№ 754. Para Kay G - September 11, 2009

№ 748. The Ghost Month, Love & Other Monsters

Pacita Abad's 

MY LIFE AND YOUR LIFE, 2002

№ 692. Trust in the Process

Cracked

“You can have flaws, be anxious and even be angry, but just remember that your life is the world’s biggest enterprise. Only you can stop it from failing. You are appreciated, admired, and loved by so many. 

 

Remember that happiness is not having a sky without storms, a road without accidents, a job without effort, a relationship without disappointments.

 

№ 591. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Pinterest

 

Indeed, he was a proponent of talking openly about dying and grief, something that came with difficulty for many people, he said. “Death has come out of the closet,” he told The New York Times in 1994.

“For so many years people thought that if they didn’t talk about it, death would go away,” he continued. “It was the immorality of mortality. But for the first time, people are willing to acknowledge that living is the leading cause of death, and they want to talk about it.” He counseled mourners with his often-used adage “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

 

Hedgeye

 

After Rabbi Grollman retired from Beth El to focus on writing and counseling, he returned there occasionally to recite the Yizkor, a memorial prayer for the dead, and regularly addressed the congregation into his 90s.

“Obsessing about death can lead to paralysis, while ignoring it can squander opportunity,” he told The Times in 1994. “The important thing about death is the importance of life. Do what you have to do now. Live today meaningfully.”

 

№ 533. In the beginning....

Why is the first instinct for many to volunteer and donate after a natural disaster? One reason is that as humans we’ve evolved to survive in groups, not alone. Rallying together makes us feel less alone in the experience, explained the sociologist Christine Carter, a fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“When our survival is threatened, we are going to reach out and strengthen our connections with people around us. We show generosity. We show compassion. We show gratitude. These are all emotions that function to connect us with each other,” Dr. Carter said.

Scientific evidence supports the idea that acts of generosity can be beneficial when we volunteer and give back regularly — and not just after a natural disaster. Volunteering is linked to health benefits like lower blood pressure and decreased mortality rates.

 

№ 516. Pag-Ibig

"Pag-Ibig" by Apo Hiking Society 

No'ng tangan ng nanay ang munti mong mga kamay 

Ika'y tuwang-tuwa, panatag ang loob 

Sa damdaming ika'y mahal

 

No'ng nakilala mo ang una mong sinta 

Umapaw ang saya at siya'y ibang-iba 

Sinasamsam ang bawat gunita 

 

Hindi mo malimutan kung kailan nagsimulang 

Matuto kung papa'nong magmahal 

At di mo malimutan kung kailan mo natikman 

Ang una mong halik, yakap na napakahigpit 

Pag-ibig na tunay hangang langit 

 

No'ng tayo'y nagkakilala nang hindi sinasadya 

Ikaw lang ang napansin, nahuli sa isang tingin 

At sa pagbati mong napakalambing 

 

Hindi ko malimutan kung kailan nagsimulang 

Matutong ikaw lang ang mahalin 

At di ko malimutan kung kailan ko natikman 

Ang tamis ng iyong halik, yakap na nakapahigpit 

Pag-ibig mong tunay hangang langit

 

Hindi ko malimutan kung kailan nagsimulang 

Matutong ikaw lang ang mahalin 

At di ko malimutan kung kailan ko natikman Ang tamis ng iyong halik, yakap na nakapahigpit 

Pag-ibig mong tunay hangang langit 

 

№ 417. The Giving Tree

№ 394. Toy Story 4: To Infinity and Beyond

Back in grade school, I could not fully understand Velveteen Rabbit.

I couldn't really grasp the core idea in "What it means to be real?" The concepts of "love" and "real" were too mature for my young, less imaginative mind then.  It escaped me how these concepts translate in my life in school, home and play. It wasn't clear how these abstract concepts fuse with my experience, which was still very limited. These big ideas, to be sure, were simply beyond a ten-year old's imagination. At that time, the thesis and the story did not yet connect in my head.

Growing up, the life lessons made the ideas in Velveteen Rabbit no less slippery.

I thought the answer, which was written in the dialogue between the real bunny and the toy, was simple enough. But I also thought that the cliché too neatly tied up the kinks of a metaphor, which I suspected was far more than it appeared. I felt that the idea in the story mimicked the pop songs crooning about romantic love: love has the power to make things truly alive. These pop ideas are easy to enough to accept but somehow I knew they smooth out the rough maladies and many contradictions hiding under the hood.

CCP Art Exhibit

№ 388. In Media Res

Poppies
Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

№ 345. Prayer for the New Year

Prayer for the New Year

№ 337. Love in November, in the Time of Diarrhea or After Ragnarok

"Para kay B is the first novel of scriptwriter par excellence Ricky Lee, published by the Writers’ Studio and launched in a grand bash last December. Subtitled “O kung paano dinevastate ng pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa atin,” the novel deals with love and its wreckages. True to form, Lee conveys his insights in a manner that shatters the usual realistic narrative mode of Philippine literature in Filipino. For in the end, he lets the author of the novel within the novel question not just the nature of love, but the nature of narrative itself. Who, in the end, gives meaning to a story? It also mirrors the novel’s central point: who, in the end, benefits from love? And if love is so melodramatic and so sad, why do we even need it?"

I read Para kay B after Ondoy. It was one of the promised dry lands after that flood of end-of-the-world proportions. That--- meaning the flood, I swear, is not an exaggeration. It was Biblical. Or to borrow from another mythology: Ragnarok.

After Ondoy, the wreckage and the materials recovery, came the forced perspective of fragility and a whole lot of Beta --- that's uncertainty in finance.

№ 317. Gospel on Foot

№ 310. Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day.

"We are born of love. Love is our mother." --- Rumi

№ 309. Sunday Full of Grace

Do you know what it means to be struck by grace?

We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by the stroke of grace. It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen when we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it.

№ 308. Happy Mother's Week

"We are born of love. Love is our mother" --- Rumi

Mothers, love em, hate em, and love em still in the end. Through and through. I know I'm a week ahead. So Happy Mother's Week, then.

№ 298. Sunday Love Songs

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

№ 266. Kiss

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding”--- Saul Williams

№ 261. Babette's Feast and the Joy of Love

Babette's Feast after the lottery win.

"The joy of this contemplative love needs to be cultivated. Since we were made for love, we know that there is no greater joy than that of sharing good things: “Give, take, and treat yourself well” (Sir 14:16). The most intense joys in life arise when we are able to elicit joy in others, as a foretaste of heaven. We can think of the lovely scene in the film Babette’s Feast, when the generous cook receives a grateful hug and praise: “Ah, how you will delight the angels!” It is a joy and a great consolation to bring delight to others, to see them enjoying themselves. This joy, the fruit of fraternal love, is not that of the vain and self-centred, but of lovers who delight in the good of those whom they love, who give freely to them and thus bear good fruit."

№ 255. I Do Not Love You....

Xvii (I Do Not Love You...) - Poem by Pablo Neruda

To wait in vain is to wait and expect no arrivals.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

№ 249. The Thorn Birds

The Art of Plating

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth.