The seeker is constantly challenged. Enlightenment and evolution are what our souls long for. Our hearts cry out for clarity and discernment in search of our spiritual path and self realization. There are no solid or easy answers. It is our shared experience and compassion that sustain and support us through life.
Our home island of Negros Occidental declared a state of calamity in the wake of Typhoon Odette - a disaster that wreaked so much havoc in its wake.
a long standing record of service to the nation & its people
With local national elections in full swing this becomes a double edged sword. Those working on the ground are often hampered by show boating politicians who have until now been largely absent to local citizens and constituents.
Pinoy pride fills our heart and spirit to overflowing as we listen to Maria Ressa's acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremony.
Philippine VP Leni Robredo with Maria Ressa
The Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded today in Oslo, Norway. This year's winners were two journalists honored for their unrelenting pursuits of truth in a world becoming less free.
Dmitry Muratov, editor of one of Russia's last independent news sources, was recognized for his work. Philippines journalist Maria Ressa, editor of Rappler.com, called for a reform of social media platforms.
Nobel Peace Prize Awardees - MLK & Maria Ressa
At stake are truth, facts, our democracy - threatened most by social media and technology. Where the spread of lies, laced with anger and hate, is prioritized over facts. Without the facts, you can't have truth. If you don't have truth, you can't have trust.
Without trust, all is compromised and much is lost. These are the folks at the forefront of this fight. Kudos to them for holding the line for truth and accountability for the rest of us.
This win is a victory for press freedom advocates across the Philippines and the world. Mabuhay!
As we commemorate the 158th birth anniversary of the The Father of the PhilippineRevolution, Andres Bonifacio - may we honor his revolutionary spirit by upholding freedom for all Filipinos.
We are proud to be Filipino and have a hero like Andres Bonifacio, who fought for, encouraged, and supported his ideals, fellowmen, and country.
As he did, may we love our country more and complain about Filipino behavior and our local situation less. Act as we must to support and improve matters instead - in however way we can.
Dissent was my primary mode of operation growing up - at home, in school, with relationships. I believed moving to the United States of America would be less repressive and corrupt than the false democracy of my Philippine homeland.
Jingle dancers at Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, July 2020
I relocated in 2006 and with Barack Obama as US president from 2009 to 2017 was all too easily lulled into the belief that this was truly the land of equal opportunity, freedom and liberty. With the US' reputation abroad and the American economy significantly improved we all had our blinders on.
The visual illusion being imposed on Filipino voters [and played on the world stage] by the political machinery driving yet another Marcos campaign is both pathetic and scary.
We had the sheer luck of escaping a world order of Trump and his Trumpians only because his man-baby ego-driven persona is so huge it is his own giant obstacle.
This too is the sad and silly story behind the Marcos machinations and maneuverings to get their lone male heir to win back their glory days in politics and erase their bloody history.
Today's session on the Shaman's Cave discussesthe ability to meet our future self. Given the news of the Amazon rainforest having tipped past salvation - we need all the help we can get.
There is an understanding in many spiritual traditions and sciences like quantum physics that we inhabit multiple realities. On a personal and communal basis how do we make a difference and have the support we need?
In shamanic journeying different choices offer alternative options that impact a variety of our future possibilities. Let us hold the intention of lightening up and growing less dense - together and collectively.
Evolution is a worthwhile state of being yet it's not an easy or comfortable place to be in. Tested and challenged to stretch and expand - often when we're resistant or ill prepared.
Like Paul Atreides, the central figure in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. Young, displaced, and unsure of himself - his safe Caladan home world lost, moved to the harsh alien world of Arrakis/Dune - all new and unfamiliar, betrayed and left to survive or die.
Frank Herbert warns about society's tendencies to "give over every decision-making capacity" to a charismatic leader, a hero. Paul himself battles ceaselessly against inner motives and outer driven factors that pull and push at him constantly.
Any of us today all too easily feel the rub and friction of ceaseless and constant change - epic proportions held over daunting obstacles. All the subtlety seems lost - along with any clarity or comfort we strive to maintain through these quantum shifts and leaps - in a roller coaster, run amok world.
What tools would you want for support and help right now? What could aid best in the restoration of our well being? For ourselves, for our world, for our future?
Make your list and let's get this conversation going!
October starts the last quarter and brings the year to a close as the holiday season kicks in. Here are a few significant days we celebrate around the world.
Living in a DUtarded world where lives, liberty, loyalties have been corrupted and compromised these five years has been a living hell. Very little hope could peek through, even with the tireless efforts of the most driven and committed.
Rodrigo Duterte's heavy handed reign of heart stopping killings, profanity riddled incoherence, and disgustingly voracious greed has brought the Philippines to an all time low - even worse than our Marcos martial law dystopian days.
Mindanao Mafia father & daughter tandem - Digong Palpak & Calamity Sara
For the past five years we watched stunned and shocked while this inept madman unraveled before our gaze and the malignant tumor of his greed and madness filled us with dread and poison. In this dark hopelessness, it was the women he targeted with his vileness - who rose up and showed us how to diffuse and debunk his ugliness.
brave women of substance who stood up to and challenged Duterte
Youth activists GretaThunberg and Autumn Peltier criticize world leaders over empty words and broken promises. We know something is terribly wrong when our children are at the forefront of a fight we stirred up long before they were born.
Autumn Peltier is a 15-year-old Anishinaabe clean-water activist from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. Peltier has been nominated three times for the International Children’s Peace Prize and continues to fight for Indigenous communities around the world. In 2019, she was also named chief water commissioner by the Anishinabek Nation, which means she speaks on behalf of 40 First Nations in Ontario.
Greta Thunberg is a 17-year-old climate activist from Stockholm. In 2018 she picketed Swedish parliament, projected her message around the world, and addressed the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019, before becoming Time Magazine’s youngest-ever Person of the Year and being named one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women.
It's not surprising that more urban trees lower the levels of heat and pollution. Although many cities maintain tree-planting programs, not all canopies have equivalent value.
A new analysis from the American Forests conservation organization states that the US needs to plant more than half a billion trees across 500 metropolitan areas and 150,000 local communities.
“Whatever you’re looking for is just beyond yourself.” ~ David Whyte
David Whyte is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies.
The author of eight books of poetry and four books of prose, he holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas.
He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.
One of the things we almost always have is a sense of heartbrokenness about the world. And certainly that's a collective experience at the moment.
Around our climate, around Afghanistan, around Israel, Palestine, around so many dynamics in the world. And the temptation is to turn away - one of the great central invitations of poetry is to say no.
Actually this doorway of difficulty, this vulnerability, this axis of heartbreak, is exactly the road that you'd be invited along. You could don't get to start from anywhere except this place of collective sorrow.
Sweet balm for our troubled times and aching soulfulness.
For Filipino Americans who survived the yoke of the Marcoses' conjugal kleptocracy and dictatorship, September 11 dredges up too many dark and devastating horrors.
On his 104th birth anniversary, the scourge that is Ferdinand Marcos may be long dead. Yet his wife and spawn remain a Philippine treat and bleeding canker. Living on to perpetuate their entitled fantasies, empowered by all their ill-gotten wealth and boundless greed.
Even now, the Marcos minions are relentless in their fanatic frenzy to rewrite history in the name of their doomed dictator.
The failed and current president of the Philippines is one of them and with their money and support has grown into another horrible political figure. One that is bleeding our county's coffers dry as its citizenry die in droves due to the world's worst disastrously mismanaged COVID administration.
This is the typical US news headline that causes people all over the world to love hating on Americans. Perpetuating the image of cluelessness sadly all too true of folks that fly by and think they know better.
Good God! What makes America think that just because they pulled out of a 20 year war they created that they can announce the war is over and it will be so? Not by a long shot buddy!
When a full moon takes place, we experience revelations and clarity, we reap the rewards of our efforts, and we witness the maturation of a cycle.
With the sun and moon in opposition, the Leo-Aquarius polarity is activated. The light of the sun sheds awareness on our inner world and our subconscious emotional dynamics.
full moon over the Hudson River
The blue full moon in Aquarius brings a strong desire to make radical changes and reclaim our freedom and sovereignty. It is an invitation to make radically different choices to reshape the future and our reality.
The world is full of pageantry - beauty in infinite forms, outrageously generous gifts - pouring out of the Earth. The planet's bounty and harvest are our best gifts - its canopy of trees, the richness of our soils, the wilderness, its oceans - all creatures and elements of nature.
The human species is a part of all this, connected and never separate - even if we managed to have grown apart. The separateness, however real it feels - in our concrete cities and boxed up domiciles of convenience and comfort - is a manmade delusion.
Every soul longs for peace yet we are all meant to live a revolutionary life. Not only lives in revolution or revolt, though for too many that has been their all too sad and sorry fact.
Revolutionary in the true sense of the word: constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change. Be an agent of change.
Many cultures celebrate Midsummer on August 2 and this week is the peak. We are halfway through the summer in all its joy and glory and danger, with its COVID-sharing county fairs, political rodeos, and Olympic upsets.
Image by Jade Brookbank/Image Source/Getty Images
August begins with Lammas, Loaf Mass Day, Lughnasadh - the day in the Book of Common Prayer calendar when a loaf baked with flour from newly harvested grain is brought to church and blessed, God's blessing is sought for the growing crops.
Activist and author Steven Newcomb offers insights into historical truths gone unrecognized for centuries. He shares how the knowledge and wisdom systems of Original Nations and Peoples teach us how to harmonize ourselves with the insight that Life-is-Energy, and Love-of-Life (Aholtewakan in Lenape), is the true purpose of our existence. He shares his life's work, decoding the doctrine of dominance perpetuated by European and Christian colonizers.
Shawna Bluestar Newcomb shares how the Gift of Remembering allows us to connect with ourselves and among each other, to walk gracefully through the many lessons of our times, and to know the gift that our ancestors dreamed for us all. As we walk through a time of Great Reckoning, recent times of challenge, and events, we are given the opportunity to see what's been hidden in plain sight for too long. When we learn to sit with the uncomfortable with compassion, new awareness, a deep healing can occur.
Summer is really upon us now. Here in the Northeast it’s been a crazy, chaotic, polarized circus. Drought and flooding. Heat waves and blinding curtains of rain. Magnificent thunder crashes and electrifying lightning storms.
Sun and rain, hot days followed by cool nights, lots of sparkly days to balance hazy ones. Washing off all the grit and heat. People are happy, gardens are lush - it sure feels good to be alive!
With the recent death of a former decent president back in the Philippines and recent Fourth of July celebrations in the USA, issues regarding beliefs that drive and affect us have come up once more.
Patriotism islove for or devotion to one's country. The feeling of pride, devotion, and attachment to a homeland, as well as a feeling of attachment to other patriotic citizens. The feelings of attachment may be further bound up in factors like race or ethnicity, culture, religious beliefs, or history.
Nationalism is loyalty and devotion to a nation. Feelings of nationalism are based on a belief that one’s country is superior to all others. It also carries a connotation of distrust or disapproval of other countries, leading to the assumption that other countries are rivals.
They may have similarities but there's a world of difference between the two - they are not in the least synonymous. Patriotism is the love of one's identity and achievement to better the world and future generations. Nationalism is believing your identity and achievements are better than those of others.
Victims and martyred Filipinos have proved no-fail and fatal fodder for countless local campaigns - political and religious, personal or accidental. Any cause justifies trotting out this penultimate card, the sacrificial lamb.
That's what hundreds of years of colonization and the Catholic Church have bestowed on its loyal subjects - martyrs, martyrdom, martyrology. A future heavenly promise of a better afterlife to trump the current hellacious reality of an oppressive down trodden existence.
Providing a growing menu consisting of enthusiastic descriptions and ghoulish persecutions as various and horrid as can be invented by the human mind, inspired by a herd of raging demons. Or devilishly devised by Duterte driven trolls and minions, as we have today.
I have moved between islands and countries, counties and states a dozen times in my adult life. As often as every year or two in the past dozen years. It is always hard and so much is expended.
Far more taxing than the physical and logistical effort is the social, emotional and mental adjustment in a new environment. Uprooted and displaced before new roots ad connections can be created once more.
As the economy changes - aggravated by this global pandemic - isolation and quarantine have revealed that many tasks can be performed remotely. Sheltering in place has given us the space to redefine ourselves and explore more geographic flexibility.
Life has been paused from its wild and greedy rampage and destruction. Going against the status quo set up by governments and big industries, for some it's just the impetus needed to consider other options.
June 12 this year is the 123rd Anniversary of the Declaration of Philippine Independence. With the theme, “Kalayaan 2021: Diwa ng Kalayaan sa Pagkakaisa at Paghilom ng Bayan” (Spirit of Freedom in Unity and National Healing). It's been made more contentious by two other events.
It's also the year-long celebration thatmarks the Spanish and Filipino encounter in 1521. The 500th Anniversary has considerably divergent tales. As well as the year leading up to another presidential election come May 9, 2022.
Filipinos are immensely proud of our history of rebellion and revolution. Every Filipino child is raised knowing by heart the tale of Lapu-Lapu, the Mactan leader and hero who repelled and killed Magellan the foreign villain.
Our local perspective proudly retells how we successfully fought off a foreign invader and foiled the attempt to subjugate and colonize us. This forms a strong and solid foundation for our national pride and identity - who we were before we were colonized.
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious albino child, a sun child or anak araw from a rural Philippine village - the struggle and journey of self acceptance and discovery an artist and activist questioning the boundaries of gender.
From a childhood of parental neglect and abuse, to the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship - Talusan found love and comfort in a devoted grandmother who saw promise and potential where others gawked in awe and no consideration for this apparition they beheld.
Easily passing for white raised more questionable concerns for Talusan as an immigrant to the United States. An academic scholarship to Harvard opened access to elite circles of privilege while requiring Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and personal place in the gay community.
“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
Red dresses are the powerful symbol of MMIWG - Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. May 5 is National Day of Awareness for MMIWG. It highlights the statistics around violence amongst women and girls - showcasing native art, expression, resistance, and grievance.
Caitlin Jenner announcing her run for governor of California is just the kind of white supremacist entitlement that gets too many of us riled up all too easily. Just because she can does not mean it is advisable.
Why? Now that their reality show is over, this is what she wants? Does anyone really want any Jenner or Kardashian in office? Hell no! They can ran amok in their own self-publicized lives - thank you. Don't be wasting any of our hard earned tax payer money on their crazy scheme - please.
As many as one in five people are food deprived, especially in major urban centers where growing our own food is not an easy option. While the pandemic has highlighted and further exacerbated inequalities in our society, it has also brought forth more heroes and helpers in local neighborhoods.
This week in Philippines news a wave of community pantries have sprouted in the wake of the media buzz generated by the Maginhawa Community Pantry set up by Ana Patricia "Patreng" Non.
Music has been a lifeline during Covid - even if we haven’t all dabbled in picking or playing a chosen instrument - there's always Spotify or iTunes.
As Michael Spitzer points out, this shift towards isolated listening is only the latest stage in a transition from active participation in music to our passive consumption of it that has been going on for thousands of years.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology - Chiapas, Mexico
Professor Michael Spitzer brings together archaeological, sociological and historical observations, along with theories from biologists and musicologists, to tell the story of what his subtitle boldly claims to be A History of Life on Earth.
Written by Michael Spitzer
Read by Simon McBurney
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4
Released On:06 Apr 2021
Spitzer isn’t afraid of using a sweeping statement or a corny line, and his fractal compositional technique means he has to make do without the narrative thrust of a conventional, linear argument. But The Musical Human is full of delightful nuggets and sends the reader back to a world of musical examples time and time again.
After following the evolution of music over 165m years, he greets the contemporary split between professional performers and passive consumers with little more than a shrug: “We are where we are, and it is where it is.” If music is as central to human existence as he suggests, we can’t leave musicians dancing to the tune of Deliveroo. ~ Book of the Day, The Guardian
