Sunrays through the clouds – disturbing the early dusk, warm color’s caress.   This haiku poem is a result of entering the following challenge: Colleen’s Weekly #Tanka Tuesday #Poetry Challenge No. 97, “Love & Time” https://colleenchesebro.com/2018/08/14/colleens-weekly-tanka-tuesday-poetry-challenge-no-97-love-time-synonymsonly/   Take care, Helena Smole, author of: – a fantasy novel with romance Vivvy and Izzy the Dwarf: A series about relationships – Balancing the Beast, a book offering a bright view of schizoaffective disorder ˗ bipolar or manic-depressive type ...

A coffee after lunch drunk in peace at home is not just a coffee after lunch drunk in peace at home. It means a lot more. The bills have been paid. A cup of coffee AT HOME means one is not getting evicted. Yet, how seldom do we think about that. The fact that we are not homeless. We take it for granted. The coffee AFTER lunch signifies that one has had lunch. Obviously there is enough money for food at one’s home. Another constant we are usually not aware of. One must also have funds for buying clothes, otherwise the drinking of coffee could not be a pleasant experience. Imagine the embarrassment of...

I am definitely suffering from a crisis as a writer. I used to write 25 blog posts a year and I was continuously working on a book, little by little but persistently. Then, in February 2017, something happened. I still do not know what it was. Was it just low blood-pressure making me totally tired and washed out or was it also the accompanying anxiety, which got a lot worse than usual. I started the Jane Austen exercise several times, but only did it once or twice and then relapsed in chronic fatigue – or whatever this new state is – for months. I really do not think it is writer’s...

I am sure you all know the saying “Forgive, but don’t forget”. There is an interesting counterpart in my mother tongue Slovene, which can be translated: “Only a fool goes on the ice twice.” Actually it is ‘a donkey’, but in the meaning of ‘a fool’. So, essentially, if someone betrays us, we will no longer trust the person. That is, if the betrayal is done on purpose, not as a mistake, which can be forgiven and forgotten. Just as the legal system imprisons criminals and thus gives them a change to pay their debt to society, likewise are we, in my opinion, entitled to protect ourselves...