You know it's summer...

...when you cannot resist the invitation to spend time by a huge body of water even if there are a gazillion filial duties to fulfill and a gazillion more writing deadlines to meet, thus a heavy beach bag it was I carried with the laptop inside. I exaggerate when I use the word gazillion, but the pressure does feel like a gazillion albatrosses hanging around my neck. Oh, to be at the beach with kin spirits! It was an answered prayer.

With the blogger in this photo taken by journalist Alan Robles are Dr. Margarita Holmes, Gemma Luz Corotan-Kolb of Casa Amara in San Juan, Batangas, and Dr. Melen Araos. All our hair are wet from a swim, except for Gemma, Casa Amara's moving body-spirit, who was earlier in the kitchen supervising the making of canapes and guinataang bilo-bilo to be served to us.

In the book I brought with me to the Casa, To Remember to Remember (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), author Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo observed how writers of autobiographical narratives are impelled by a need to recount a past experience, begin a personal exploration and "expand to become an engagement with the world." When women gather, you feel there is something inside them in need of healing and recovery. The break from the urban life that my kinswomen live and move in was more than welcome. I for one will have stories to tell no longer in the farthest future but in the nearest one...while there is time.

To be 90 and furiously writing

In one of his essays in his collection Why We Are Hungry, F. Sionil Jose, National Artist for Literature, wrote six years ago, "In a couple of days, I will be 84--a very old man. I have earned the privilege of saying what I please because now, I know so much--and yet, I also know so little. Indeed, the whole of living is a learning experience." On your 90th year today, Manong Frankie, I wish you a still hearty appetite for food, for life, for letters. Onto to next novel. Mabuhay! Photo by Babeth Lolarga

The ordinary and the ecstatic

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

-William Martin

On an ordinary day in the week just ended, I got up after hours of reading, sitting and trying to put words together to stretch a bit, see what's going in the world outside the nook where I do my work.

From a corner of my mother's kitchen, I saw this play of light and shadow. If I only knew how to turn on the video component of an old digicam, I would've recorded the dancing shadows of the atis tree from outside, how the sun during the sunset hour caused this shadow play to happen.

Yes, Mr. Martin, I feel like that ordinary child who happened upon something extraordinary.

Thank you, oh Divine Master, who leads us not into temptation but to visions of the ecstatic in the every day.

Photos by Babeth Lolarga