ghost dancers

This is an homage to Mary Oliver and her poem Ghosts - her moving sermon for the lost bison herds of the American pioneer west, killed to starve the Native American tribes out.

It is also a eulogy to the sakadas of Negros Island - the migrant Filipino farm laborers who watched their children helpless as they starved to death, at the height of the Marcos martial law sugar plunder.

Bayan Negros protest streamer says, "behind the smiles of MassKara lie hunger and poverty."

In a decade of deliberate historical distortion the dictator's heirs have returned - brandishing their ill-gotten wealth in a bid to retell the tale of their ugly, nasty past into a burnished fable of their own making.

wisdom & ignorance

The Buddhist scholar monk Bhikkhu Bodhi explains that ignorance is not just an absence of knowledge - “It is an insidious and volatile mental factor incessantly at work inserting itself into every compartment of our inner life. It distorts cognition, dominates volition, and determines the entire tone of our existence.”

Whereas ignorance obscures the true nature of things, wisdom removes the veils of distortion - enabling us to witness a situation in its essential mode of being - through our direct perception and not clouded over by filters and bias. 

burned out utility pole - photo © Igor Podgorny

Training in wisdom is rooted in the development of insight (vipassana-bhavana) - a deep and comprehensive seeing into the nature of existence which fathoms the truth of our being - from our own experience. 

decolonize holidays

Columbus Day - also known as Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Heritage Day), Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Indigenous Resistance Day) or Día de la Diversidad Cultural (Cultural Diversity Day), and Día de la Raza - is the contentious controversial commemoration of historic events that started on this day in 1492 as seen through very different lenses. 

© Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

On one hand, some argue that this date was the beginning of the history of the modern American nations with the introduction of the American continent to the rest of the world. This Eurocentric view focuses on the colonizers' outlook. 

celebrating Indigenous groups & tribal communities across the globe

The other perspective is October 12, 1492 was the start of a process of death and subjugation of native indigenous people by European nations. This view states that celebrating the person who made that possible (Christopher Columbus) is insensitive and erroneous.