Vanitas Vanitatum

ALL the flowers of the spring
Meet to perfume our burying;
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time:
Survey our progress from our birth—	5
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites!
Sweetest breath and clearest eye
Like perfumes go out and die;	10
And consequently this is done
As shadows wait upon the sun.
Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,	15
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

(pasimunong training...)
'di ko malimutan
nakaraang puno ng mga
usapang
tungkol sa wala namang
saysay,
ha! ha! ha! ha!
 tawanang
'di naman binuhay
ng san miguel o
kahit anong inumin.
tubig lang...
pero super saya!
at ang mga taga-mindanao--kontrobersyal!
pero masaya lahat at cool na cool!
at si miss pindoy,
nasaan na kaya siya ngayon?
si efren? si jovits?
si pina, janice at si flor...?
sa facebook, wala naman sila:(
brilyanteng minuto ng mga workshops, conferences
at sari-saring mayroon at mayroong
walang saysay!
buhay kalikasan
ang hanap.
hanggang ang mga
pangarap ay
naabot o di kaya'y
lumipad kasama ng eroplanong
magbabalik pa rin
upang makita
ang mga kaibigang
'di pa rin nalilimutan...
hanggang
sa muli!

for if we dwell
on greek dictionaries
and dark tunnels,
aren't we... 
forlorn
victims, and
slaves
of past and
modern inequities
still perpetuating
the negative
image that
we abhor?
why
confirm
what others have fought
against?
i'd say
transcend and
train the light toward
heaven...

"Find each other.

Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there.

An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn’t affect us, doesn’t commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth. There’s a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth. It is a matter of not letting it go, of starting from there. A truth isn’t a view on the world but what binds us to it in an irreducible way. A truth isn’t something we hold but something that carries us. It makes and unmakes me, constitutes and undoes me as an individual; it distances me from many and brings me closer to those who also experience it."

Catch a butterfly of idea flitting by. 
Cherish its color and beauty. 
Capture the tints and shadows...

Or let it go.

Nanay, as we fondly called my late grandmother, was a housewife and a widow at the age of twenty six.  Armed only with the most basic knowledge of child-rearing and housekeeping as all young wives were in those days, she raised six children on her own--a super human feat compared to the single mothers of today.  This was during the era of "Liberation" when the Americans came to free the islands from the grip of Imperial Japan.  (The period before was called Occupation but there was also a phase named Insurrection depending on whose side one is on.)  Raised in the hot, arid tracts of sugar cane and coffee plantations where people were purported to have originated from across the Celebes, she moved her family to a nearby province where my grandfather built her a house with his own bare hands.  He was an eccentric yet educated man, much older than Nanay.  And he died of unknown reasons.  (The Catholic priests, at first, did not let his remains be buried inside the confines of the town cemetery for fear that he had commited suicide.)

So, the town they settled in was located in a coastal town at the foot of a huge mountain, Mt. Banahaw, where history has noted the many brave heroes who spilled gallons of blood against conquerors of Iberian origins--an earlier era of more horrendous consequences.  In Nanay's days, however, even when the Americans were already in sight celebrating their victory in the Pacific, the locals were still plagued by the ravages of the war; there were rampant poverty and malnutrition.  The biggest city--Manila--was bombed beyond recognition, second only to Berlin in devastation.  Nanay learned how to cook a very Spartan, yet nutritious and adaptable fish stew that could last for a week without refrigeration.  Everyone got tired of it for she kept cooking the same dish long after the war was over as if it were some kind of offering to the gods--I can just imagine her saying, "Thank you god of the ocean, for all fish big and small..."

There were many, many stories that ensued long after the horrors of the past were buried.  Nanay told tales of entire villages evacuating for fear of being decimated by the approaching armies.  She recounted about how once, a large field planted with corn and vegetables completely disappeared--roots and all--in a matter of minutes after the hungry villagers had passed.  Of relatives being buried alive and surviving to tell the tale.  Yet, Nanay, despite the tragic consequences of history and later of her own life, took to the difficult task of raising her children and ensuring their education (Catholic parochial yet private) and making sure that the generations that came along must not forget the stories passed down from one generation to the next.  Nanay's stories, her idiosyncracies, her stunning non-traditional mathematical abilities (she can add large numbers without the use of a pencil) and her legendary thriftiness will forever be remembered by her descendants (who have studied the past from the pages of history...).

to learn more click on any of these:
http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ump/majors/english/bookshelf/bain/sitttingindarkness.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/9782/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_War
http://www.eserbisyo.gov.ph/Default.aspx?ssid=84&aid=1880