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In Hopes of the Coming Spring

“Green Sky Ad Infinitum: Winter Spring Summer” by sacadalang 2014

 

♦  Winter can come to us at any time. Even in the midst of summer it could be winter for some of us.

The sky isn’t always blue. It could sometimes be green. And the leaves of spring and summer can appear during winter.

When we look at the sky we see the same sky yet each of us sees a different sky, too.

It’s a matter of perspective. 

“this is our sky, too” by sacadalang 2014

Faith and Rubik’s cube

The Rubik’s cube is fascinating. It reminds me of what life is like. Rubik's cube 1 _green

Life is a series of acts in order to put things into order. Order order order. For me I see life, mine at least, as being put into order at some other parts while [I] am occupied with putting into order some other different part.

I have forgotten about this feature in my life until I recently spent time getting to know a 3 x 3 Rubik’s cube. To my delight I saw that when I try to get a side into a single color the other sides may form distinguishable patterns all by themselves.

Rubik's cube 2 _redThere are those who, like me, do not congregate towards the “very” end of the “orderly” spectrum. I may be called lazy by some, but I know I’m not lazy. It’s just that the way my clock runs isn’t the kind that will stand out in the corporate world. Instead, my clock runs in such a way that I take the time to appreciate patterns that aren’t interesting to others. No, I don’t have the aptitude for the mathematical way of describing patterns, so that’s not what I’m talking about, either. There’s just too much stuff needed to be able to math-talk that I run out of time for them. Nevertheless it would be wonderful if I, too, like the mathematicians am able to cook up a statement describing how the color patterns come up when this and that turning is done on a Rubik’s cube.

Rubik's cube 3 _nearlyThe way I, or you, put our lives into order may be objectionable to others. There are those who express disapproval at the way we do things. It could also be that we try to put our lives into order in such a way that we won’t be at the receiving end of a disapproval. Whichever way it is we do feel the tension between these two ways tugging at us. For me it is couched as “what should I do?”

We all have our own pattern-appreciation-languages ::: musical notes, weaving patterns,  words on a page, lines+shapes+lighting, or sound+movement+lighting, angles+weights, trajectory+speed, food tastes, taxonomy, almost-no-words-but-full-of-thoughts (e.g., the haiku) … et cetera

Rubik's cube 4 _nearlyThere are also those who, like me, aren’t experts at a particular pattern-language but all the same we are uplifted whenever we spot an evidence of one.

If you believe in God then this shouldn’t be a surprise for you. Thousands of years ago humans have already become aware that God causes patterns to form. He puts order out of chaos.

Rubuik's cube 5 _orange

At center stage, my Rubik’s cube on my table where my study things are pushed to the side for the moment.

I am typical of my folks. We get to laugh at almost anything, not the least at our own selves. It helps us cope. It helps us from going down that road which is lethal to those who have “nothing”. I needed to put that within quotes because, one, it is subjective, and two, “nothing” doesn’t seem to exist. That’s what I understood the last time I looked up science. But, I fervently request you, don’t discuss creatio ex nihilo with me yet because I haven’t read up much on that. If you want, in relation to it, you can look at discussions about an ancient Mesopotamian composition that starts with “When on high” … 😀 that’s all I can remember for now 😀

I don’t know which part of the world you live in, but just in case you are also like us who are nakakapit sa patalim (living on the edge of a knife) then let the lesson I discovered from the Rubik’s cube encourage you. Just keep on no matter how hard things are going because somehow there’s a pattern forming at the other side, waiting for its perfect time to come up in your life’s story.

Thank you, Mr. Garfitt.

Jesus came to banish fear.

jesus of wigan  Though I haven’t gone through the entire book yet, the few parts that I have read so far are making good sense to me. For one, I can see that it’s obviously made out of love, that it’s a true labor of love, and it deserves much respect and consideration. Thank you, Francis Garfitt, for writing this fascinating and refreshing book about a living man and a living story that was calcified within just a few pages two thousand years ago.

I have always gone by the thought that if truth is in God, that if ‘truth’ is an embodiment of God, then there’s no way of disproving Him nor that our insistence on “defending” Him will add to that truthfulness. In pursuing my personal studies on that distant world of two thousand years ago when Jesus of Nazareth shook his world, I would like to listen to this particular voice that projects Jesus’ story’s context through a personal conviction using the platform of the contemporary world. ‘Evangelism’, after all, is not limited to the mainstream’s definition of it, if the reader sees it as that. A storyteller is by all means entitled to any artful way of delivering an old story with full relevance. We, those of us who want to keep on telling a story that has been stamped ‘unchangeable’, may just have to take the courage to step out of the silenced crowd and speak in a way that will make the story enabling again even to those who have been rendered numb by the challenges of everyday survival — the way that Jesus of Nazareth did. That’s love.  Jesus of Wigan

What I especially find refreshing among the narratives is the inclusion of the scientific perspective in order to bring about a multi-perspective handling of whatever scene is featured. In this book science is integrated as a tool for looking at what is. The outcome resonates with the Hebrew worldview where things are dealt with integrally, like for example that a human being is not allocated into body-&-soul parts. So far I can see it doesn’t pretend to know everything yet it’s a humbling book. It will make one look at things differently, make one recall the time when one realized that things are not what they are as seen on the surface. It will encourage you to love. It will confirm your simplest reasons for wishing for happiness.

(Note: Today is May 19, 2016. This was written 2 years ago. I need to update it soon. I just got to find the time. Get the book if you can. Jesus of Wigan by Francis Garfitt. You will like it even if you’re not interested in the religious side of it. ❤

Update: May 20, 2016. I edited the original script and added a few words. Still, that is not the ‘update’ that I meant. It will then look like a review of the book.)

Thanks for dropping by. Have a great day, everyone! 🙂

🙂

  • 🙂 I have your book today, in paper. I don’t know when I can finish it considering that I’m not supposed to do anything else besides looking for certain things in books for a year at least, but actually I’m now on John’s first baptism. I’m liking John and I can easily connect him with that John in the desert, both with passions of that intensity. But how I wish I knew more of European economy/history so that I could get more laughs out of your quirky statements — I mean, I had my first big laugh at page (though unnumbered) 3 of Introduction and I anticipate that there are lots like it in this your thickish book. Though I think I just go open some more of your book for reasons other than greed for knowledge, otherwise things will just not get right with me. One has to be ready for the things that you say in here 🙂 . What made me confident enough to get a copy was that a few days ago I finally had a gut feeling of what evil is. The subject of evil isn’t an attractive material for me and so I haven’t read up on the academic discussions on it, nor am I interested in the macabre in popular media. But recently, in a flash, I realized that I understood that evil is the attempt to choke/snuff out/strangle life, to negate life. Something happened to me and I felt like I was going to be annihilated, something is trying to deny my essence, and if I let it be I would end up a living dead, a nothing — and so it dawned on me that this, then, is what evil is. I decided to find a way to stay alive despite the presence of this thing that would callously wipe me off from existence if I let it. So I thought that a retelling of Jesus’ story like the way you’re doing is worth looking into, with the horrors of modern metropolitan living, and they shouldn’t disturb me as much anymore due to my newly found knowledge (haha looks like this leads me further into my “knowledge-of-good-and-evil” musings…). I’m wary like this because I’m not familiar with big city living, and the little that I’ve experienced of it I didn’t really like… but I do like the way you explain the will to power … I agree with what you say in there … and I can’t help wanting to catch your words at each right-hand page because they look like they might fall off any time — this was the first big laugh, actually 🙂 THANK YOU for your great effort in this book. May many people come to read it.

     

  • Dear Sacadalang,

    thank you so much for the comment and for buying a copy of my book. I’m glad you are liking John. He is based on a guy that I met whilst doing some voluntary work. He was working as an ‘enlightened witness’ with other ex-prisoners and this idea of a ‘witness of the light’ kept bringing me back to him whenever I tried to visualise John the Baptist. I was genuinely humbled to meet him. I only met him once, but maybe that is how life is.

    I think that your gut feeling of what evil is, is important. George Macdonald wrote of the shadow inside us all in his book Phantastes, a fairy story for adults. In it he wrote that the affirmation of evil is the negation of all else. So take care of yourself, negation is anti-hope, the anti-social anti-value that builds on feelings of isolation, then anger, then destruction… either of self or others. In the same way that the key to madness is personal to each of us, so is the path to oneness. I love your blogs, their enthusiasm and infectious joy. I don’t know all the films and TV shows you mention, but what I enjoy is learning why you enjoy them. So keep it up, we are all part of the pattern.

    It took me 7 years to write the book, and I always felt that if it touched one person then that was worth it, that whatever I was doing meant something more than just another writer with another book. Sometimes I felt like giving it up as a bad job, and even now I’m not happy with it, I can see the flaws, particularly in grammar. So thank you once again for taking the time to read it.

    kind regards

    Fran

     

  • Dear Fran,
    thank you for replying, for the reply, for Phantastes, for John, and for the encouragement — yep, I have a good idea now about the self-destruction and the wanting-to-quit parts, thanks to my experiences — ach, the grammar, well, grammar does not rule so to say … all I know is that I’m reading a genuine specimen of contemporary British English and for me that’s good enough 🙂
    -wishing-you-a-nice-week-
    ang sacada lang

     

    ❤ ——————- ❤

    ( 4.0 out of 5 stars Philosophy with a difference 8 Aug 2013  /  By Viv M)
    I found this book shocking at times and unlike any other “religious” book I’ve ever read. It is an imaginative modern interpretation of the gospel story. I enjoyed the references to Wigan, and there is plenty of humour. It’s a retelling of history with complex twists.
    ❤ ——————- ❤
    4.0 out of 5 stars Are you on the path? 4 Aug 2013  /  By Mark S If you are trying to find a path to faith this book will help. The authors take on the New Testament and the disciples of Jesus provide some great reflective moments for the reader, which disciple are you? The author’s link to modern day diseases, such as the craving for power and certainty, provide an interesting view of the New Testament story and highlight how shallow our modern day lives have become. Our constant desire for instant gratification and oneupmanship are clearly exposed in this insightful work.

    A great read and it really challenged my thoughts. This book has really helped me to think more clearly about what Jesus was really trying to achieve. I don’t agree with all of the authors views but the thought provoking nature helped me to further understand the Bible itself. Well done a great first book.

     

 

revisiting Tolkien’s . 1

Revisiting Tolkien’s world. Part 1. Reflections on some quotes from the start of The Fellowship of the Ring movie adaptation. [The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien]

one ring to rule them all

one ring to rule them all

but the power of the ring could not be undone
Whatever we do about it, whatever good the intention is, however excellent the effort is, it is not for us humans to be able to vanquish evil. Evil is part of the present, it is here, and for all those who will be born in the world that is just the continuation to ours, to the now, evil is there, too. But there is a capability that can vanquish this phenomenon and together with its coming to pass is the manifestation of humility in all of us. We all will be humbled that there is a Something beyond ourselves that could accomplish what our best efforts and intentions cannot.


the ring has a will of its own
Evil is a thriving phenomenon. It feeds on the will to power and it finds ways to manifest itself. When one sees evil one shouldn’t be surprised, because all things where we are now have a potential to evil.


some things that should not have been forgotten were lost …history became legend, legend became myth
Man did not just suddenly become smart because of the Enlightenment. Man has always been smart. He has always been highly intelligent, highly sensitive highly intuitive. There were things that he had already ascertained but which the subsequent generations would relegate to something “bygone”, hence obsolete, hence inapplicable, hence just stuff that stories are made of. Just myth and legend. Like the reverence for integral-man/soul and the numinous. What we overlook is the fact that scientists operate on the basis of theories and conjectures. Scientists have to start with faith. We are all standing on “nothing”, we are suspended on almost empty space, near vacuum, and are held in place by forces that are not obvious to our senses. We are contained within a sphere wherein we could thrive as if by “magic”. Only a minute part of the phenomenon of our existence has become describable to us, and in our exclusive terms at that, yet our discussions delude us into believing that we are now capable of talking about everything there is. Of course our scientific estimations have always come back to us as sound, precise, reliable, but that’s only applicable within the sphere we move and operate. We talk of clusters of galaxies when the actual space we have physically reached is only the boundaries of our single puny star system, only one of the gazillion that we project there is. Our existence is as ephemeral as the woodland faeries of lore.


for the hearts of men are easily corrupted
What more can I say to this? I can simply agree.

nine rings for the kings of men

nine rings for the kings of men . Introducing: the 9 who become the Nazgul, ring wraiths, slaves to the evil will & are neither living nor dead


nine rings were gifted to the race of men who above all else desire power
My first reaction has to be on the term race. I have read somewhere that this term is now deemed invalid for the fact that there are no genetic bases for classifying the Homo sapiens sapiens into subcategories in which outer manifestations are skin and hair color. There are no notable differences in the genetic make-up of one race of humans from another, and so this way of categorizing does not make sense, unless we insist that the white-skinned is better than the brown-skinned, that the lanky-bodied are better than the bulky-bodied, that blondes are better than jet-blacks. If we insist on putting subcategories in this manner then we might as well call these as distinct species, which brings in the next point: in what sense can we say that one species of a plant is “better” than the next? In what sense do we speak of inferiority vis-a-vis superiority? Can we honestly say, even, that a child who has Down Syndrome “inferior” to a child who has not? Hence, the talk of race among humans is an uninformed discussion, invalid.

a Milky Way representation from i.space.com

a Milky Way representation, from i.space.com. The Sun, situated at the periphery, is not distinctive, and is just one of the 200+ billion stars comprising this galaxy.

“men who above all else desire power” —  if it were not so then there wouldn’t be so much resources wasted on election campaigns 😛 … there wouldn’t be so much hoopla over show business, over the fashion industry, over lifestyle management, over the science for packaging, over the small and big things that affect mostly the “small ones” in the society, those who cannot afford yearly vacations, those who are hurt by the heavy taxes on almost anything, those who are blamed of having succumbed to the tiresomeness of the daily city grind, those whom society disgusts for not having enough will power to keep on a “prosperous” way of life… Modern society thrives on aggression, it favors the aggressive, and it shames those who wish to just have enough to live by. We hoard as if nothing will rot. We acquire as if we can use these all up. But we only create a disastrous imbalance. Our demand to have more deprives many, at the other side of the globe, at the side of the world invisible to us, hidden behind sweat shops and fancy talks of wage raises. Does earth, by attracting more space materials to itself and thus making it more massive, add to the security of its orbiting around the sun? Does the sun have to do anything so that it remains secured within the outer rim of the Milky Way? Does the Milky Way have to do something so that it does not get thrown off from its local cluster of galaxies?


for within these rings were bound the strength and will to govern each race but they were all of them deceived
The capability to move things, events, people is a hallucinogen that amplifies our narcissistic tendencies. That’s why Gandalf, Galadriel, and Aragorn are simply awesome characters. They are aware of how the ring can corrupt them by working through their good intentions for all residents of Middle-Earth. This awareness has humbled them and has led them to choose the supporting role to Frodo and the hobbits — the simple folks who, as Bilbo comprehensively describes his kin, are reputed to foremost love food but actually hold peace and quiet closest to their heart.

hobbits' reputed passion for food

hobbits’ reputed passion for food.
The groom quickly munches a muffin he has grabbed from a passing by tray, forgetting to kiss his bride.

hobbit market

a hobbit market

all hobbits share a love for things that grow

all hobbits share a love for things that grow ❤ Introducing: Samwise Gamgee.

A Letter To Michael Berg, From An Ignorant Blabbermouth

Then what am I supposed to do with your story, Michael Berg?

You don’t blame Hanna for loving you. You do not blame yourself for loving Hanna. What, then, am I to make of your sad love story? Okay, so it wasn’t wrong for her to love you, 21 years her junior. But of course only a very few will agree with you. Look at that survivor who described her as having been brutal to you. But you said so yourself that the only love we are not responsible for is the one we have for our parents. I’m glad that it came from your own mouth.

The Reader _front cover

click to enlarge

I hurt for you as I listen to you talk to me in your telling of your story. A fifty-year-old professional coming to grips with an emotion he first experienced for a woman 35 years ago sure speaks something for the love a man has for a woman. Dreaming of her, associating her with the feeling of coming home, describes an attachment stronger than a mere adolescent crush, or even passion.

Michael, for all your words, I really would have loved to hear something from Hanna Schmitz. I wish you were older when you met her then perhaps you would have seen more, have understood more. I feel like if only you didn’t keep your age a secret from her then she would have driven you off, out of her life for good, even if you’ve already been lovers for a week. But even then many people would still want to say that a full grown woman seducing a seventeen-year-old is just as immoral.

Again, what do I really know of Hanna to even suggest that she was immoral in her relationship with you? In what way did she benefit if indeed it’s true that she used you? For all you know the fact that you have become happy lovers has brought her an equal amount of sadness, too.

However, what does her relationship with you have to do with her being on that court trial, and you meddling with her life afterwards? You were not supposed to know anything about her in the first place. Michael, she would have continued on with her silent life had she not heard from you again. Why the hell did you have to send her those tapes? And then not even telling her of how happy you were to receive a note from her when it was obvious that you, of all people, were the one whom she wanted most to be happy with and for her? Would you be excused when it would be said that you had no idea anymore whatsoever if she still loved you in the way you knew she did? But my goodness, Michael Berg, you were microscopic in deciphering the amount of effort she put into that note she sent to you. Didn’t that give an indication of her reaching out to you?

Numbness. Numbness. You always give numbness as the excuse. If a Corrie ten Boom is possible then why couldn’t it work out with you for the sake of the great love you had for her?

Ach, but it’s all over now. I’m ranting needlessly. Like the prison governor I can only feel anger towards the both of you — to you for being a hypocrite about your love for her, to her for not having the strength to deny you, not then, not while she was in prison, and not even when she was about to have a new life. That woman who spoke so callously about Hanna did not realize that you, Michael Berg, have also been brutal to Hanna.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

You say that the generation before you failed in confronting evil. You are the same as them. You just kept on protecting yourself. Even when you discovered what made Hanna the way she is, still you didn’t clear it up with her. Compare your level of literacy with hers. Compare her access to “enlightened” discussions with yours. Why couldn’t you have found the way to come up to her and inform her of her accountability for leaving you brokenhearted? I’m sure you’ve heard of something like with-greater-knowledge-comes-greater-responsibility from somewhere.

Just like the way she asked the judge, what else could she have done when she already knew that the boy she fell in love with was growing up without her, and fast? She knew she didn’t belong to your world. Why would she hamper your growth? That, then, would have been brutal. She actually did you a great service, by disappearing from your life.

Haven’t you heard from somewhere, too, that once you start something you have to take responsibility for it? You led Hanna on by giving her false hope. You made it seem like you have forgiven her for leaving you. You made it seem like you understood her for having ended up in that court. In your having reached adulthood didn’t it occur to you that it was your innocence that attracted her to you? That with you she found a picture of what she would have liked to be had fate been different for her? We do not even have an idea why she became like that in the first place, or why she didn’t take the effort to remedy it for all the earth time she was in existence before she met you.

If you said that coming to visit her was like coming home, then couldn’t you visit her again? Cutting your ties with her is denying your existence, too. If you don’t blame anyone for all that’s happened then perhaps a celebration of your love for each other could awaken from your frozen heart.

Viktor Frankl, too, came from Auschwitz. He saw among his companions the same phenomenon that happened to Hanna, i.e., that the feeling that nobody out there is eager for one’s well-being hastens one’s non-existence.

The Reader _read allI do not know what to say of your story, Michael Berg. Since Hanna did not talk to you, since she didn’t compose narratives, and since she doesn’t even have a collection of songs you’d have an idea she likes then how can we speak of a person’s choices to whom a world of letters cannot speak to? Did you even wonder what made it an imperative for her to guard over her dignity? Can you even begin to imagine the depravities she had to survive and rise from just so that one day she’d be able to make little dance steps in front of the man she loves? You know what, Michael, with your renewed readings to her you pried open her armor and then you left her exposed to the elements.

Maybe we can just say that it’s the price she had to pay for not knowing what to do then. But what can one do when one doesn’t even know that one is supposed to know? How can one guard oneself from the ignorance of ignorance? When you pried open her armor she was beginning to forgive herself. She was learning to face the condemnations. She was having her spring.

What saddens me, Michael, is that it’s possible for X to stand in judgment over Y whom X knows loves X, while all the while denying that a judgment had been passed.

I rest my case, or whatever it’s called.


This narrative is a reaction to Bernhard Schlink’s 1997 novel The Reader.

find your laughter

(edited April 5, 2014)

!good morning

🙂

…for a long time, some time ago, I didn’t know that I was sick until I realized that I had lost my laughter…

 wwrwtw _black  If you have not come across the author/psychiatrist/storyteller [Dr.] Clarissa Pinkola Estes, or anyone like her, or just anyone that even a tiny bit slightly resembles what her book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, brings to the noosphere, then let me introduce her name to you with a quote from that book, on laughter (to enlarge images, please click on them)

🙂

.

… this is where the quote may be found on the net:

on laughter _ wwrwtw _estes

 

… laughter is essential … if you don’t have it yet, your particular kind of laughter, the one that connects you to your beating heart, the one right there, at the core of you, or, if you’ve lost it, then may you gather your strength in order to find it … !and this goes for everyone, of course! … the book is for everyone, so the author emphasizes, despite its title 😉

ciao for now

chic and pretty ... beauty defined

chic and pretty … beauty defined

origin page:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Women-Who-Run-With-the-Wolves-by-Clarissa-Pinkola-Estes/180239888679436

time to escape

to take off

just go, now.

cut off the strands of gravity from beneath you.

.

?????????your only choice is to levitate, and just drift,

simply drift, be carried away.

.blown away

do not resist.

.

time must cease to hover over your sky,

someone's artbe free from it.

.

.

.

.bluish & pinkishbe part of the electromagnetic realm,

.

golden movementembrace fluid boundaries.

.

just  shift,   shift,    shift.

.

.

shuffle the touchdowns, do not touch ground.

it   is  the   moment   to   fly.

taking off now.

April 1, 2014

Coffee Grounds Fertilizer

I am homesick for the reek of carabao* dung drying under the sun.

unripe green mangoesI have come to the point where I now know how it is for paralytics when

                they get to feel flashes of heat and cold at the sight

                of icicles or kettle merrily singing in singeing heat

                because

green unripe Philippine mangoesI now get flashes of the taste and smell

                of damnably sour crunchy unripened mangoes that only my home islands can grow.

I am homesick for the reek of carabao dung drying under the sun,

                the one that we non-farmers harvest from the ground to take home to our

                little plots of tomatoes and eggplants, to make the soil fat,

old nipa hut near coconutsto make the fruits fat, to make us kids fat…

I feel homesick for the reek of caked mud cracking under the sun,

                gray mud turned powdery white plastered on the burnt brown that is

young rice plants, a watery rice paddy                my grandfather’s merrily laughing toothless friend’s skin, who

                couldn’t hear very well the guffaws my Lolo would bring

                whenever we take time from our little garden of okras and cotton and

                come visit him in his tiny tiny

a cogon shack amidst a rice fieldnipa hut stuck in the middle of the flatness of the land he tills

                that is not his. On weekends and on school vacations.

rice stalks almost with grains                When it was a clear day with a slight cooling wind.

                When the rice fields were swaying green, anticipating grains,

or, already stalk-brown, a silent witness to muted gain…

rice straw, after harvestHis name was Lolo Cente, if I remember it right, and mine is Lolo Jose,

                the Jose of Jose Rizal, but who is simply “Lolo” to me,

                and who, unlike that Jose who is Rizal, this Lolo-to-me quit school when he was 7

                because he’d rather ride the back of his carabaos and

                play with them, out of the mud, through the streams, far far away from the school yard,

away from where his teacher and mom could catch and drag him back.

children riding a carabao                A bit of a truant. A bit like Juan Tamad, who wanted to take it easy all day,

,though, my Lolo-to-me was no slacker, no stranger to the singe of the burning sun,

                and he, like Lolo Cente, was toothless, too, by only 2 teeth, but unlike

farmer & friend                Lolo Cente, Lolo could hear even a whisper until

Death peacefully whispered to him at 102. What a life he had.

                That was about 3 times of the Jose’s who is Rizal…

I am so so homesick of the smell of parched soil reeking under a

a well tended rice field                sudden sprinkling of serious rain, of the kind that will soak your hanging laundry in a

                matter of seconds, the kind that will create little oceans and lakes on

                imperceptible indentations here and there along the earth road,

 almost ripe rice grains               the kind of rain that will wedge minute waterfalls and waterways against the edge

                of miniature hills and mountains at the sides of the banked ground that is the

foundation of our wooden house, the one where I spent my infancy in,

                the one where I first realized that adults aren’t so wise after all

rice, almost ready to harvest                when I was only less than 2 and they had me holding my baby brother so that

they could get a picture of us together,

back when Kodak means kodak, means photograph, means to photograph.

                That photograph of me intensely holding on to my reclining position,

                at one end of the, then-popular, plain hardwood sofa, so as

                not to drop my body and my baby brother, tight in my arms, still exists, back home.

mangoes for sale…ah…good old days…

…these words here are just memory lane gone cruising…

                …the less-of-a-second-long flash of the taste of one’s home’s dishes and fruits at

                the back of one’s nostrils that is somewhere inside one’s skull

                does funny things, indeed, to the rest of the brain…

very sweet ripe Philippine mango, cut for easy biteI have used-coffee grounds strewn over my indoor pots’ soil, the ones where I had

                grass-like houseplants stuck onto, my oxygen providers, here, inside,

                where no slight wind sways them from side to side.

[4March2014, 8pm, in about 30 minutes]

*Glossary:

carabao = water buffalo, nicknamed the farmer’s best friend because it’s the muscle in traditional farming

nipa hut = traditional house generally of bamboo and where the roof is of thatched leaves of the nipa palm (Nypa fruticans)bahay_kubo nipa_hut

Lolo = grandfather; the general address for the elderly male

Cente = short and informal for the name Vicente

Jose Rizal = the Philippines’ National Hero; author and medical doctor in late 19th century; studied in Manila, Paris, Madrid, and Heidelberg; martyred at 35

Juan Tamad = in folklore, he was a lazy lad who couldn’t be trusted to get things done; Juan is Spanish for John; tamad is Tagalog/Filipino for lazy

!muchas gracias to the owners of the photos I have here

I Have Beached

beach (1)       Three years I surfed the pages,

arms extended, fingers outstretched,

the gray continental sky indifferent to my need for light;

beach (2)Three years I paced the shore,

back and forth, tracing the break’s contour,

shifting, ephemeral, undulating;

beach (4)On the beach on the sand that is my brain,

lets information like water, in,

pass through, then away, soaked;

beach (5)Three years the troughs and crests and I

kept holding hands and letting go.

The other day I traced the shore at the bus stop.

Concrete platform undulating like lapping waves.

Cigarette butts like flotsam lining the pavement.

I saw the sea foam in my mind.

beach (7)I smelled the salty air.

I heard the rush and splash.

I felt the breeze in my hair.

beach (8)Three years came to pass and I arrived

at how it should have been all along.