[ Photo: Milk and Honey By: Amazon

This is the journey of surviving through poetry, this is the blood sweat tears of twenty-one years, this is my heart in your hands, this is the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing                                                                                                                                                                   – rupi kaur

Milk and Honey is a collection of poems that is based on the feeling of losing everything, violence, and the joy of surviving. This book shows how important it is to love yourself spiritually and physically, even when the heart is not in the position to do that. Milk and Honey takes the reader through a whole new journey, making them feel that every little bitter moment in life is important to look for that sweetness in it.

After reading this book of poems, I wondered if they were actually inspired by real events or if it was all made up. But when you read it, you feel every heart felt word the author has to say, it’s too difficult to make up those words out of the blue.  I also recommend this book for a more mature audience due to the fact that it describes and illustrates very graphic images.

Every chapter has it’s own sweetness to give:

“How is it easy for you to be kind to people he asked, milk and honey dripped from my lips as I answered: cause people have not been kind to me”

The hurting

The book starts with the chapter of the hurting, which mainly the author bases on her experiences on what it’s like to be hurt by someone you looked up to. Having to feel the experience of taking away that precious thing that was so important to you, just because he felt pure pleasure out of it. Yes, it is mainly about violence and losing a part of you. But, it shows us to take action when things are taken away from us and to stand up for ourselves.

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“When my mother was pregnant with her second child i was four, I pointed at her swollen belly confused at how my mother had gotten so big in such little time. My father scooped me in his tree trunk arms and said the closest thing to god on this earth is a woman’s body it’s where life comes from and to have a grown man tell me something so powerful at such a young age, changed me to see the entire universe rested at my mother’s feet” 

The Loving

This has to be my favorite chapter of the entire book. Now, when you think of love your first thought is Valentine’s Day or cute couples out on the streets. But no, this chapter reflects more deeply about the meaning of love. The love that a mother has for her child, the meaning of loving yourself, what making love really means, that feeling of connecting for the first time. Also, there’s some poems of that first love in your life, the one that starts everything. Being in love is an indescribable feeling, and permitting that person to love every single flaw you have. The flaws that nobody knows, just you. Love is like honey, it’s so addicting that you just want more.

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 “When you are broken and he has left you, do not question whether you were enough, the problem was you were so enough he was not able to carry it”

 The Breaking

        All of us at some point are gonna suffer through a heartbreak, and it’s gonna feel like the world is falling apart. You ask yourself: “Why me?” “What did I do in order for him/her break my heart the way he/her did?” This type of questions are the ones that will never be answered. A broken heart is the same as having an unhealed wound, if you keep poking it, it will never heal. Yes, that boy who once gave you the entire universe, may take it away in a second. He may not care, he may just stopped loving you with no utter explanation, or he simply just got bored of the same thing. I learned that in order to be happy, we need to pass through the worst. Hell, if somebody told you that the breaking is easy, it was total lies. Nothing of it is easy. Moving on is not easy, but it requires strength and positivity that everything will turn out alright at the end.  “In order for there to be a rainbow, we must pass through the rain and thunder first”

“I have what I have and I am happy, I’ve lost what I’ve lost and I am still happy”

The healing 

After a dark tunnel, there’s always a shiny light.  In order to get past the pain and the suffering, you must heal. In this last chapter, the author emphasizes on how the process of healing can help you grow as a person and learn to live with solitude. Now, it’s not easy to move on from the only thing that actually gave you hope that love exists, but that’s just called the process of living. I so happened to have my heart broken not too long ago and I thought i would never get past it, but I learned to accept solitude, and to let myself grow as a person. It is not healthy to get stuck on the same step, you must keep moving forward. Also, never try to heal on the feet of those who hurt you, that will just make it worse. Learn to accept it and let it go. You’re worth is so much more than being stuck on someone who didn’t see that.

Rupi Kaur’s work is just remarkable that I can’t put it into words. I would recommend this book because sometimes we need that little push in order to see the worth that we have. See that we must move on from those memories that don’t matter anymore, and to start making new ones.