№ 767. The Salt Doll

Screenrant

A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land until it finally came to the sea. 

It was fascinated by this strange, moving mass quite unlike anything it had ever seen before. 

‘Who are you?’ the Salt Doll asked the sea. 

The sea smilingly replied, ‘Come in and see.’ 

So the doll waded in. The farther it walked into the sea, the more it dissolved until there was only very little of it left.

Before that last bit dissolved, the doll exclaimed in wonder, ‘Now I know what I am!’”

№ 691. How long will you live?

Performance Excellence Network

 

By Susan Ople

The average life span of a cockroach is one year. But, a cockroach does not know this. It does not scurry into safety at the sight of a giant shoe looming overhead, waiting for the perfect moment to squash it to extinction.

You and I differ from a cockroach. We are born knowing that eventually we will die. Like bread crumbs to pudding, our ashes will comingle with the Earth, thus offering nutrients to earthworms. An earthworm is far luckier than a cockroach. Its life span varies widely, from six to nine years, with the luckier species able to survive for at least 20 years.

That we, humans, are gifted with the knowledge that our umbilical cords come with an expiration date appear to be lost on people who live aimless lives. To wake up each morning and feel that this day is no different than the other is such a grievous error in judgment. Every sunrise is an opportunity to live a day better and more productive than the previous one.

№ 508. The Paradoxes of Enclosure

At a time when the rule of life across the globe has been disrupted by the paradoxes of collective isolation, a sensitivity to “the small,” to containment and enclosure, presses upon individuals, families, and society in unexpected and often confounding ways. Like Jones’s experimental letter forms, we awkwardly jostle for space within the confines of our homes, balconies, and gardens. Even communal spaces like parks and grocery stores seem to have shrunk, as attempts to heed social distancing alter our awareness of space. Our sense of what counts as crowded has changed, as we learn to accommodate these new rules. Meanwhile, many of us, particularly those in self-isolation, are simultaneously learning just how vastly vacant even a small space can feel.

We can recalibrate our senses to the mysteries of the small through meditation on that paradox of paradoxes, the Incarnation, with the help of this little wood block by David Jones. Throughout Jones’s work there is a marked affection for “things familiar and small.” It is inseparable from a spiritual practice of attention—tuning our senses to that which is easily overlooked or undervalued. Wrapped up in this sensitivity to the small is a care for the fragile, the vulnerable, and a discovery of the surprising resilience of the delicate. It is guided above all by the conviction that it is through refinement of our attention that the wonder and mystery of the created world, particularly in its relation to the divine, reveals itself most fully to us. Focusing on what is small and seemingly commonplace becomes a portal for seeing all things in light of the love of God and thus yields, paradoxically, the most generous and capacious of vantage points.

As the whole world fights to contain a contagion through the mantra “stay at home,” uniting and separating lives in various ways, our spiritual labor in this time may be to find these openings for grace within the multiple circles of our everyday circumstance as these widen and intersect with others, and in light of their relation to the divine Other. We are in truth, as Julian of Norwich reminds us, enclosed not by walls or government guidelines, but by the enduring intimacy of the love of God. For “he is our clothing that for love wrappeth us and windeth us, holdeth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love that he may never leave us.”

Grand Mosque at Djenne, Mali

№ 495. Work from Home: Traveler's Spirit

Travel teaches us that there’s more to life than increasing its speed. This quarantine has been therapy for a workaholic like me. Perhaps the pandemic is the universe’s way of telling us all to slow down. And, like travel, this crisis is reminding us of how we need one another, and we need one another to be safe and cared for. Hard times highlight the importance of public services and good governance, as well as the value of neighbors.

№ 464. Know Thyself

This is the reason for the essay " Who Am I?"  The essay was a requirement to the university admission. That was thirty years ago. And yet the question remains timely and vital.

Live Real

№ 446. The Plague

Viktor Frankl, writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.

Suffering can be redemptive. We learn more about ourselves in these hard periods. The differences between red and blue don’t seem as acute on the gurneys of the E.R., but the inequality in the world seems more obscene when the difference between rich and poor is life or death.

№ 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

№ 347. Chasing Summers in the Depths of Winter

From one of the Daily Globe clippings:




At the former St. Thomas More chapel of Ateneo de Manila on Padre Faura, the celebrant was a Jesuit priest who had just finished his doctorate at Harvard University.

Christmas is when we celebrate the unexpected; it is the festival of surprise, Horacio de la Costa said in a seven-minute homily that has been quoted time and again.

№ 324. Monday Night Virtues

Watched the end of Game of Thrones (GoT).

After the season finale, I realize it's going to be a long wait. 2019. Two years long. Twenty four months. 

And we're counting. Starting now. HBO, quickly now.

"Patience wears my grandmother's filigree earrings. She bakes marvelous dark break. She has beautiful hands. She carries great sacks of peace and purses filled with small treasures. You don't notice Patience right away in a crowd, but suddenly you see her all at once, and then she is so beautiful you wonder why you never saw her before."

~J. Ruth Gendler

№ 280. Thursday in the Desert

Oil Lamps at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum
Flagellation Monastery (Via Dolorosa)

“Those who saw so dimly could be further blinded by the light of full revelation. Jesus, therefore, does not reveal with complete clarity the true nature of the messianic kingdom which is unostentatious. Instead he filters the light through symbols, the resulting half-light is nevertheless a grace from God, an invitation to ask for something better and accept something greater.” Living Space

№ 166. Into the Wilderness

Lent is nigh.

The dessert sings its call.

I must head towards

Its sacred spaces. 

The soul will find its thirst.

Thirst must seek its water.

№ 108. Reflections On Photography

"Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." — Susan Sontag 

"Simply stated, photography is taking pictures. But more than that, it involves the eye and the soul of the photographer using a mechanical tool to record both a physical reality and an inner reality. As a religious photographer, I try to reveal to the subject I photograph an inner dignity of which the subject may not be aware.

№ 78. Sacraments

There are many sacrifices I have to endure in Manila. 

 

Pasig

One daily grinding thorn is commuting--- either by public transportation or private car. Long lines, traffic, heat, pollution, noise and all urban blight seem to converge like LDL or bad cholesterol in the arteries of the city.

It helps that someone---yes, a priest---had the vision to write about the art, he calls it "sacrament", of waiting.

That dirty word, again. "Sacrament" has been so burdened with all layers of Catholic meanings for me that it's become almost sinister. I hesitate to use it.

But, admittedly, he nailed the insights in the experience and wrote damn well about it. So I must share the space with those nuggets about the art (for us secular folks) of waiting.

"Waiting is a mystery - a natural sacrament of life - there is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives. 

 

Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting (testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in self-control). We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations and bus depots are great temples of waiting filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one - or wait in sadness to say goodbye and give the last wave of hand. We wait for springs to come - or autumn - for the rains to begin and stop. And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the next stop." (Son of the Prodigal).