand this eternal infatuation.

2)      Whenever I read a story, I pay attention to the way each and every sentence is crafted. I notice how they are arranged into paragraphs. If I like their rhythm, I read them more than once.

3)      I notice how the writer unfolds the plot; I examine the ways the author manages the tension and the conflicts.

4)      I observe the characters. I learn to see how the writer reveals information about them.

5)      Many times I take notes on ideas that occur to me while I read the story. I explore the layers of meaning. I delve into the psychology of the characters and analyze their relationships and conflicts. I relate them to the world.

      6)      My mind elaborates the scenes. Snapshots of the characters and vivid images of the setting flash into my mind.

      All these actions that happen simultaneously while I read something enhance the reading experience.

 What about you? What is your reading experience like?

 I will be taking a break from blogging for 4-6 weeks. I will keep posting links to my works on my list of published material located to your left (my right.) If you miss my posts, feel free to check them. The upper part has the most recently published ones. 

 Thanks.

Humor in poetry

 Today I was supposed to publish a post about art, but I had no time to complete it, so I decided to share  this poem of mine that was published  by The Artistic Muse.
 

For poetry lovers... and those who don't care about poetry

"The sun strikes deep into the wells of the sky: depends on how you look at it -- for someone it is the hour to be shot at dawn, for me the infinite gift of red, of violet and blush-graying white above the bridge across the Loireo."
Tomaz Salamun

  Poetry is a universal dialogue that invites voices from every corner of the world. It embodies the desire to explore emotions and new realms.
 Poetry invites the mind to set itself free from its prison, but it is also a medium that can understand and console us. If I had to choose an anthology out of all the ones I read this year, I would pick Edward Hirsch's "Poet's Choice."
  Most of the poems he selected landed before my eyes just when I needed them - as if I had been destined to read them. Edward Hirsch brought together the voices of poets from all over the world without being biased by gender, country of origin, popularity, political ideas, religion or social class. Edward Hirsch was inspired and motivated by his passion for poetry.
   I was spellbound by Hirsch's essays on the poets and their works. I admire his wit,  sensitivity and open-minded approach. I savored each and every sentence he wrote and was compelled to read them more than once. This book is a masterpiece. It unleashes the vast universe of human experience.
   Not only did I fall in love with the poems he selected, but I also experienced a strong kinship to most of these poets.
 Now let me share with you Edward Hirsch's quotes on poetry:
  "I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand."
   "Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. Poetry saves something precious in the world from vanishing."
   "Poetry challenges us to find meaning in the midst of suffering. Poetry answers this challenge. It puts us in touch with ourselves. It sends us messages from the interior and also connects us to others. It is intimate and secretive; it is generously collective."
    "Poems defend the importance of individual lives and rebel at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture."
    "I have carried poetry with me like a flashlight-- how many small books have I crammed into my pockets?-- and used it to illuminate other lives, other worlds. I discovered myself in discovering others, and I have lived with these poems until they have become part of the air that I breathe. I hope they will become part of the reader's world too."
 Some of the poets he included in this book are Jorge Luis Borges,  Sappho, Blaga Dimitrova, Charlotte Mew, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Czeslaw Milosz,  Radmila Lazic, Primo Levi, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yehuda Amichai, Kadya Molodowsky, Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Saadi Youssef, Cesar Vallejo, Miguel Hernandez, Pablo Neruda, Julia de Burgos, Alfonsina Storni, Octavio Paz, Amy Lowell, Naomi Nye, Wallace Stevens, Jane Mayhall, Dorothea Tanning, Kathleen Raine, Mark Strand, William Carlos Williams, Jane Mayhall, William Matthews, Robert Bly and many others.
 I believe there is something urgent about poetry, something that rescues us from our own uncertainty...
 
Ars Poetica

Write each of your poems
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have no right to lie,
no right to play pretty little games.
You simply won't have time
to correct your mistakes.
Write each of your poems,
tersely, mercilessly,
with blood -- as if it were your last.

Blaga Dimitrova (Translated by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman)

Two Women Inside One

 My poem "Two Women Inside One" was accepted by Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. You can read it here

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 If you wonder what it feels like to be inside the mind of a person who suffers from severe depression, reading The Bell Jar will help you approach such a person’s reality. However, stating that this book is about a lady who falls prey to this disorder undermines the complexity of this fascinating book.

  This novel, which is based on true events that Sylvia Plath fictionalized, unravels the conflicts that trouble a young woman who struggles to meet the demands of a society that classified people into “losers” and “winners", while she attempts to be loyal to her identity and to unearth her true self.

  Esther is willing to figure out how to find her place in the world. At the same time, she tries to understand the nature of relationships between men and women. In doing so, she ferrets out the inconsistencies of these relationships, and how the moral code imposed on men and women differs from what happens under the surface. Through different situations, she exposes this reality with humor and irony.

  Esther Greenwood, the main character, tells us her story  in a conversational style that is effortless and captivating--Sylvia Plath knows where to place her metaphors. The raw honesty of her thoughts bemused me.

    How can we fail to understand what a depressive person feels after we have read the following remark?

   “If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

  Esther sees the world and her life through the stifling glass of “the bell jar”: her depression. Before descending to the bottom of her nervous breakdown, she dithers over what she should be doing with her life, what paths are the ones she should choose.

   Her doubts unsettle her. She is trapped in a snare, caught up by the false belief that she will not make the right decisions and will lose her chances to accomplish something meaningful. The metaphor of the tree illustrates her concerns.

   “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

  “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
  Her experiences in the asylums are memorable and interesting. It is hard for the reader to forget her acquaintance, Joan, who is almost like a friend to her despite the fact that she had dated the same man: Buddy Willard, a medical student.
 The ambiguity of the relationship between Joan and Esther is a recurrent theme. Esther states that she does not like Joan. Yet she also admits that she will always treasure her. "I thought I would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own."
 Interestingly, Joan's final decision foreshadows Sylvia Plath's destiny, and one cannot help but wonder about the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality.

  Another riveting aspect of The Bell Jar is revealed to us in the relationships she had with the psychiatrists who treated her. First, the cold distant encounter with her first psychiatrist, Dr Gordon. The treatment started by Dr Gordon was unsuccessful. Then with her second psychiatrist, Dr Nolan, she had a friendly relationship cemented by trust, and the outcome was different (Dr Nolan was also more knowledgeable). Through precise body language and realistic dialogues, Sylvia makes this relationship jump out of the page.

   I think physicians and psychiatrists will benefit from reading this novel, even though the set of events took place in 1953, when Sylvia Plath was a freshman in college.

   Many of the problems portrayed in this novel are universal. This is a literary classic that I thoroughly enjoyed, not only because her writing style is impeccable but also because her reality is as relevant today as it was in 1953.