This is who I really am.

Do you want to know who Amapola Blooming really is?  Read this interview from my beloved writer's community SMITH Magazine.  I am the featured Member of the Month (August 2012).

To review the article, click here.

A wedding cake in four movements (true story)

I

When I married my ex-husband, we opted for a very informal, non-religious, absolutely intimate Dutch wedding. We were short of money, so we decided to prepare all the finger food ourselves. After all, we only had 10 guests.

It was the night before the ceremony, when we were avidly preparing our wedding version of our improvised movie-night tapas, that I realised that we didn't have a wedding cake! It was nearly 10pm, and the supermarket was about to close.

Before rushing to the supermarket, I decided to make a quick call to my mum in the Dominican Republic so that she could take me through the ingredients of the recipe. She used to bake wedding cakes for a living when I was a child, and I used to feel thrilled to be allowed to help her.

(But honestly, in a case like this, who would you call if not mum?)

But mum was not home and I had to be quick, otherwise I was doomed to have a 'cakeless' wedding. So I ran to the supermarket and I got all the ingredients that came to my mind as I recalled the many  times mum and I baked together.

II

I intuitively mixed the eggs, the flour, the butter, the sugar, the cocoa... and by midnight I had a perfectly shaped and neatly scooped steamy marble cake. In the same memory flow as in the supermarket, I also managed to prepare a cream with rum. I let the cake cool before I poured a generous amount of 'crema borracha' over it. It was winter and the cool drafts of the night crawling into the kitchen would keep it fresh until the next day, so I left it outside.

III

Back in the house after the ceremony: that unmissable moment where the bride and the groom cut the cake and they bite that first little piece of married sweetness they carefully put in each others' mouth.

I don't remember if we kissed, but the cake tasted heavenly.

IV

In all the times my mum supervised my baking (a habit that stayed on until my teens, long after she had stopped baking for a living), I never managed to bake a cake as soft in texture and balanced in sweetness as this one.

Traveling was expensive, so my mum and my family could not attend my wedding. But that cake, THAT cake! had MUM written in every sliced served.

It simply melted slowly, like a tender kiss.

Musa solitaria

El poeta y la musa by Rodin

“Ven Pablo,  ¡dibujemos un poema!”

¿Dibujar un poema? ¿A qué te refieres, mujer?

Los poemas no se dibujan, se es-cri-ben.

Los dibujos no se escriben, se di-bu-jan.

Dibujar un poema... ¿Qué pretendes, mujer?

No sé dibujar, no sé escribir bonito

Y  encima de eso te inventas

que dibujemos un poema.

Olvídate de eso, déjame solo y no insistas.

¿Dibujar un poema?

¡Qué ocurrencias las tuyas, mujer!

Never too much...

 

Blue Angel by Chagall.

There's never too much giving.

Only too little self-care.

Digging creative flow. Bach is here.

When I listen to this piece...  I dream, I dream, I dream... 

Bach -click here: Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major

 The Dream Maker by Orlando Agudelo Botero

Quiet, not dead

Bereft of hope, the good old wind abandoned.
The sand was sad, the mermaids were silent.
They hid with the waves under the rough reefs.
A pale reflection of the distant moon
prayed and sobbed, begging the sea not to sink.

I'll die for you! a young sailboat mumbled.
I offer you my life! an old sailor screamed.
Since when are you a coward? A twirl asked.
With tired, weeping eyes, the sea curled in fear.
His tears were thick, his body was trembling.

'The ocean never rests', he remembered;
and feebly he walked towards ailing shores.

Religious pamphlets on a winter day

I'm sure you've seen them:
stacked flat religious pamphlets
like glossy butterflies neatly arranged
on a makeshift table
in the midst of a frozen cotton-like winter day.

Have you noticed them?
On one wing,
a bleeding heart stabbed by thorns burns in the wind
on the other,
a cursive whip shapes the words "HE died for you"

People also tattoo these things.

Those pamphlets, they cost nothing,
but they make me itchy, they make me watch my ticking wrist
and polish my impoliteness with a carefully sketched pearly grin.
That is, when the voices of the lord, like talking statues
annoyingly insist "I" take one.

And they start to sing about Jezus.

Those glossy butterflies, if they ever perch on my hands
they eventually end up crushed like paper meatballs.
I heard they make excellent food
for hungry domesticated dragons.

A hungry domesticated dragon or a fireplace...
I wished I owned either one of them. But I don't.
Which is one of the reasons
why I avoid tattooed butterflies.

You see, it's not easy to keep up the pace
of those paved, fast treadmills they call streets
and feel a fossil's heartbeat and cursive whip
become alive and curse inside my pocket
like a crushed meatball in the rush of a frozen cotton day.

The empty bottle

A chilled draft of darkness cracks the ghostly curtains.

Like a burglar, it crawls and tiptoes into her room,

Leaving lingering traces of olden mud behind.

A miserable, empty bottle rolls on the croaky floor

and hides under the dusty, massive teak table.

It peeps at her despair with pity:


She curses the night, spitting rambling insults,

splitting her sanity into horror and blight.

Her odious words sound young, rebellious.

She's not yet a woman, no longer a child.

The ocean in her eyes lashes her vision

and memories pour out like pointing knives.

Like that empty bottle hiding under the teak table,

She too, got to know about misery too well:

The cruel rage of a reckless man

On a starry night at the seashore,

Gripped her life with lust and drank her breath.

Now she soothes her shivers with songs and sketches.

She draws bleeding hearts as fetching clutches

Breaking through the chest of headless babies.

She composes slurred, frantic prayers

She strums thunderstorms, random hurricanes,

With a broken cello and ravenous chants.


Yet, in her ocean,

in the very depths of her torn eyes,

an angel,

an ailing angel hums loose verses

of drown innocence

and sunken lullabies.

What to do in case of an earthquake

,

 

Today it's been two years. It was nearly midnight on January 12th 2010.   My older brother had posted a few messages on Facebook, announcing that the earth was rattling pretty badly in the Dominican Republic and the rest of our island.  A few hours later, I became aware that a terrible earthquake had taken place in the poorest country of the Western hemisphere.  It was impossible to read and watch the news about Haiti without feeling devastated. Almost paralysed of sorrow and horror, I called my parents back home.

“Ay mi hija, it is indescribable, so terribly sad.  If you can, send some money, we’ll find a way to help.There is not much more you can do just now”.  My parents said over the phone when I broke in tears.

My immense urge to give was greater than anything at that moment. I regretted living so far away. I wished that instead of being a teacher, I was a doctor, a nurse, a rescuer or a wealthy person so I could do something for Haiti. Still sobbing, I asked myself:  “What can you do for Haiti?  Think!  You can’t just sit and cry!”

 

By inwardly repeating this question, the few things I have learned in Buddhism revealed to me:  that clinging to our own sorrow or anger paralyses us from acting positively; that any problem or difficulty is an opportunity to practice loving kindness and compassion; and, as I once heard the Dalai Lama say: that one should never, under any circumstance, lose hope.  With these thoughts in my mind and reassuring myself that when I wake up I’d be calmer and more able to find an answer, I eventually fell asleep.

At the crack of dawn, I started to post messages on Facebook.  I was asking my network to donate money for Haiti, with the simple reasoning that whatever I could collect would surpass what I alone could give. "If I can give hundred euros, maybe I can triple that. I'd be more than happy with five hundred" I said to myself.

The response was overwhelming. An incredible domino effect followed:  after that fateful night, what started as a tear of powerlessness, anger and sorrow, turned into an unstoppable wave of donations that lasted for about 8 weeks. People started to drop money in my bank account, in my mailbox, in my hands.  Friends of friends started to donate and ask money on my behalf. Students and colleagues knocked on my office door with an envelope in their hands. Every extra cent was another update on my Facebook status, and a personal tag on the logo that symbolised this campaign (see picture). 



The donations were channeled through two Dominican-based emergency operations: Helping Hand Haiti (www.helpinghandhaiti.com), set by my good friend Olivier Flambert and IBG Fund, a charity set by the Baptist Church, to which my mum and older brother belong.  Contrary to the negative media messages regarding the slow reach of foreign aid, these small donations were used inmediately and reached the victims directly. I could provide donors with visual evidence of how their money was being used by posting photographs of the emergency actions on my Facebook page. These constant updates contributed greatly to the credibility of my efforts. Before I knew how much more I was to collect, I had given birth to the I♥HAITI campaign.

I honestly never felt so humble in my life.  I learned that being a teacher was indeed the right profession to help Haiti: 95% of the donations came from my network of students, colleagues and alumni from The Hague University. Without their trust and genuine giving, the nearly 59,000 euros (yes, fifty-nine thousand!) collected would not have been possible.   I also learned that my students can become my heroes and inspiration. One of my heroines in this effort is my friend and ex-student, Lubomira Kirilova. She replicated  the campaign at the European Patent Office in The Hague. Her trust & selfless dedication resulted in collecting more than 50,000 euros. With a result like that, who dares regret being a teacher?

I also learned another valuable lesson:  choosing a spiritual path is not merely a question of faith, but of genuine practice of the heart.  Regardless of belief and vocation, we need to think humanly and act in harmony with our principles and with the planet.  With an increasingly interconnected world, every single action we take, every message we send out, every gesture we make can transgress borders and create a powerful human viral effect. As long as we act together for the cause of love and compassion for others, we can welcome the beautiful future we all can create. We only need to live day-by-day guided by our faith and by our innate capacity to give unconditionally, never abandoning our principles, our values and our ideals.

 

Dance me (for Medhi)

Dancer, by Miró

Dance me, love, dance me, 

dance me to unknown magic places.

Where the wind unchains its wings

and echoes our names, our destiny.

Dance me, love, dance me,
dance me to liquid places.

Where your ocean awakens my shore
with the wavy strokes of your senses.

Dance me, love, dance me, 

dance me to mysterious, taunting places.

Where your arms embrace my fear 

and become my blanket, my shelter

Dance me, love, dance me, 

dance me to dauntless, wonderful places.

Dance me long to where we belong, 

where our fiery lust will be sacred.

Dance me, love, dance me, 

dance me to blossoming places.

Where spring buds know no resistance, 

where love will never surrender.

Dance me, love, dance me long,
dance me slowly to timeless places.

Where the rising sun unveils our lips
and decisively kisses 
                                                                 the birth of us.

Liberation Day

The band is playing nearby the seashore, along the edges of the beach boulevard. The music seems to dissolve in the wavy gusts of the ocean breeze, as if it was a vague reminder that once upon a war, there were indeed moments of youthful joy.

A small group of veterans and a handful of elderly widows are their only public. With their neatly pressed uniforms and their polished medals, the men salute each other with reverence; and then, politely, they greet the widows, delicately kissing their hands.

The widows nod graciously at the gentlemen’s gesture; and then continue waving their colourful hand-held fans. In their time, this was a sign that meant that they were available, at least for one frugal dance. The musicians notice the elegant courting and the timid flirting and decide to speed up the piece and improvise. Hand in hand, cheek-to-cheek, the veterans and the widows flow with the music, smiling to the roar of vintage airplanes, which travel with the jazzy notes across the cloudless blue sky.

A Feeble Fan

The soft melon and pistachio green walls reflected the shadows of the lazy ceiling fan. I fixed my gaze on the flapping wings, wishing after every slow turn that the events of that hot summer afternoon had not been real.

My books, my poems, my diaries, my photo albums, my pen-pal postcard collection, my drawings, my teen magazines, my birthday cards, my newspaper clippings, my old Billy Idol and Rod Stewart posters, my autograph collection, my comics, my dictionaries, my fashion catalogues, my “if-I-win-the-lotto” wish list, my high school transcripts, my address book, my hardly-ever-touched bible, my linen stationary paper, my funky pen collection, my freshly purchased college books seemed to have gained a life of their own before shamelessly spreading in complete disarray on my bedroom floor as if wanting to remind me of the hurricane of my obsessive desperation when I tried to retrieve that precious letter a couple of hours before.

It was in between my private collection of poems that I hid it. I knew my mother had the nasty habit of sniffing around my things, so I had to prevent her from finding it. But my mum, an overprotective fire survivor, has an incredible knack of being able to unveil a secret as easily as she can detect an iron that has been left on even as far as the next-door neighbour’s home. Nothing, virtually nothing, escapes my nosy mother, and my letter was no exception.

“Either you tell you father what you have done or I’ll give it to him. This letter confirms that the sexual innuendos in your poems are not just a product of your imagination. "I am blissful with happiness for having lost my virginity to you.” Mom quoted me with a reproachful, condemning tone, omitting the subsequent “I love you”. I locked myself in my bedroom repressing the urge to slam the door. I had three hours before dad would return from work.

On a bookshelf, a picture-frame of us sitting in our living room reminded me of better times. With his left arm warmly wrapped around me, his neatly trimmed moustache displayed a discrete cinnamon pearly smile. I was laughing, revealing that it wasn’t long ago that I had grown new teeth. I stared at the black and white photograph trying to imagine how my dad, a man of few words and a placid, quiet character would react. I was his only daughter. I was seventeen.

I lay on my bed, held a pillow against my chest and for nearly three long hours I fixed my gaze on the ever-vicious circling of the ceiling fan, which seemed too weak to disperse the humid heaviness that filtered through the half open blinds. I thought I heard distant thunder claps. It was to rain heavily that night and the lurking heat of the paved streets outside would burst into steam. I glanced through the window, recalling what it was like to shower naked and play in the rain. Those happy Caribbean childhood summers were gone and no matter how hard I wished for it, the feeble fan could not turn back time or return my innocence. I had to tell dad.

I heard the recognisable smooth vintage sound of his Peugeot 404 approaching as I counted the ticking seconds at the pace of the fan's flapping wings. It would take just a few minutes before dad knocked on my door and claimed a kiss, like he did every day when he came back from work. Thick rain drops started to fall far away and the smell of moist tropical soil gradually invaded my bedroom.

The fire and the jumping doll.

It was early morning Friday, when fire sirens assaulted my smooth running pace. A fire down Hope Street was bursting savagely and even from a few hundred meters I could see the flames flare up like a ferocious volcano at the break of dawn.

 

I ran faster to have a closer look: a fence of tightly aligned policemen was surrounding firm, confident fire fighters who were trying to convince a teenage girl to jump. “She lives on the ground floor, but she had to run up 9 stories to be able to escape the climbing fire”. I heard someone say.

I could feel her tension and her vertigo. I too, would be bloody afraid. I closed my eyes and prayed incessantly until I heard the crowd awe and clap. I caught a glimpse of the girl just before she touched the safety trampoline: she looked like a human-sized porcelain doll landing blissfully on a cloud of human compassion.

I'm afraid of the dark

Self-portrait

Click HERE to listen to my experiment with voice and poetry. 

Musketeer

Naked woman and musketeer, by Pablo Picasso (1967)

 

"I love you". Three-word musketeer. Weaponless.

The Silent Witness

 Self-portrait.  Story inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins

I

This is the saddest case I’ve witnessed since being glued to the walls of this nursery room. You should see her: a pale cheek boned beauty, resembling Knox, the goddess of the night, trapped in the numbness of self-love starvation. 

Poor woman. Her despair pains my soul, but I’m so weak myself that I nearly can’t say anything. I see her curling up at the break of dawn, and fall into deep sleep while her onyx eyes remain wide open. She seems to be in trance with this wall to which I’m doomed to stay glued on. I too, can’t stop looking at her.

II

In all these years, I’ve seen too much misery and abandonment to be able to make a concise account. I honestly don’t know how I’ve been able to survive the grievances lingering in this room, but this time I’m certain that if I don’t save her, I’ll die with her. That is how much my tired heart wants to live.

I still remember how the playful sunlight would filter through my semi-transparent reddish petals as they swang fragilely with the imaginary wind. But those ghostly sorrows have gradually degraded my joyful wallpaper tints into horrid yellows and devastated poppy meadows. No wonder she believes that I’m monstrous.

III

I see her surrender to her husband’s patronising sweetness. I want to tell her that he’s evil, and in my effort, my patterns choke and make ugly faces. I think she noticed me. I can see her look away to the musty ceiling and tremble with childish apprehension, but I cannot reach her. She’s still too feeble to trust me. I have to wait.

IV

Today was one of those days where the masquerade of her husband made me nauseous again. Just like my case, he wants her to disintegrate bit by bit, by making her believe that nobody, including herself, can save her. What a despicable man.

When he left the room, I saw her helplessly scribble on her secret notebook "he truly loves me". She was crying again.

I tried to scream by cracking loudly and harshly tearing my pieces off the wall so she would notice me. And dear heaven, this time she did.

She observed me with her studious, bone-shaped expression. Her dark hollow gaze carefully followed every convulsing pattern of mine. She stared at me perplexingly until I sank into her drowning eyes. I had to tell her my story. I had to save her.

Eyes tightly shut, I recalled when I was a firm wallpaper sheltering bright Amapolas, which spread under the sun like graceful frescoes over emerald valleys. I fiercely tried to regress to my robust forms and glowing tones while telling her that she was mesmerising, that she deserved better, that I loved her.

My tearful passionate efforts softened and moistened my dying paper. With fervent determination, I crawled and held onto the porous wall until my fading poppies slowly burst out giving birth to blossoming, full-bodied Amapola trees.

With diamond-like tears revealing her bewitching onyx eyes, she timidly smiled and delicately caressed my dancing colours, as I held her hands and invited her in.

Our love story fits a haiku.

 Snetterton, 23rd of July 2011

Shivering sadness.

Summer raindrops on our cheeks,

gently, the sun hides.

Untitled

 

 Somewhere, 24th of July 2011 For original memoir. click here.

Miss him holding me in bed.

Truth

Japanese symbol for Truth

Think love. Think truth. stop. | Feel love. Feel Truth. Stop. Stop there. | Feel any difference?

Dragonflies

 Image source here  (Narancsmag's photostream)

Lived love like dragonflies,

fragile, intense, mystified.