Month: March 2022

Imperfect whole

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by Andrada Costoiu

Hit by the armor piercing drops,
I’m still alive, and better. 
I promised when the thunder rumbled,
That I will let the rain wash them away.

The fears sunken in darkness,
Gave way to light and to bands of color,
And then I saw the rainbow.

I thought I’m ready now to start only worshiping the sun,
But colors had melancholies awaken.

It’s like a circle….

Springs of my childhood, joy,
Loves of the past, both joy and sorrow,
The gates, the walls, the doors I’ve built,
They all belong to me.

I am not perfect, but then who is?
The one who says that has no fear?
The one who says that only loves and never hates?
The one who knows and never learns?

I can’t control my feelings, 
But in my smallness, I can approach my center.
I find it full of holes,
Where dreams, and fears and loves have fallen like the autumn leaves.

I am not perfect,
I fear, I love and hate, I do not know….

I am not perfect,
But every day I learn,
To patch with hopes, and dreams the holes left at my center,
By fallen autumn leaves.

© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

My poetry book “Love poems: insights into the complicated mystery of love” is available on Amazon. You can get it here. Please write a review if you get around it. I would really appreciate it.

From afar

/ Andrada Costoiu / 2 Comments

by Andrada Costoiu

On a hill covered with yellow flowers
One more dandelion has lost its fluff in the wind
Over my wishful thinking.  
It smells like grass and newness,
As spring is blowing its wind of perfection over this side of the world.

Oceans, seas, hills and mountains between us,
I still hear your heartbeat,
What would I do without it?
It may have been easier for Socrates and Aristotle,
To exhaust the problems of everything and anything,
Then it is for a lover to explain the world without the other.

I do excavations every day….
And as there is grace in all created things,
I find it also in the archeology of my memory.
All moments have language, smiles, smells,
They have you…

From afar you enter my burning solitude,
And make me feel alive.
Stay!
I should carry a dagger to scare away the night,
Because I don’t dream of you every time I’m asleep.

How do I love you from afar?
My thinking puts forth no fruit,
But my heat does…. I just do.

© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

My poetry book “Love poems: insights into the complicated mystery of love” is available on Amazon. You can get it here. Please write a review if you get around it. I would really appreciate it.

Hope dies last

/ Andrada Costoiu / 3 Comments

by Andrada Costoiu

Photo by Mali Maeder

Like a bird in an invisible cage, 
I sang to you.
The more I sang, the more you plucked my feathers,
In the name of love. 

Despite wanting to fly,
I just sat there, in self-inflicted paralysis,
In the name of a utopian future,
Because…. hope dies last.

Disguised in peaceful dreams and hopes,
Your love was a democratic access to pain.
Bewitched by the dance in your eyes,
I’ve taken the wrong road and I deserve the downfall,
But at least I am alive.

Salvation comes from within and not from others. 
Between my tears,
Doomed feathers on the floor remind me that I am a bird,
…. That I can fly.

Blue and white, 
The grimace of yourself dilates the moment,
As the color of the sky pours over my feathers.

Bereft of self- confidence you’ll catch another, 
To sing to you.
I mourn for her,
And for the loss of innocence of the white feathers.

But the air in your world bears the smell of your fundamental impurity,
And at the mercy of time she too will awaken,
And will fly…
Because hope dies last.

© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

My poetry book “Love poems: insights into the complicated mystery of love” is available on Amazon. You can get it here. Please write a review if you get around it. I would really appreciate it.

Romania, things you do not see in the big news outlets

/ Andrada Costoiu / 3 Comments

by Andrada Costoiu

The war in Ukraine has shattered the world, as it should have happened with the wars in Syria, with the ones in parts of Africa and in many other places of the world where populations have been or are still being displaced or killed for political reasons. We didn’t see this kind of international response in those other cases, but this is another conversation that the world should have, because as people we should all be treated the same, regardless of race, religion, gender and of the other kinds of social markers.

It is the war in Ukraine I would like to talk about today. In the past week I have been in touch with people from my birth country, some of which are in powerful political positions. Besides getting official information, I also get to see the inside of how Romania is responding to the crisis in Ukraine.

I’d like to bring up a story, from the town where I was born, Targu Jiu, which has about 80,000 inhabitants. Not a big place, not a lot of people, not extremely rich, still…. people are pulling together to help the best they can their displaced Ukrainian neighbors.

Dana Constantinescu, the Director of Inspectorate of Education of Gorj Country, has mobilized the schools within the county’s jurisdiction and organized centers where people can donate household items, food and everything they can spare to help the refugees of Ukraine. 

Photo: Dana Constantinescu, Director of Inspectorate of Education of Gorj country

This is what it looked like yesterday……..

Amazing, isn’t it? And this is just one county…

The Romanian government has launched a platform to coordinate the help for Ukraine  Impreuna Ajutam mai Mult. They did this in record time. This is a platform where volunteers and organizations can mobilize and coordinate help for refugees, and it is also a place where refugees can find official information about how to get medical services, find jobs and obtain asylum in Romania (this is for long term- because immediate help is provided at the borders).

Romania is also sending medication, hospital beds and medical equipment into Ukraine.

Photo: Romanian Government/Facebook

According to UN, as of March 9th here is how refugee are distributed across Eastern Europe:

  • Poland has taken in 1,412,502 refugees
  • Hungary 214,160
  • Slovakia 165,199
  • Russia 97,098
  • Romania 84,671
  • Moldova 82,762
  • Belarus 765

Other 255,000 people have gone to other European countries, the UN says.

For more information about Ukraine’s refugees check the UN website by clicking here: UN/Ukraine refugee situation.

All wars are destructive. ALL! I am not sure where and how this is going to end, but seeing people pulling together for the ones in need is a ray of sunshine in a gloomy world.

Inspiration for young people

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by Andrada Costoiu

Hello everyone,

I just want to share with you a little presentation I did for our school district, in which I talk to high school students about what is it like working in academia and what are the challenges and the rewards of being a writer.

You can find the recording here:

When asked about how hard it was to sculpt his masterpiece David, Michelangelo, the famous renaissance sculptor said, “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.” He believed that each block of material had a sculpture divinely embedded within. I believe that so are we, people, we just have to find our passion, our calling. Mine is writing, researching, and teaching. If you would like to hear what it entails to pursue an academic career or be a professional writer, come learn from the story I will share with you.

Presenter Biography

Andrada Costoiu is a mom, an academic, and a writer.

Before she became an academic, she worked for the Romanian Foreign Trade Center and was involved in the privatization process that took place in Romania right after the Romanian Revolution. She is currently a Tobis Fellow at the Center of Scientific Learning of Ethics and Morality, Irvine, and an Associate Director of the Summer Mentoring Program at the UCI Ethics Center. She is also a nationally published author in her birth country, Romania. Her first novel “Under the Iron Curtain” was published in July 2021 by Niculescu Publishing House, Bucharest.

CTE Industry Sector/s: Academics/Literacy

Cold world

/ Andrada Costoiu / 3 Comments

by Andrada Costoiu

I follow my path into the roaring whirlwind,
Searching for you.
They told me to stop, but I did not listen,
I do not listen still.

I feed on your invisible presence,
Is it madness to think that the world has no meaning without you?
Reach out with your spectral hand and catch me,
Would you?

I hate prudence because it grips my flight,
I have to be quick or you will disappear ….

Love! They say you don’t exist anymore,
But I’m here…..I see you!
I’d give you the coat off my back so you would not shiver,
What have they done?

No, it’s not over, there is hope.
Me and others,
We’re desperately insomniac, but we still dream.

Stay. 
And ashes would be all that’s left of cowards’ resignation. 
Stay, stay with me,
Because I would rather die of passion than of cold.

© Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020- . Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrada Costoiu and a-passion4life.com, 2020 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

My new poetry book “Love poems: insights into the complicated mystery of love” is available on Amazon. You can get it here. Please write a review if you get around it. I would really appreciate it.

Ukraine War and the elephant in the room

/ Andrada Costoiu / 3 Comments

by Andrada Costoiu

We live in unprecedented times, not because wars did not happen before but because the military power and the weapons’ sophistication is far beyond what nation states had at hand before. If you’re watching TV and reading the news you hear politicians, economists and journalists giving their opinions. Some of them are extremely offensive, some of them have smiles on their faces.  I do not enjoy any of it, and I find myself in political impossibility. 

I would like to see a reasonable end to the madness we are all part of. I have been trying to, but people who are knowledgeable of Russian politics do not say good things about how this is going to end.

Fiona Hill, an expert in Russia politics says in an interview that was published by Politico: “Every time you think, ’No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”

You can read her interview if you clock here: Fiona Hill Politico Interview

Thomas Friedman, an author that has penned well known books on world politics, says that he sees 3 scenarios about how this war ends. None of them are rosy, but the less likely of them it’s called …. “the salvation.” You can read that New York Times article here:

And, just yesterday, US gov is offering advice on how to survive a nuclear blast.  Here it is : Nuclear Explosion Ready.gov

Ok, so, first, people in Ukraine are dying. That’s right, children, old people, women and men are dying.
Second, if the government is kindly offering us advice of how to survive nuclear blast, they should also know that nobody survives above the ground in the area of the blast.  We also do not have the kind of houses that would offer protection against the penetration of gamma radiation, in case we are not in the blast area. And….in California there are no basements.
So, no, I am not smiling. None of us should. Perhaps the ones smiling on TV and in political and in other kinds of circles have a plan B. But us, regular people, do not.

Biden said yesterday “We’re ready.” 
I am asking, ready for what? 
What are the checks and balances in the situation that is unfolding right under our eyes?
Is there a logical, tactical plan that would end this or at least minimize the damages and the risks?

I am never pessimistic, but right now I need someone to help me out of the gloom. 

From the Lion King that my kids love so much, to Star Wars, the Edge of Tomorrow and you name it, everyone likes to think they’re a hero. Right now, I and us all are looking for that kind of hero, but in real life. We need somebody wise that would be able to de escalate the conflict. 
If he shows up, god bless him/her/they (or whatever the pronoun the hero would like!). We should call him: The man/woman who saved the world.

May we all see the light.