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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
August 25, 2015 at 10:39pm August 25, 2015 at 10:39pm
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Prompt: Better to be hurt with the truth then a lie. Do you agree?
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Absolutely. Truth, as we know it, is always the better road to take. What we believe as the truth may not always be 100% true, as any truth is never simple; still it is what we know to be true. Besides, lies usually beget other lies, and eventually it becomes difficult to remember them.
Truth may hurt, but who wants to look foolish by believing in the lies? Eventually, the lies we once believed in will end up hurting us anyway. Truth may hurt especially when we know the truth but hide it with a lie, as this lie festers like an internal tumor gone bad. Truth may also hurt when we fool ourselves by knowingly denying the truth and acting on lies only because those lies are easier on us. A lie may soothe temporarily, but in the long run, truth will win out, and the person who was lied to will feel as if he wasn’t worth the truth.
Yes, truth may hurt but it will also offer us freedom, because truth works better than anything. Even in writing, when we are telling the truth, even if our writing is not up to par, its context will be better accepted. By mentioning truth in writing, I am not putting down fiction at all; on the contrary, fiction can tell the truth with emphasis, while an article that sounds real may be a lie or a half-truth.
Some people “cannot handle the truth”--like the part of a famous movie quote--because truth is real, and it matters. It takes a strong person to face and acknowledge the truth.
Yet, if the truth is so bad that the power of it will hurt another person’s health, we have to be careful with the delivery of it, as that delivery has to be strategically planned and worded with utmost care. Even in such a situation, a lie is not an option, for when the lie is discovered, the intent behind it will be questioned and the person who told that soothing lie will not be believed again.
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August 25, 2015 at 6:30pm August 25, 2015 at 6:30pm
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August 25, 2015
My Reading
Prompt: “A person can write the most beautiful, lyrical sentences (as James Patterson will be the first to tell you, he does not), but if the story doesn’t grab a reader by the throat, and—having grabbed on—hold her there, none of the rest may matter all that much.” Joyce Maynard in her article on Patterson --- in Observer
What kind of stories capture your imagination so you may keep on reading?
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Just about everything captures my imagination. I used to think that I only preferred realistic stories and literary works. Lately, however, I have been surprising myself with my choices. I used to think that --although I had enjoyed the stories like The Handmaid’s Tale and A Wrinkle in Time— for me, Sci-Fi and Fantasy were secondary choices.
Now I find myself enjoying well-written stories of werewolves, witches, and other imaginary stuff, just as much as the literary. For example, because the entire Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon was $1.99 in Amazon, I purchased it out of curiosity. I am reading the third book now and appreciating the way this writer writes. Luckily, I didn’t watch the series on TV, so now I can enjoy and admire the beautiful words, the author’s imagination, and her dedication to keeping the historical facts as facts. Thus, in her stories I have found a great respect for magical realism.
Yet, it is not the genre that captures me and makes me keep on reading. It is the quality of the writing, story construction, and the usage of language, and by that I don’t mean “the most beautiful, lyrical sentences” that clog the storyline. The use of such language is fine when it doesn't cut into the storytelling and pull the reader's attention to a different direction. In this, I agree with Joyce Maynard and James Patterson.
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August 24, 2015
What Lies Within
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
What do you think Emerson means and what do you take from the above quote?
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First, let me point out to one fact, which Emerson didn’t say. In his words, “what lies within us” points to the essence inside us, who we really are; it doesn’t point, in a roundabout way, to the lies within us. Surely, most of us carry lies within us. Lies that others, at one time or another, made us believe are the essence of us. Lies like, “you are as bad as your other parent” or “you can’t hold office; you’re a woman.” To clarify what lies within us, those lies have to be deleted first.
What lies within us is much more important than our experiences in the past or those to come in the future. What lies within is self-generated and needs to be viewed clearly, while what lies behind or before us has to do with the outside of us.
Who we are decides what inspires us or what scares us or what makes us spring to action. Who we are recognizes what will turn our potential energy into a kinetic flow. Who we are gives us permission to act on specific cues or to bring the work we do to its completion or not.
In other words, the source we seek is in us, and once we hold on to that fact, we can move forward with confidence. If we are writing or creating anything, for example, if we can shut out the past and the future and concentrate in what’s in us, explore it, mold it, play with it, the result will be satisfactory if not spectacular.
In short, the gravitational pull of the past and the wishful thinking of the future is meaningless in comparison to the power hidden or acknowledged within us today and always.
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