How Fast Can Your Wishes Come True?

How fast can your wishes come true? Do you believe that once you've asked for something, it would eventually be given? I believe. Just like before, somebody gave me a new laptop. When I enrolled last Fall 2012, I didn't have one. But I made use of what resources I had available on campus and I managed to finish two semesters without my personal computer. (I had one, a heavy-duty IBM which I left in the Philippines.) Now, just when I was no longer paying attention to my 'need' of owning a computer, it was the time it arrived.

The angels are jumping-up-and-down- happy. 


photo

Homesickness 101

When you're in America, your husband is in China, and your daughter is in the Philippines, how would you feel? I could say that this has been the longest isolation I've ever had in my life- being away from loved ones too long. Why didn't this happen when I was 20's and very much unattached? May 8th 2013 would be our 3rd wedding anniversary, and I don't know what I'd be doing that time. This universe has a huge sense of humor.

What Day Is It?

What I feel right now is like springing up from an afternoon of sleeping. Sleeping past lunch, waking up, jerking - panicking - losing that basic sense of time. What time is it? It was only... it was only a few hours ago that I had been moving around and about.
The past weeks and months had been full of activities. There were the holidays, and many traveling to and fro Manila for many weeks.  I just moved Julienne Roux from our apartment in the city, back to the house where I grew up. And because she moved, of course I had to follow suit. I changed jobs- from a fast-paced culinary career into a more low-key business teaching and business creation and development coaching for young entrepreneurs. The two are quite far-fetched, but previous experiences seemed to prepare me for that ordeal somehow.
Living in the province feels like the ideal life for me. Friends and former colleagues had been asking if I had any regrets, having established a house in the city, and having lived and studied and worked there for the last sixteen years. I said, no. No regrets at all. While I am not closing doors to what the future could possibly bring, I am enjoying the provincial life to the core. More blogs about that in the future.

Now, getting a grip back to the blogging life, there is a song singing in my head...

I don't remember what day it was
I don't remember what time it was 
All I know is that I fell in love with you 
And if all my dreams come true
I'll be spending time with you! 

I Love You More Today Than Yesterday 

-The Spiral Staircase

Womanity

My weekend was spent reading a book by Anais Nin. I am convinced that above all, graphic porn cannot and will not replace real art, whether literary or visual.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. 
Anais Nin 


And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. 
Anais Nin 

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. 
Anais Nin 

Shooting Nostalgia

Writing this post, I am listening to Duran Duran's "Ordinary World". If I don't allow myself a kind of centeredness, I am certain that there's a part of me that is about to collapse. I hate to think of my life in Manila again. The typhoons that ravaged recently, nonchalant people, the wetness in the streets. I am counting the days when I can come home again to the province, take Julienne with me and enough with this five-stair-flights climbing and descending everyday- now that my daughter is getting heavier and bigger. There is a kind of ennui building up, a kind of boredom... that too many events no longer seem interesting, but another circumstance where I need to dress up and show up. Am I getting older? Or am I in that stage where I had to be like a clay and mold up to the demands of life? I guess, if  I were single, Manila is fine. But I am getting older and I wanna lay back and breathe some fresh air.

Or shoot cows, like I did last summer.

Or shoot flowers on the road side. Like I did last summer.

Magnolia blooms hiding in the foliage.

Cockscomb, hiding little black seeds inside.

When will life become poetry again?

Refuge of the Complex

 Lately I couldn't stop the many chatters inside my head. I had been very busy moving around too much, turning like a hurricane, always trying to outrun something. What was it that I was running after? And when tired, all I wanted to do was lean back and see things in a different way. 

I am moved deeply by individuals who take some pleasure in being simple. In being humble in their ways and unmoved by whatever happens in the world. Though I do not consider that trait at all as being passive, there is  a screaming wisdom in just being calm and at peace with the world. With nothing to anxious about. With being satisfied. With seeing big things in what is little. 

Despite the distance of my house from grandma's, I made a point to visit my daughter who is on vacation there. In Julienne's company, all big dreams in the world seem to fall away, and all that matters is the little world that exists in those little hoop of her arms. There's a whole world around young children. They see the smallest piece of cookie crumb on the bed and try to pick it up with their small fingers. They see the small, the simple.

Now I am trying to appreciate the lace-like patterns on the wings of a dragonfly.

Getting a Grip

It seems, these days, I have been a hurricane going about in different directions. Too many hats to wear, too many tasks at a time. But isn't this what I've always wanted? Drink it up!

Searching the Soul

 It must be because I am getting older that there are already many chatters inside my head. The more one knows, the more one asks, and the more questions unfold. It must be because, too, that I spend so much time alone, with books and writings at home, that there is just too much space for so many musings. I almost have this desire always to go some place, a church perhaps, some temple.

I was raised a Catholic. There were just too many trips to church with my grandma and my family to the church, and too many sermons heard.

 But I remember, I was fascinated most about the details of the church's insides, like statues of angels and stained glass windows, and church songs. Hardly an irreplaceable experience.

Oh, God, I am growing older.

Thinking

I've been thinking quite too much these days. I guess it happens even after things turn out to be just too happy and glorious. The weekend has been very happy, I almost didn't want it to end. I was with my little family. Now things are about to change late this year. I'm thinking of leaving Manila and go back to my hometown. I guess perspectives change when you already have a child- you wake up one day and realize that you're not just living for yourself but for someone else.

Crushing Gardenias

There are gardenia bushes just outside our street in the village. They had been there for a very long time. And when I was talking about my wedding two years ago, I said that I wanted gardenias for my wedding bouquet. Unfortunately the flower makers didn't have gardenias, instead they used white roses and put in some purple grapes. Yes, I had grapes on my bridal bouquet.

While shooting gardenias after the rain a week ago, I was not only intoxicated by their scent but was so captured by their beauty that some poignant thoughts crossed my head. The flowers were just too sweet-smelling I recalled that saying about forgiveness: that Forgiveness is the sweet scent the flower gives us when we step on them.

I have always believed that. I guess that is just a simplification of many philosophies of non-retaliation, of Christ, of Gandhi, of many other revolutionaries and peacemakers who opened the doors of enlightenment from the world's ignorance.

 

I know that human conflicts are inevitable. I am this old not to have experienced frictions with other people. There were the people who told you lies, who made promises and broke them, who borrowed money and you never heard from again (quite a lot), who raided your fridge (quite a lot too), people who pushed you and pulled you, sent hate letters, and so many other forms of human discord. Time passed and you eventually parted ways. It has been my own principle not to sow grudges so I will not reap them. So I go on and live my life, forgiving those who might have done me wrong. Then comes a time when you meet again. Sometimes they'd tell you that they heard about you, and that they're glad and proud of you. Sometimes they'd write a mail telling you "that you do cross my mind every so often." Sometimes they'd tell you that they watched  TV and the news reminded them of you. In your case, you've forgotten who these people are. You've forgotten how in the first place you were ever entangled with their existence.  And little by little, they begin to confess about their lives. You don't judge. You just listen. And just by listening, you can only feel the agony of what they've been through.

The mystery is this, the fragrance of a flower haunts you. And the more you crush the flower, the stronger the scent becomes.

Ducks For Fidelity and a Happy Marriage

Rain is pouring in the province again we have to cancel our scheduled visit to the farm. I heard that the fish have grown so much bigger and fatter at the pond, and there are new hatchlings for ducks and chicken. When I opened the fridge a few days ago and saw ducks eggs, I wasn't very happy.

"Why did you harvest ducks eggs? You should have allowed them to hatch!" 

Although duck meat is good (though more fatty and has higher cholesterol than chicken), and the eggs are excellent for salting and making custards, I saw the eggs at our refrigerator shelf as some form of annihilation of a species. Sort of. Because I wanted to see more little ducklings going around the farm tailing the quacking mother duck.

Before my wedding last year, I researched on Eastern traditions on weddings and keeping happy marriages. I stumbled upon a Korean and a Chinese wedding belief that the couple must at least be gifted with a pair of ducks - ceramic or wood or real- so that they can stay with each other for longer periods of time (like ducks do?) and come home to each other (like ducks do?) all the time. I received no duck pairs on my wedding.

 But ducks or no ducks, I am happily hitched and faithful to my spouse. Yes. Of course.

Passion

"If the world hates you, remember, it hated me first."

   

    I'm beginning to think that the Holy Week of 2011 has a looming unnamed presence in my life right now. I haven't prayed or mused over salvation and faith and acts of faith before. Maybe because it runs through my birthday (a sign that I am gettng older), and therefore makes me a little more laid back and think of other things besides business or work or craft. I tend to think more of my little family, my husband, my child, and a good marriage- the few things I cannot leave behind. I'm not in a mood for vacation. The thoughts about my book release are suspended temporarily in my head.

   Last year, Holy Week, was the first time I've watched Mel Gibson's film. I used to read about it from the papers many years ago, but at the height of all that controversy or many questioning about the film, I wasn't enticed at all to watch it.And when I did, I went beyond the movie-ness of the film but took it as a peek to the existence of Christ.

 

"Love one another."

Forgetting

Whenever I want to forget something, I can't think of a fancier way than this: to recall one of the very first movies I've seen as a child. There was a scene there, where, to forget her past, all that the princess had to do  was inhale the scent of a blue rose. Then... all memories are erased. You can start over. How pain-free is that? 

For a few days I have been struggling with this resolve to forget something. Some part of my life- which in truth didn't really exist in the truest sense- but had lingered with me badly for years. It was like a drug. Every time things in my real world got screwed, that other life was the easiest escape.  And I want to forget now that other life.

I could not truly justify what it was. The emotions that governed that experience could probably be classified as mere infatuation, raw attraction, like those feelings of  adolescents who stare at posters of Kurt Cobain on their ceiling every night. For some time I thought it was one of the best things that ever happened in this life. And yet, everything dawned now that what happened in my life was just my own making. I could not fully credit it to that experience.

Did I waste time? Maybe I did. Did I waste strength? Maybe I did too. And yet, whatever beauty that experience gave, I want to throw it all to the universe who in the first place, made that experience possible the whole time. To put the experience into writing could be one of the best cures. The emotions were masked in figures of huge, deserted houses and  withered gardens, and  death and leaving of loved ones. For some time I believed that it gave me some liberation, some wings, some unseen sword to brave the storms of life. It did. And with the same liberation, my mind flew to another dimension and  see that experience with a different sight: that it is beginning to ruin my life. 

The Thief of Baghdad

Leaning Back and Thinking

Every time I look back at the last 20 years, I can't help but notice that I've spent most of my life in school. I don't know why I had this strong attachment to school. But here's one paradoxical thing to that. That the more I spent time sitting in class, the more I look outside the window, daydreaming.I'm not a scholar of the world, and I'll never be. Maybe for the last 20 years, those days went by and those days taught me nothing much that I could truly remember. In the process of all that schooling, maybe I didn't really learn what I should. For 20 years I sat on that armchair looking outside. Hoping that the schools I've been to should have taught me to imagine more.

Music of the Day

Harvest Moon. Neil Young.

New Year

I don't know what resolutions to make.

Leaving the City

Whenever I see night views such as these, I realize that I've spent so much of my life living in the city. And if there's something I like about the lifestyle here, it's the diversity of people and a more liberating culture: cities are melting pots of ideas. There's a genius somewhere there.

 For two weeks, I will surely miss this view at night. Can't wait for tomorrow. Julienne is having her first airplane ride- going to the province for the holidays. I love holidays. 

Three A.M.

 

Book seen at my brother's office in the big house. I have my 3 a.m. experiences too, and I will not make nursing my daughter an excuse why I am still up at these hours. For some strange reasons, I love keeping awake just when everybody  is asleep.  Reading a book, updating my book, reading and writing letters. The silence is poignant. Beautiful.

Meet the Shackler

 Shackles:  (shkl) A metal fastening, usually one of a pair, for encircling and confining the ankle or wrist of a prisoner or captive;

I was looking at the passport of Julienne's dad and all I noticed was the many shuttlings to China. I like making him fed up with some bitchisms... 

"You look like this guy from a Chinese movie..." 

“You ate too much pansit in Guangzhou that's why you already look like Chinese.”

“You ask that Chinese lady at the furniture shop to give us a discount. You understand each other, right?”

“Why do we always go to Chinese restaurants when we're dating?”

 

The shackler turns, shakes his head, “You are the craziest woman in the world. “

I load him up with more insanity.

“Alright. Then go and leave me. By the way,  what is your next Kung Fu movie?”

“You must have been a eunuch in your past life.”

The shackler is passive. “I don't care what you say. I'll court you and marry you again no matter how you push me out the door. Do you understand?””

Talk about being shackled. It's scary. 

stephen chow/kung fu hustle

All Things Bright

There is a certain feeling when you see things as they are so early in the morning. Everything is beautiful.