Brookside Baby
Friday, January 31, 2014
Love 'em, love her
"Be thankful for those individuals that help you keep your head on straight and your smile in place. Love them like there's no tomorrow." - a tweet from Terry Alex who believes that "positivity is contagious. Compliments are priceless. Encouragement and praise should be endless.Faith brings them all together."
During her last visit to the thunders of Pasig (code for tanda), The Button plucked the santan flowers off the hedge planted by her great grandfather in the 1970s in a kind of counting game. There are new flowers to greet the Year of the Blue Wooden Horse. My smile is in place again. Photo by Babeth Lolarga
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Comfy with uncertainty
"When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life." - Eckhart Tolle
More than a decade ago, I stood to watch the sun rise on an open field in Clark, Pampanga. Then Inquirer travel editor Chato Garcellano had sent me there to write about and take pictures of a hot-air balloon festival--I think it has become an annual thing every February. And February is only "three sleeps" away--that's American Anglicizing of the Pinoy phrase tatlong tulog na lang.
Alice M. Sun-Cua, physician, poet and essayist, has this book of travel tales with a title that never fails to make me smile: Riding Towards the Sunrise. So thank you, January, even though we're not done with you yet. February and Year of the Horse, here we, who are still around, here we come riding to more risings of the spirit and of the sun!
Here's to uncertainties, possibilities and mornings like this. From the smudges you can tell it's an old print, not something digital. Photo by Babeth Lolarga
More than a decade ago, I stood to watch the sun rise on an open field in Clark, Pampanga. Then Inquirer travel editor Chato Garcellano had sent me there to write about and take pictures of a hot-air balloon festival--I think it has become an annual thing every February. And February is only "three sleeps" away--that's American Anglicizing of the Pinoy phrase tatlong tulog na lang.
Alice M. Sun-Cua, physician, poet and essayist, has this book of travel tales with a title that never fails to make me smile: Riding Towards the Sunrise. So thank you, January, even though we're not done with you yet. February and Year of the Horse, here we, who are still around, here we come riding to more risings of the spirit and of the sun!
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
To Oscar, happy trails
"There is protection accorded by the bill of rights not just to freedom of the press, but to freedom of expression in general." - Harry Roque
I'm always on the lookout for a boost that'll put me on the right track for the rest of the day. Or even for just this new morning. Attorney Roque's latest commentary in Vera Files has just given me the boost I need that caffeine no longer can give because I am slowly lessening its intake until my system fully rejects it. Aging requires some changing.
Because the day is new and ripe with possibilities, I am reminded, too, that it is right to put a song in one's heart when one wakens. Puwede bang bumati o magpaalam man lang kay Ginoong Oscar Dipasupil?
Oskie, bro and friend to Ester, skipped this life on the 24th of January and has become a heavenly intercessor to his two surviving sisters (the other is Dipsy who's from Oz) and other beloveds. Today is his cremation and inurnment day.
I have good memories of that chap, among them how he carefully read the lines, especially those in the newspaper his sister continues to work for. He was doing the Reader Advocate's duties unofficially. To Oskie, now that you're beyond the bluest sky, thanks for the times I hitched a ride in your car, those times you pointed this and that out in my article in your quiet, measured tones while I sat in Ester's garden or your living room while I waited for her to waken.
More than anything, thank you for being that old reliable steadfast pillar in Ester's life. She'll be all right in time and back to doing the work she loves in the hallowed Dipasupil tradition of being press guardians and fighters.
Some trees my Dad and another old family reliable, Mang Cabiz, planted. Blogger sends thoughts upward to mingle with The Saints and Intercessors. Photo by Babeth Lolarga
I'm always on the lookout for a boost that'll put me on the right track for the rest of the day. Or even for just this new morning. Attorney Roque's latest commentary in Vera Files has just given me the boost I need that caffeine no longer can give because I am slowly lessening its intake until my system fully rejects it. Aging requires some changing.
Because the day is new and ripe with possibilities, I am reminded, too, that it is right to put a song in one's heart when one wakens. Puwede bang bumati o magpaalam man lang kay Ginoong Oscar Dipasupil?
Oskie, bro and friend to Ester, skipped this life on the 24th of January and has become a heavenly intercessor to his two surviving sisters (the other is Dipsy who's from Oz) and other beloveds. Today is his cremation and inurnment day.
I have good memories of that chap, among them how he carefully read the lines, especially those in the newspaper his sister continues to work for. He was doing the Reader Advocate's duties unofficially. To Oskie, now that you're beyond the bluest sky, thanks for the times I hitched a ride in your car, those times you pointed this and that out in my article in your quiet, measured tones while I sat in Ester's garden or your living room while I waited for her to waken.
More than anything, thank you for being that old reliable steadfast pillar in Ester's life. She'll be all right in time and back to doing the work she loves in the hallowed Dipasupil tradition of being press guardians and fighters.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Unafraid of the creative overflow because we're fueled by faith
"You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith." - Anais Nin in a letter to an aspiring writer
I often wonder if I am in any way living up to my role as a teacher, even if I'm only part-time. Most times I have to mind my duties as someone who happens to know how to write a little or over-much, depending on the reader. Somehow I can still make a shaky living out of writing. It doesn't matter anymore that the earnings still add up to a little below the poverty line at month's end, and I always need a lifeline extension from family in Pasig and in Baguio, especially my partner of close to 30 years (I silently thank Rolly Fernandez and the heavens in my morning rituals).
There isn't much of a difference between me and the help that my family in both cities hires to do house chores. Part of my work sometimes involves cleaning up other people's manuscripts, making sense of them, even if these sometimes cause me symptoms of stress like falling hair and growing irritability.
In one of the articles I found in the Web, it said that those who serve--nannies, domestic helpers, gardeners, care-givers of the sick and dying, dishwashers--they are the truest philanthropists in these times. The work I do forces me to sit for hours and hours. I don't know how long I will hold out, but I always finish, or try to anyway, what I begin. Nothing ennobling about lengthy sitting and enlarging one's avoirdupois, but I'm grateful just the same.
I don't know where or how this morning's blog entry will end. I wanted to begin with re-telling how Teacher Maite dela Rosa and I accompanied some high school students enrolled in the Community of Learners creative writing class on a field trip to the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings and the Ateneo Art Gallery upstairs this past Saturday.
Born in the late 1990s, the students are part of a generation that woke to a digital age. Something like the notebook of poet Angela Manalang Gloria, with the Bureau of Education's logo stamped on the cover, looked supremely exotic to them.
As I carefully opened a page (for me the experience was close to touching the shroud of Turin, having worshiped for quite sometime at Manalang Gloria's altar, though invisible), there were audible gasps and comments like "Look at her penmanship!" I asked if they knew what a fountain pen looked like. A boy answered, "It's something you have to constantly refill."
I turned another page that showed Ms. Gloria's handwritten draft for a poem that left clues to her creative process: how she crossed out some lines, then replaced them with another. That detail started a short conversation on the process of revisions and discouraging the use of correcting fluid. But sometimes one or two kids can't help being obsessive about erasures--part of a young writer's quirks that I have to respect.
We saw the typescript of scholars Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre's interview of Edith Tiempo. It led to a brief discussion on what a typewriter looked and sounded like, how it used to be the writer's tool. A girl said, "My lola still uses one." And I saw that lola in my head composing her lines to the clackity clack of an Underwood or a Remington.
Maybe in my next life, I shall be working in the stacks, meaning, become a library chick.
Seated around the first table at ALIWW: Mark Lee, Bea Buenaventura, Julian Zapata, Teacher Maite and Miki Cabochan. Girls at the next table: Isabel Arellano, Mika Mamauag and Joan Torres. Standing are Gio Gutierrez and Janrick Razon.
That's us at the gallery with part of Rodel Tapaya's exhibit behind us. His show "Bato Balani" will be the subject of our next writing exercise.
I often wonder if I am in any way living up to my role as a teacher, even if I'm only part-time. Most times I have to mind my duties as someone who happens to know how to write a little or over-much, depending on the reader. Somehow I can still make a shaky living out of writing. It doesn't matter anymore that the earnings still add up to a little below the poverty line at month's end, and I always need a lifeline extension from family in Pasig and in Baguio, especially my partner of close to 30 years (I silently thank Rolly Fernandez and the heavens in my morning rituals).
There isn't much of a difference between me and the help that my family in both cities hires to do house chores. Part of my work sometimes involves cleaning up other people's manuscripts, making sense of them, even if these sometimes cause me symptoms of stress like falling hair and growing irritability.
In one of the articles I found in the Web, it said that those who serve--nannies, domestic helpers, gardeners, care-givers of the sick and dying, dishwashers--they are the truest philanthropists in these times. The work I do forces me to sit for hours and hours. I don't know how long I will hold out, but I always finish, or try to anyway, what I begin. Nothing ennobling about lengthy sitting and enlarging one's avoirdupois, but I'm grateful just the same.
I don't know where or how this morning's blog entry will end. I wanted to begin with re-telling how Teacher Maite dela Rosa and I accompanied some high school students enrolled in the Community of Learners creative writing class on a field trip to the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings and the Ateneo Art Gallery upstairs this past Saturday.
Born in the late 1990s, the students are part of a generation that woke to a digital age. Something like the notebook of poet Angela Manalang Gloria, with the Bureau of Education's logo stamped on the cover, looked supremely exotic to them.
As I carefully opened a page (for me the experience was close to touching the shroud of Turin, having worshiped for quite sometime at Manalang Gloria's altar, though invisible), there were audible gasps and comments like "Look at her penmanship!" I asked if they knew what a fountain pen looked like. A boy answered, "It's something you have to constantly refill."
I turned another page that showed Ms. Gloria's handwritten draft for a poem that left clues to her creative process: how she crossed out some lines, then replaced them with another. That detail started a short conversation on the process of revisions and discouraging the use of correcting fluid. But sometimes one or two kids can't help being obsessive about erasures--part of a young writer's quirks that I have to respect.
We saw the typescript of scholars Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre's interview of Edith Tiempo. It led to a brief discussion on what a typewriter looked and sounded like, how it used to be the writer's tool. A girl said, "My lola still uses one." And I saw that lola in my head composing her lines to the clackity clack of an Underwood or a Remington.
Maybe in my next life, I shall be working in the stacks, meaning, become a library chick.
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