Sending bright love to a remarkable year

Another year is coming to an end. And another is rushing forward to greet us all! This was a year full of letting go, moving on and scaling mountains (figuratively). But a rewarding year indeed.

So I am very thankful to everyone who gave their warmth, gentleness and love to me. And also I am grateful to people whom I gave my love and care and concern. May we all find year 2013 another year of abundance of positive thinking, of creating good nurturing relationships and of giving of ourselves to serve humanity and the earth.

May love and hope kindle our hearts as we pave the paths of our lives.

Blessings and faith to all of us.

Of living alone and procrastination

Oh well here it's Christmas again, done with all the holiday shopping, endured the heavy traffic and survived long lines at the mall. And these experiences are all blown away by my immediate issue -- trying to live alone. My thoughts stray towards independence. Just how hard will it be if I just choose to live alone? Far from the familiar surroundings of every day existence? From the usual jeepney route? Maybe difficult at first but am sure its doable.

Which brings me to the next point - saving up. I read somewhere that expenses should just be 30% maximum of what one earns, mmm, so there. Oh well I am procrastinating, should be doing my paper right now but I just can't think of what to write yet, argh :(

Oh well after five minutes of staring at the screen, nada . . . and then I see my mom's traditional fruit salad just sitting peacefully inside our crowded ref now I can't help but be the 8-year-old version of myself, weee, Christmas is here ^^

What a year!

Lantern Parade

Whew! What a year huh ^^
No matter what, I am glad to have spent most of my time with these two lovely ladies, I am so blessed with their love and friendship.
More years to come!

Jumping into love

Sharing to you a wunnerful passage from Brainpickings, acts like a teaching mantra to me ^^

From the author of Brainpickings: But my favorite answer is to the all-engulfing question, How do we fall in love?. Author Jeanette Winterson offers this breathlessly poetic response:

You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump.

Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

PS You have to be brave.

Kindling new hope

Weird, every song starts to be meaningful again.
You make it harder for me to sleep at nights again ^^

Random thoughts

Here's a secret, there are times when I write posts for my blog like I have readers, but there are also times when I write just for the sake of. Just like this entry tonight.

I believe that we are all free to express ourselves, one form is that of writing. I write because it is my outlet. When my brain's too full, it is my habit to spill it to papers, but in this case, my blog. Words flow, echoing doubts, fears, self-criticism, hope, faith, self-redemption. All those processes kept my brain from focusing so i push my trusty fix-it button and then I begin to write. I write of my limitations, my agony, my guilt -- my pleasures, my hopes, my dreams, all of them safely tucked inside the pages of my volumes of diaries. 

Ohwell, lately my brain is being battered by all kinds of thoughts so I want to pour them out here too.

Been typing this one yesterday afternoon, might be that I was so affected by our discussion in my MA subject ancient Asia

I saw it and I know it is deep as well as high

Been feeling depressed lately and it is really long way down must be far and wide too. Too small, feeling confused too. But not really too much. Been telling myself there was a lesson in my undergraduate years about this religion ritual where they have to sacrifice virgin princesses. Then as the ritual was about to begin, there was a slight pause and the princess ran away. Nobody knows if she escaped and freed herself from the ritual or not. But the point is it is our basic instinct to preserve our life. It's our human instinct to save ourselves from impending danger. Now I am talking about it bec maybe it will help me in making decisions. It will help me shape my mind and my life. 

The way out is to create and to feel --- using experiences. To express my authentic self through arts and through my creations.

I also want to know what confucianism is and why Marx (in the Philosopher's Football) is demanding that Confucius has no free will?

*

And then existential questions kept bothering me this morning

How can we reconcile modern and ancient? Maybe that's basically the guiding question in my life right now. View things from a different perspective. It is maybe what that priestess was thinking about as she sought to escape from an unfair tradition.

Arts and emotions will rule my decisions and my perspectives. Maybe I can save as much from my sadness and despair. I will not be confrontational, I will just be the student of life, free to be taken everywhere. But these little drops of wisdom, I will take care close to my heart. Because one day it will grow to be a big picture for me and it will help me with my quest for truth. 

Consequences are present. So is our faith and rational thinking and compassion. Well maybe that's the universal. Or another question is what enables us to be reborn after death (metaphor) what forces are in action? Who are we? 

What connects us to life? What makes us human again after we are reduced to ashes? Common humanity? Instinct to survive? Quest for truth? What makes us persistent? What made us reach the other side? What drives us to continue living if we know that life is constant level up and constant challenges? Love I suppose. Because we are all one. How can I expand it? How can I understand it? You are me and I am you. What calls us back? Maybe love. It is not rational, cannot be anything that we can figure out. We just feel.

Harmony. Feelings. Emotions. Boundless.

Note:

I discovered Ancient Future ----> (bliss) *-*

A gem of Celtic Wisdom

For Freedom 

John O'Donohue

As a bird soars high
In the free holding of the wind,
Clear of the certainty of ground,
Opening the imagination of wings
Into the grace of emptiness
To fulfill new voyagings,
May your life awaken
To the call of its freedom.

As the ocean absolves itself
Of the expectation of land,
Approaching only
In the form of waves
That fill and pleat and fall
With such gradual elegance
As to make of the limit
A sonorous threshold
Whose music echoes back among
The give and strain of memory,
Thus may your heart know the patience
That can draw infinity from limitation.

As the embrace of the earth
Welcomes all we call death,
Taking deep into itself
The right solitude of a seed,
Allowing it time
To shed the grip of former form
And give way to a deeper generosity
That will one day send it forth,
A tree into springtime,
May all that holds you
Fall from its hungry ledge
Into the fecund surge of your heart.

A big wave of imagination engulfed me

It’s my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change…
Thomas Moore

Creativity

Got this from here.

So here comes full circle

Stars and dusts
Please help me with time management.

Feeling so dragged down by all my responsibilities.
Need to chill.

Circle. Circle. Ha! Ancient Asian History tomorrow, have to read! Read! Read!

But will read Haruki Murakami first, IQ84, wehehehe ^^

Eureka

The Philosophers' Football Match is a Monty Python sketch depicting a football match in the Olympiastadion at the 1972 Munich Olympics between philosophers representing Greece and Germany. Starring in the sketch are Archimedes (John Cleese), Socrates (Eric Idle), Hegel (Graham Chapman), Nietzsche (Michael Palin), Marx (Terry Jones) and Kant (Terry Gilliam).

Confucius is the referee and keeps times with an hourglass. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (sporting haloes) serve as linesmen.^[1] The German manager is Martin Luther. As play begins, the philosophers ponder their theories while walking on the pitch in circles.^[1] Franz Beckenbauer, the sole genuine footballer on the pitch and a "surprise inclusion" in the German team, is left more than a little confused.

The sketch was performed in the Grünwalder Stadion^{[citation needed]}. It originally featured in the second Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus episode and was later included in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982).^[2]

Outcome

Nietzsche receives a yellow card after claiming that Confucius has no free will. Confucius replies, "Name go in book". In the second half, Karl Marx replaces Ludwig Wittgenstein, but does nothing to advance the game. With just over a minute of the match remaining Archimedes cries out "Eureka!", takes the first kick of the ball and rushes towards the German goal. Socrates scores the only goal of the match in a diving header off a cross from Archimedes. As the sketch closes, the Germans dispute the call; "Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside." The slow-motion replay proves that according to the offside rule that was valid until 1990, Socrates was indeed offside.

Line Up

The names of the Greek philosophers in the line-up are displayed in German in the sketch.

Germany	Greece
Gottfried Leibniz (goalkeeper)	Plato (goalkeeper)
Immanuel Kant	Epictetus
Georg "Nobby" Hegel (capt)	Aristotle
Arthur Schopenhauer	"Chopper" Sophocles
Friedrich Schelling	Empedocles of Acragas
Franz Beckenbauer	Plotinus
Karl Jaspers	Epicurus
Karl Schlegel	Heraklitus
Ludwig Wittgenstein	Democritus
Friedrich Nietzsche	Socrates (capt)
Martin Heidegger	Archimedes
Karl Marx - substituting Wittgenstein in the 2nd half

(Wittgenstein was, of course, Austrian.)

Taken from Wikipedia

Finally out of the woods ^^

Ayon kay Lourd: 

Ang sarap mawala, ang sarap magwala
Ang sarap maligaw sa mundong tulala

Yun lang :D

Tita Oset's wedding (25th anniversary renewal of vows)

At Crowne Regency Hotel 

Me and my cousin

Tita Oset and I

Me, Tita Oset and Tita Anabelle (Matron of Honor)

The wedding!

The bride and groom

A post about longing: Will I ever find you?!

Ah such sweet voice, Sir Paul <3

When will I ever find the one?
Where are you BTW? Detour? Flight delay? Traffic?

:'(

Digging Leonard Cohen

Probably one of the best music videos I've seen.

In my secret life / Leonard Cohen

That's how it goes

Everybody Knows | Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded 
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed 
Everybody knows that the war is over 
Everybody knows the good guys lost 
Everybody knows the fight was fixed 
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich 
That's how it goes 
Everybody knows 

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking 
Everybody knows that the captain lied 
Everybody got this broken feeling 
Like their father or their dog just died 

Everybody talking to their pockets 
Everybody wants a box of chocolates 
And a long stem rose 
Everybody knows 

Everybody knows that you love me baby 
Everybody knows that you really do 
Everybody knows that you've been faithful 
Ah give or take a night or two 
Everybody knows you've been discreet 
But there were so many people you just had to meet 
Without your clothes 
And everybody knows 

Everybody knows, everybody knows 
That's how it goes 
Everybody knows 

Everybody knows, everybody knows 
That's how it goes 
Everybody knows 
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leonard+cohen/everybody+knows_20082809.html ] 
And everybody knows that it's now or never 
Everybody knows that it's me or you 
And everybody knows that you live forever 
Ah when you've done a line or two 
Everybody knows the deal is rotten 
Old black joe's still pickin' cotton 
For your ribbons and bows 
And everybody knows 

And everybody knows that the plague is coming 
Everybody knows that it's moving fast 
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman 
Are just a shining artifact of the past 
Everybody knows the scene is dead 
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed 
That will disclose 
What everybody knows 

And everybody knows that you're in trouble 
Everybody knows what you've been through 
From the bloody cross on top of calvary 
To the beach of malibu 
Everybody knows it's coming apart 
Take one last look at this sacred heart 
Before it blows 
And everybody knows 

Everybody knows, everybody knows 
That's how it goes 
Everybody knows 

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows 
That's how it goes 
Everybody knows 

Everybody knows

Meet Kian, the new family dog!

Mom loves Kian

Resting from the hype of national holiday Nov 1 and Nov 2, as we catholic countries go back to trace our root connections by visiting our ancients who passed away.

My family's go-to place was Heritage Park in Makati City. So aside from participating in the age-old national tradition, we also had mini-reunion. Here are some pictures from that full day of walk, picnic style sit-downs and plenty of fresh winds to keep us cool under the sunny sky.

BTW, yes, we have a family dog, the name's Kian, you will see this adorable dog on the pictures below^^

Pagoda-like structure at the heart of Heritage Park

Dad entering ala-Chinese Pagoda structure in the middle of
Heritage Park. Cool ^^

Inside Pagoda

And folks, here is the adorable dog Kian ^^

Kian getting pet by dad

And another picture ^^

Kian <3

Good reads

Here are some interesting quotes to make us think and feel about our journey in our lives so far: 

You’re a gorgeous mystery with a wild heart and a lofty purpose. But like all of us, you also have a dark side — a part of your psyche that snarls and bites, that’s unconscious and irrational, that is motivated by ill will or twisted passions or instinctual fears.

It’s your own personal portion of the world’s sickness: a mess of repressed longings, enervating wounds, ignorant delusions, and unripe powers. You’d prefer to ignore it because it’s unflattering or uncomfortable or very different from what you imagine yourself to be.
– Rob Brezsny

A line from the movie, "A Dangerous Beauty"

Veronica Franco: I confess that as a young girl I loved a man who would not marry me for want of a dowry. I confess I had a mother who taught me a different way of life, one I resisted at first but learned to embrace. I confess I became a courtesan, traded yearning for power, welcomed many rather than be owned by one. I confess I embraced a whore's freedom over a wife's obedience. I confess I find more ecstasy in passion than in prayer. Such passion is prayer. I confess I pray still to feel the touch of my lover's lips. His hands upon me, his arms enfolding me... Such surrender has been mine. I confess I pray still to be filled and enflamed. To melt into the dream of us, beyond this troubled place, to where we are not even ourselves. To know that always, this is mine. If this had not been mine-if I had lived any other way-a child to her husband's will, my soul hardened from lack of touch and lack of love... I confess such endless days and nights would be a punishment far greater than you could ever mete out. You, all of you, you who hunger so for what I give yet cannot bear to see that kind of power in a woman. You call God's greatest gift- ourselves, our yearning, our need to love - you call it filth and sin and heresy... I repent there was no other way open to me. I do not repent my life.

Just about time

Waking up from dream to dream as I nursed my high fever all day in bed. Dreams containing the people I love, the people I long to be with, people revealing what connection we have -- the magic thread that connects us to this life cycle. Dreams revealing truths, however it hurts. Sometimes messy dreams. Sometimes incomprehensible dream as how the dew feels when leaving the tip of a grass at dawn.

Must be the full moon again. Feeling deeply about my failed loves, failed dreams, failed relationships. Sighing from one minute to the next. Waiting for your email. Receiving calls from a worried lover. Reading blogs, trying desperately to connect to something that might give life meaning. What I feel is pain, dull pain in particular. Dull that I don't know how to release it. So dull that I cannot even contain it inside me anymore. Pains and frustrations, here are the bitter dishes that will keep me company to cold and empty dinner tonight. Sometimes there are moments when I have to resist the call of melancholy, but it is as we all know persistent, just like the cycle of the moon -- full, quarter, balsamic, new. Again and again this will continue, again and again this cycle will unfold whether we like it or not. It will conquer us and  its waters will destroy our sandcastles -- oh well pain I am so used to you now.

What's the point of building when it is meant to be destroyed? What's the point of connection when we cannot really maintain it, after just days, we become strangers again. It is like a helpless pattern.

As the light of the sun fill the light-less moon, I want to reveal my pains and sufferings. I want the world to know that I am just human, that I can bear just the minimum of it. Because pain as much as truth, dehumanizes. I want to reveal the pain of longing, the pain of hoping, the pain of believing. But I guess the world is just too fragile for my hurts. Above all the noise of the city and the muzak of the neighboring street, it was just stale air -- nothing above that will take this pain to a higher being for immediate healing. No, I grew too bitter to believe that.

That it depends on us to redeem ourselves. Sariling kain, sariling busog. How religion make life so dry and brittle, how I feel so alone. How relationships can bring me to the top and topple me down unaware to the deep pit.

But I know deep inside, as I rescue myself from myself -- from utter pain to a place of hope and resurrection, that we are capable of that spark of hope to guide us through the dark. It is when faced with difficult questions that we remember our divine heritage. That we are capable of dragging ourselves out of misery, melancholy, pain and loneliness, it has to happen from deep within. That spark is the other part of us that we forget as we pay all our attention to mundane life. It must be time to wake up to that sparkling side of us. We are complete from the beginning, we just have to be painfully aware of it, every single second of our lives. The pain and melancholy make the soil of sparkling side of us rich, that we are ready for its eventual fruition. That it is calling us to wake up to a bigger part of us. The better part of us.

Maybe it's not too late. As I nurse my fever and as I watch the full moon from my window, I offer a silent prayer that we will reveal to ourselves that sparkling side of us. It is just about time.

Words to live by

Modern-day Ilustrado

Getting ready for the big ride ^^

Lovely morning

Mornings couldn't be better

Waking up to a romantic sky makes all my troubles melt away. Today is rather nearing bed weather, a reason to stay in bed, all day ^^

But people call and woke me up, that's the next best thing in the world: to be needed by friends!

So I got my mug and heat up water for tea. Sipping tea while talking to special people in my life, couldn't be better than this.

Today I welcome the sweet smell of Holiday Season in the air. The overcast sky helps to make the mood more home-y and romantic. I love this day. Hope everyone is having a good day too.

Listening to: Hotel Song by Regina Spektor

A post for you

He is music. He is the air containing music. He brings the harmony of every aspect which magically makes good music together. The divine collaboration that establishes order way beyond the physical realm, way beyond reason, way beyond what I considered truth and real, tangible and proven.

His music rules my quiet fixed air until that moment when I tossed a bagful of question to that mesmerizing orchestra he brings with him everywhere he goes.

Although I ask him difficult questions, I can feel him deeply beyond the incapacity to respond. The genuine need to keep the harmony in the face of debate. The gentleness behind the answers uttered just to provide a semblance of conversation. Gently pushing forward the reality contained in a soft voice which says 'i know it's not enough, but i care' -- of course an interpretation of the verbal answer.

If only he knew that I have decided long ago that there are questions that exist without answers. Getting used to that blissful space of self-preservation strategy, I learned ages ago during university days that questions are form of reaching common ground, to cover the spaces between two souls. To bridge the gap built over time. Not all questions are meant to be answered. There are some that just needed to be heard. Some that needed release. Some that only be asked to people who I intimately care about.

Self-preservation. That old devil of strategy to keep me going from one level to another as I climb mountains in life's journey. That familiar way of living, not unlike breathing, to keep the boundaries clear as crystal. To prevent one from stepping to the softest side of me. Just the thought of someone crossing that clear edge of border makes me cringe. Nobody can cross that else I will be as fragile as Daly's clocks. Dissolving, shapeless, melting into the person who dare cross the boundary. I will be history long before the seconds hand move to the next bead.

Now I am left with tides of emotion. I don't know what moves me from one moment to the next when my thoughts were just occupied by him. Maybe that's life for me now, you just go and do stuff because you have to go and do stuff. Swinging from one end to the other - moving through the motions. Tiring. It sounds so old. Antique and cranky and fragile. But it calms me for now.

Whenever reality hit me hard, my imagination tends to fly to the clear blue wide expanse of deep oceans. Inviting, exposed yet secretive, calling me with the voice so deep that I cannot resist the feeling of smooth sand beneath my feet, waves crashing into my weak knees eventually its gentle waters enveloping my whole body.

Ocean heals.

Waves full of possibilities. Ocean waters full of tiny worlds asking us to make it real. Small, subtle waves, produced by wind moving gently over the surface. Without air, who will hear the longing of the ocean? Without the playful wind, how will the ocean water gracefully move?

To you: You don't need to be so mature to answer these questions I tossed. I just need you to be. You showed me who you are by being still. You showed your love by answering me with a sweet post card you denied as your diary. The letter contains an invitation for further talks and conversation and chat over coffee. That alone made me feel so loved. I feel so cared for. I feel protected.

This is just our beginning.

New good winds coming

Moon is in its dark phase, signaling its balsamic period before it finally turns new. The current moon cycle is ending now, looking back at the past month, I did a lot! It was productive because I was able to contribute a lot to my community, friends and family.
This coming new moon I am now incubating more ideas that I want to grow and manifest. Sounds exciting ^^ I will fill all of my little fragile tiny seeds of ideas with love and kindness so they will grow as sturdy and solid source of happiness.
I say goodbye to the old that don't serve me anymore and hug tight those lessons and ideas that helped me grow.
I say welcome to the gifts that the universe is sending me, I will take care of them like abundant harvests that I can share to friends and people within my radius.

I will cherish each moment of life with deeper respect and profound gratitude because each second is a treasure that contains infinite possibilities.

But you know what? Miracles happen. Out of the blue good stuff happens. It’s the moments in between, most of the moments, that need our love. - Aliza

Inspire your Friday

Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

~ Letters to a young Poet
   Rainer Maria Rilke

Wise words

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.” 
― Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God 4

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. -Joseph Campbell
*
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again. -Joseph Campbell
*

“The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.” 
― Joseph Campbell

Easy Sunday

And today is a lazy day, unleashing the home-buddy in me. But still I want to accomplish stuff, so here is my Sunday list ^^

1. Write snail mails, so far, I have yet to reply to 8 letters.
2. Accomplish my christmas shopping list for family, friends and officemates.
3. Send postcards.
4. Start snail mails for friends XD
5. Maybe wash later
6. Update my diary.

So this is an easy Sunday, playing easy as Sunday Morning in my head ^^

Also, before I end this entry, I will paste the image of this book that I will give as a sembreak gift to myself. Here it is.

Some words of wisdom from him:
"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Pictures from September, the month that was ^^