“Broken Strings” – Poem by American Poet Mark Tulin

16 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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American Poet Mark Tulin
Photo Credit: Amazon Author Page


My Poetry Corner July 2023 features the poem “Broken Strings” from the poetry collection Awkward Grace: Poems (USA, 2019) by Mark Tulin, a poet, humorist, and short-story writer. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he attended the Pennsylvania State University where he studied psychotherapy, specializing in family and sex therapy. In 2012, after practicing for over thirty years as a marriage and family therapist, he moved to Santa Barbara, Southern California. Today, he lives with his second wife, Alice, in Long Beach.

An only child, Tulin began writing poems as a teenager to cope with asthma and a dysfunctional family. His father, a fruit store owner, was charming, sociable, and rational. His mother was an independent-minded schizophrenic who “talked to herself and rarely filtered her words.” Because of his mother, he studied psychology and became a psychotherapist. “If I couldn’t fix my parents, I might be able to heal a family of strangers,” says Tulin in his author bio on Medium.

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Reflections on Serenity

09 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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Potential Record High Temperatures Across the South & Southeast – United States – June 2023
Source Map: Fox Weather

This is the third in my series of reflections on the “c-o-s-m-o-s remedy” proposed in opposition to the “ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e” by Jem Bendell in Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (UK/USA 2021).

#1: Reflections on Compassion
#2: Reflections on Openness

In contrast to the habit of Control in e-s-c-a-p-e ideology, which involves thinking ‘I will try to impose on you and everything, including myself, so I feel safer,’ Bendell proposes that Serenity involves the feeling that ‘I appreciate the dignity of you, myself and all life, however disturbing situations might seem’ (p.146).

Serenity is defined as the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. A look at the day’s headlines suggest that we are more generally inclined to feel the very opposite: fear, dread, anguish, and anxiety. Desperate for control over our lives, we often place our faith in powerful men to save us from drowning. In America, we pass laws to restrict the rights of others for control over their bodies.

Since childhood, fear has been a constant companion. Such is the nature of domestic violence. All I could control was fear itself. In high school, I learned the “Serenity Prayer” asking God for the wisdom to know the difference between things I could and could not change, and the courage to change what was within my power to change. I did what I could to improve communication between my parents, with no observable change.

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California – The Final Days of Spring

02 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in United States

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African ‘Lily of the Nile’ – Rosaliene’s Garden – Los Angeles – California – June 17, 2023

After an unusually wet and frigid winter, I was relieved that most of my plants had survived the deluge. A few, like the potted lime tree and croton bush, gained new life. Spring struggled to come into its own, remaining cooler than normal. The plants that flower in the spring are featured below. The captioned photo of the purple African ‘Lily of the Nile’ was the last plant to flower and is still in bloom.

The drought took a toll on the Amaryllis lilies, as shown in the photos below. This is the first spring that the stems only produced two flowers instead of four.

Amaryllis – Spring 2014
Amaryllis – Spring 2023

The yellow Calandivia succulent plant added much needed color to the garden plot in front of my apartment. I’ve had this plant for several years now and, despite the drought, it continues to bless my spring days with much needed joy. The adjacent plant pot with purple Graptoveria Debbie also added a touch of color with their star-shaped yellow mini-flowers.

Yellow Calandivia Succulent Plant – Spring 2023
Purple Graptoveria Debbie – Spring 2023

My favorite succulent rosettes, like the two plants below, all flowered this year. They have a strong not-so-pleasant scent that attracts the stray bees that visit my corner of the garden.

Aeonium ‘Kiwi’ – Spring 2023
Aeonium ‘Kiwi’ – Spring 2023

My indoor garden got a great boost this Mother’s Day with five new plants from my sons. So far, none of them have died. I keep them on top of the sideboard cupboard below my living room window where they enjoy the morning sunlight. As you will note in the photo, three of them are on the window ledge.

Temperatures are expected to rise this weekend. I’m brazing myself for the summer heat ahead. To my American readers, a Happy Independence Day!

Rosaliene’s Indoor Garden – Los Angeles – California – Spring 2023

Guest Post: “Let Your Freak Flag Fly” by Patti Moore Wilson

25 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Human Behavior

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Patti Moore Wilson, a Wednesday’s Child (full of woe), never fails to captivate me with her storytelling. In yet another heartwarming story, she shows us how we connect with each other when our hearts are open to the unexpected.

Wiktionary definition for ‘fly your freak flag”: unconventional or unrestrained behaviour; extreme, nonconformist views.  Reportedly originated from song lyrics for If 6 Was 9 (1967) by Jimi Hendrix[1] and was popularized by its use in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young‘s counterculture anthem Almost Cut My Hair

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I am the quietest, most ordinary person you will ever meet. I listen ten times more than I speak. Unless social etiquette requires it, I only open my mouth when I have something to contribute. I like blending in. I don’t like making waves. I CAN perform in the spotlight (say, in a work context) but it isn’t something I purposely seek out.

Read more at Patti’s blog “Wednesday’s Child“

“For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” by Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi
Photo Credit: Blog Elimacuxi, Pure Poetry

My Poetry Corner June 2023 features the poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” (Pra Sua Hipocrisia Com Um Beijo) by Brazilian poet, photographer, historian, and teacher Elisangela Martins, who self-identifies as Eli Macuxi or Elimacuxi. She teaches History and Art Criticism in the Visual Arts Course at the Federal University of Roraima with special interest in feminism and gender identity/orientation. As a historian and photographer, she has partnered with the Association of Transvestites and Transexuals of Roraima in fighting for human rights.

Born in 1973 in the City of São Paulo, she grew up in a favela on the periphery where, for the first ten years of her life, she faced hunger and begged on the streets. Her semi-illiterate father, from the Northeastern State of Ceará, taught her to read and write. With a childhood fascination for verse and encouraged by a teacher, she began writing poetry in fifth grade. At fifteen, she dreamed of having her work read and studied by others:

“But the desire was totally blunted by the pessimistic awareness of reality,” confides the poet on her blog. “I was a skinny teenager, without luck of getting a job, studying at night school on the periphery, ‘daughter of a drunkie,’ with lots of younger siblings. To be a writer? Poet? It was laughable.”

In 1990, as a seventeen-year-old night school student and receptionist at a pharmacy during the day, she married a much older man. Giving birth to triplets soon after did not bode well for their marriage. Before the triplet’s second birthday, her husband had had enough and left them. A divorcee and back home with her parents, she worked for two years at several part-time jobs before securing a steady job as a waitress at a high-end restaurant. 

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Reflections on Openness

11 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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New York City blanketed in smoke from Canadian wildfires – USA – June 7, 2023

This is the second in my series of reflections on the “c-o-s-m-o-s remedy” proposed in opposition to the “ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e” by Jem Bendell in Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (UK/USA 2021).

#1: Reflections on Compassion

In contrast to the habit of Surety or Certainty in e-s-c-a-p-e ideology, which involves thinking ‘I will define you and everything in my experience so that I feel calmer,’ Bendell proposes that Openness wishes ‘I will keep returning to be curious about as much as I can, however unnerving’ (p.146).

What is the openness that Bendell refers to?

According to Psychology Today: “Openness to experience, or simply openness, is a basic personality trait denoting receptivity to new ideas and new experiences. It is one of the five core personality dimensions that drive behavior—known as the five-factor model of personality, or the Big 5. People with high levels of openness are more likely to seek out a variety of experiences, be comfortable with the unfamiliar, and pay attention to their inner feelings more than those who are less open to novelty. They tend to exhibit high levels of curiosity and often enjoy being surprised. People with low levels of openness prefer familiar routines, people, and ideas; they can be perceived as closed-minded.”

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Thought for Today: Climate Change Displacement in America

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover: The Great Displacement: Climate Change and The Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
Photo Credit: Simon & Schuster (USA, 2023)

At the most fundamental level, displacement begins when climate change makes it either too risky or too expensive for people to stay somewhere. The disasters discussed in this book bear little resemblance to each other on the surface, but they all exert pressure on governments and private markets, whether through the financial costs of rebuilding or the strain of allocating scarce resources. As this pressure builds, it starts to push people around, changing where they can live or where they want to live. Sometimes this looks like the government paying residents of flood-prone areas to leave their homes; sometimes it looks like fire victims getting priced out of an unaffordable state; other times it looks like fishermen going broke as the wetlands around them erode. It may seem reductive to think about a planetary crisis in terms of financial risk rather than human lives, but that is how most people in this country will experience it—through the loss of their most valuable assets, or the elimination of their job, or a shift in where they can afford to live.

Excerpt from The Great Displacement: Climate Change and The Next American Migration by Jake Bittle, Simon & Schuster, New York, USA, 2023 (Introduction, p. xvii).

Note: The title of the book is an oblique reference to the Great Migration in American history (1920s to 1970s) when more than six million Black people left the South and moved to northern cities like New York and Chicago, fleeing an economic and humanitarian crisis.

JAKE BITTLE, a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, is a staff writer at Grist, where he covers climate impacts and adaptation. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and a number of other publications.

The Writer’s Life: Is my creative writing mojo back?

28 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in The Writer's Life

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Auction of African Slaves on Arrival in the Dutch Colony of Novo Zeelandia, later known as Essequibo – Undated
Photo Credit: Images Guyana Blogspot

On Monday, May 22nd, I revisited Chapter One of my two-year-long neglected work in progress. As I revised the chapter, the familiar thrill of creating images with words surprised me. Once again, I was eager to engage with the creative process. I woke up in the mornings with ideas for improving or adding to the text. What a joy!

Since last working on this chapter in January 2020, I found it easier to “kill [my] darlings”—words, phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs. While maintaining the purpose of setting the stage of the world in which the featured women fought for agency in their lives, I found it challenging to cut and tighten critical historical information. Although the players in our own time have changed somewhat, women and minority groups are still fighting the same battles.

To establish the author as a participant-observer in the lives of these women, the narrative also contains autobiographical information. The author, like all the players on the stage, shares their legacy of severed ancestral roots.

Regardless of the efforts of some among us to rewrite or erase America’s brutal history, the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue to impact our lives at home and worldwide.

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“Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat” – Poem by Caribbean American Poet Lauren K Alleyne

21 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Poetry

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Caribbean American Poet Lauren K Alleyne
Source: Poet’s Official Website (Photo by Erica Cavanagh)

My Poetry Corner May 2023 features the poem “Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat” from the poetry collection Honeyfish by Lauren K. Alleyne, first published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2019). Born in the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the poet arrived in the USA at eighteen years old after receiving a scholarship from St. Francis College in New York City, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English. She also earned a Masters Degree in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University (2002) and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry from Cornell University (2006).

In 2022, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia recognized Alleyne with an Outstanding Faculty Award for her work at James Madison University, where she serves as a professor of English and executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. She currently resides in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Honeyfish, her second collection of poetry, won the 2018 New Issues Press Green Rose Prize sponsored by Western Michigan University. In the first of three untitled sections of the collection, the poet-persona bears witness to the relentless horror of white oppression and murder of black bodies: Aaron Campbell (Oregon, 2010), Trayvon Martin (Florida, 2012), Tamir Rice (Ohio, 2014), Sandra Bland (Texas, 2015), Charleston mass shootings (South Carolina, 2015), and Charlottesville white supremacist protest (Virginia, 2017). In contrast to such violence, the elegies and poems of remembrance hold no malice. Instead, we experience the tender and painful images of the innocent lost.

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Reflections on Compassion

07 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior

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Flooding in the Upper Mississippi Valley – Stillwater – Minnesota – USA – April 18, 2023
Photo Credit: Weather Underground

This is the first in my series of reflections on the “c-o-s-m-o-s remedy” proposed in opposition to the “ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e” by Jem Bendell in Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (UK/USA 2021).

In contrast to the habit of Entitlement in e-s-c-a-p-e ideology, which involves thinking ‘I expect more of what I like and to be helped to feel fine,’ Bendell proposes that Compassion, in this context, involves sensing that ‘I feel an active responsibility for any of my contribution to your suffering, without expecting to feel right, better or worse’ (p.146).

What is compassion?

In her book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (USA 2021), American research professor Brené Brown defines compassion as “the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering” (p. 118). Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) describes it simply in Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (USA 2021, p. 109): “Compassion is a powerful energy that allows us to do anything we can to help reduce the suffering around us.”

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