Ulali | all my relations

The last day of 2023 and New Year's Eve 2024 is most definitely a special occasion - 123123.

May the works of our hands be rooted in reverence for Mother Nature. May we be sustained by the grace of the Sun, the Wind, the Waters, the sacred Land - and by each other.

The Ulali Project founders

to our elders who teach us

of our creation and our past

so we may preserve Mother Earth

for ancestors yet to come

we are the land

this is dedicated to our relatives 

 

"All Our Relations" sang by Ulali, lyrics by Pura Fe

Ulali's "All Our Relations" refers to the Garryowen March or Hale as it is known in the US. It was often used by the American military as they marched to massacre the Native Americans.

a good night

Noche Buena. Simbang Gabi. Misa de Gallo. All are cherished Filipino Christmas holiday traditions we hold warmly in our hearts. 

Simbang Gabi is the night mass Filipinos attend mass either late at night or in the early morning hours. It is a series of masses held daily for all nine days before Christmas. The belief holds that attending all nine masses will grant ones wish.

@dokmarkus via Instagram

Simbang Gabi can also have a nine-day novena procession that is a reenactment of the nativity of Christ known as the Panunulúyan.

behavioral reform

There are more parallels between how cults indoctrinate and control their members and how highly dysfunctional families perpetuate their abuse than most are led to believe. 

While there is no universal list of cult basics, one of the two most commonly used resources is that of clinical psychologist and cult expert Dr. Margaret Singer. 

Below are the criteria adapted from her “Conditions for Thought Reform,” 1995. 

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. The goal may be to make them deployable agents for the leadership, to get them to buy more courses, or get them to make a deeper commitment, depending on the leader's aim and desires.

Most abusive, highly dysfunctional families rely on their ability to keep young children within them isolated from the healthier norms of other families and society at large.

ANGER | character & context

Women are often discouraged from expressing anger and if they do, they're penalized. Writer Soraya Chemaly explains the ways women are socialized to suppress anger. 

Soraya Chemaly is a writer and director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project - an initiative dedicated to expanding women's civic and political participation.

art by Michelle Moirai

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage.

It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.

book cover art

what we are

In these times of uncertainty - tremulous, touchy, trying periods of violent upheaval and tremendous loss - hatred can all too easily overcome all else.

The curtain rises on a circus run amok - a carnage of vicious and pointed hatred. The quick and instant devastation of murderous violence directed at one another. Or a slow, seething barbarity borne from centuries of inherited bias.

Hell bent annihilation as deadly as blatant disregard for the universe and life. Human and non-human lives with which we share this fragile, irreplaceable planet are at a constant face off.

We are beyond shocked at what human beings are capable of - ambient and pervasive in our daily living and dying.

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? by Paul Gauguin

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 

The poet Jane Hirshfield is a serene and courageous voice of our time. An ordained Buddhist, humanitarian, planetarian, and advocate for the cosmos - questions how to end this mockery and fatal drama.

Her explorative poetry in Spell to Be Said Against Hatred is a master work of quiet, surefooted insistence, persistence, and perseverance of compassionate consideration.

Until each breath refuses they, those, them.
Until the Dramatis Personae of the book’s first page says “Each one is you.” 

Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another.
Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly “I.”
Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless chair.
Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves nonetheless bending.
Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird.
Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles.
Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat.
Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral.
Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless.
Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken.
Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing see themselves mirrors.
Until by “we” we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger.
Until by “I” we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and sounding and
         vanishing completely.
Until by “until” we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger,

         the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered. 

co-hearts

When ending comes

Cradle it in your arms like an egg, warm it with your body

so that someday when your back curves around it with grief

the bared bones of your shoulders

will breathe out wings.

© Sophia Rosenberg 2019, We'Moon 2023

Iniko © Sandra Stanton 2021

We don’t choose our relatives or our genetics,neither do we control what happens in the world around us. It's why relationships matter more - they gift us with enrichment and beauty.

Friendship bring joy to life. People we love can enrich our everyday experiences. We get to share with them the aspects of life we cherish

Our friendships help us through our challenges. Our friends provide support through hard times to make unimaginably difficult situations seem bearable.

Our individual preferences guide us toward the people who will best meet our particular social needs. With a little luck, we find buddies who can lend a hand and support us when needed. 

Our preferences are the key to finding friends who can buffer against feeling alone and provide the social, emotional and health benefits of friendly companionship. 

Tug O' War by Shel Silverstein

“I will not play at tug o’ war.

I’d rather play at hug o’ war,

Where everyone hugs

Instead of tugs,

Where everyone giggles

And rolls on the rug,

Where everyone kisses,

And everyone grins,

And everyone cuddles,

And everyone wins”

In our world at war on so very many fronts these simple words are a powerful salve for all wounds - old, festering, new.

Bared shoulder blades breathing out wings.

eclipse energy

A powerful transformation kicked off with the solar eclipse on October 14. With the lunar eclipse and the full hunter's moon this October 28 another phase of the experience unfolds. 

Eclipse season always brings great change that can also be seen in the physical - not just felt in surrounding energies. It brings changes to our energetic system and affects the physical reality of the higher timelines. 

how to guide

misleading misconceptions

The review of a show describes a point of view about a creative or cultural event in order to justify the experience. Whereas critiquing a show's production questions why the show was created and what consequences were produced. 

Reviews are where experience meets ideas. Being at a concert, a movie, an art exhibition, a restaurant - gives us cause to think. Maybe the experience is a catalyst for a brand-new idea - maybe it crystallizes something a long-held thought. It becomes something worth considering. 

basic & simple

Critiquing the production questions why a show was produced. What about the creation of the show do we prefer, dislike, condemn - where do we stand? Maybe something occurred that causes a strong reaction - maybe it compels us to speak up and give voice. It becomes something worth discussing. 

grandmother wisdom

A timely message from the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers:

As you move through these changing times be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to.

You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it.

Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother's grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle... and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.

Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings.

mestizo - a hybrid culture

I was born in Negros Island in the Philippine Ocean and migrated to the U.S. Spending time back and forth - half in and out of each country provides more insight and perspective into my family's hybrid culture. 

One day in an art history class, I read an article about migration and identity that discussed the amalgamation of culture. What is created when someone physically crosses a border and occupies new space? 

Sitio Tabucol in Barangay Bacong, Bago City, Negros Occidental

I thought of our parents and the ways my family participates in local and mestizo traditions. It made me dissect what our family’s hybrid culture presents as. Join me in an exploration of these sentiments. 

possibilities & probabilities - perseverance & persistence

Potential does not come to fruition in barren territory - even at the price of blood, sweat and tears. It is what differentiates the quitters from those who eventually succeed.
Every fellow Filipino and freedom fighter accepts this in their core being. All throughout recorded history it has been the rough road our countrymen are tested with every day.
Even the best among us have to cushion ourselves and take succor from the horror and beating meted year in and year out.

multi-generational trauma of the Philippines

A people known for their spirit of warmth and hospitality whose life force slowly leaks away in a country of parasitic politicians of few exceptions.
Much is wasted to expend scarce resources and ill-gotten wealth on keeping the masses fat dumb and happy on short term extravaganzas and fiestas.

heroic fallacy

Today marks National Heroes Day in the Philippines - a stark reminder of our long history of suffering and revolt against the powers that be - whether foreign colonizers or local overlords. 

Since the American colonial period the Philippine Legislature enacted Act No. 3827 on October 28, 1931 - designated every last Sunday of August as National Heroes Day. This date was last revised in 2007 to the last Monday of August as per Republic Act No. 9492. 

celebrating our true heroes - not some made up one

A day to honor and remember all known and unnamed national heroes who fought for the country's independence and freedom. Officially recognized or not Filipinos have long been martyred for countless reasons and causes - then and now. 

We idolize our heroes so much we even have a cemetery dedicated to our fallen heroes. This sacred ground has since been desecrated with the burial of a non-hero - our one and only dictator (to date), Ferdinand Marcos. 

Philippines People Power, 1986

We commemorate all our known and unsung heroes and their exemplary achievements on this day. We celebrate those who continue to inspire us - the fearless visionaries, the tireless advocates, the selfless souls.

Because of them - who stood against, fought bravely, risked their lives for country, justice, liberty - we have our freedom now. Let us remember and honor them always by continuing to fight for our rights. 

on display

Inspired by the resistance storytelling of Arundhati Roy, we cannot help but draw parallels between our countries. 

Prime Minister Modi and India's violently divisive history and politics raise the ghost of Marcos - the father and dictator - who birthed and raised our current baby boy heir and president. 

Roy's rage and frustration is apparent in her passionate love of people and country - vilely manipulated by decades of corruption and greed. 

mantra, prayer, plea - graphics by bhaktiCD.org

In all her heart rending stories her writing includes meditations on language - public as well as private - and the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in current disturbing times. 

The Philippines has always been plagued by leaders obsessed in their divine command. Whether pretended, promoted, or publicized in political, religious or other arenas - these folks prey on our beliefs and biases to gain power and prestige. 

the good, the bad, the ugly

We have had a home away from home in The Colony on Edgewater, New Jersey for going on 15 years now. Like many other pockets of haven wedged between busy city hubs it is being increasingly encroached upon. 

love nature & it will love you back

After six months of isolation in our provincial tropical island, our return to East Coast US has been a brutal and harsh adjustment. Our once secret haven has been invaded by greedy corporate developers who have torn down our little quaint house to build their ugly McMansions. 

Hudson River trail walk - August 2023

be like water

Water is a vital element of life. Everything in our blue planet needs it and thrives on it. Including us. 

In a translation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 8, Lao Tzu states, “the best of [wo/]men are like water.” To quote Bruce Lee's famous teaching philosophy is, "Be Water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water." 

be water, my friend

Water covers over seventy percent of the Earth's surface with seas and oceans making up most of the water volume (at over 95%). The human body contains from 55% to 78% water, depending on our body size.

birthday bonds

It has been a while since I have been back to celebrate my birthday in the land of my birth. Our island knows best how to throw a fun and yum party! 

Our sister is the best hostess with her household staff skillfully trained to set a creative tablescape with thematic setting, beautiful floral arrangements, and a bountiful spread. Nom nom nom! 

cabana fiesta spread

cosmic collisions

This year July 4th is the 247th Independence Day for Americans. For the Philippines it's the 77th Philippine–American Friendship Day or what used to be the country's Republic Day. 

a popular meme of the day

It is also the first of four super full moons for 2023 and Guru Purnima as well. To honor and express gratitude for the immense blessing of the guru. The word guru meaning dispeller of darkness as in the one who is a light unto this world.

Guru Purnima marks the start of monsoon season and heavy rains, the first day of a three month season from July to September. With Issa's birthday in July and Mahala's in September it is a season that holds special significance for both of us wonder | wonder | women.

The Buck Super Full Moon in Capricorn, July 2023

In however way you choose to set aside some time on this day to honor Spirit to connect and pay homage to the God of your Heart. Blessing to all - Sad Gurunath Maharaj Ki Jaya!

pile of . . . .

Dogpile has existed since it was established in 1996. I have been using it since I first moved to the US in 2001. In May 2023 for reasons unknown to us they decided to pull out of many Asian regions. 

Dogpile is a meta search engine created to enhance search results. It facilitates the search for links to web pages, videos, music, news, and other online content. 

no longer available in the Philippines & other regions

Dogpile offers more content than services that only use their indexes because it uses results from multiple search engine indexes rather than just one. Among these are from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, Bing.

It has also scraped content from several defunct search engines, including AltaVista, Infoseek, and HotBot.

Dogpile has made a name in internet history as one of the first metasearch engines. Dogpile was a cutting-edge search engine then, and we see many benefits to using it as your primary search engine over the other options 

Maybe it's for the best to go now. Dogpile hasn’t always kept up with new trends, unlike its more recent rival, Google. Although it provides a wide range of search results, it isn’t as functional as Google and isn’t as private as DuckDuckGo. 

We've had a good run and now it's time we went our separate ways. It was great while it lasted. 

view from my room

I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day... the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

10th Anniversary Edition book cover

I lie in bed nursing my battered psyche and renegade body, feeling like such a failure for succumbing to COVID-19 so unexpectedly. This is a first for me - after years of careful dodging and concerned management I am just another casualty of this abominable pandemic.

I was supposed to be spending my time writing an article about our local island birds - for submission before I fly off to Bali for a sound healing workshop. Instead, I loll around in a daze - my fevered brain pounding savagely, eyes hot and bleary, unable to focus.

heart & soul nebulae

For Mother's Day we celebrated with this gorgeous collection of images of two emission nebulae - aptly called the heart and soul. 

When we honor all mothering guardian spirits - the carers and nurturers who birthed and raised us - those who brought us into being and enlivened our world.

Heart &Soul nebulae - infrared mosaic from NASA’s
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) 

The Heart Nebula (IC 1805) is an emission nebula located at an approximate distance of 7,500 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cassiopeia. It is also known as Sharpless 2-190 (Sh2-190). 

The Heart Nebula forms a famous complex known as the Heart and Soul with its smaller neighbour Westerhout 5, also known as the Soul Nebula, which lies just 2.5 degrees to the southeast. 

Bless blessed blessings from the heavens above and around us! 

stolen work

World Intellectual Property Day takes place every year on April 26. It was established by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2000. 

Each year, the campaign is rolled out around a topical theme:

• 2023 – Women and IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity
• 2022 – IP and Youth: Innovating for a Better Future 
• 2021 – IP and SMEs: Taking Your Ideas to Market 
• 2020 – Innovate for a Green Future 

The purpose of the holiday is to raise awareness about patents, copyright, and trademarks. People can learn more about how these laws impact our daily life. 

It helps us to celebrate talent and creativity which makes us able to recognize the contributions that creators and inventors make to our world. 

writing tools of creative revolution

My work was recently so blatantly and publicly plagiarized. Accidental or not it made me feel violated and vandalized. The fact that it was done was surprising enough. That it was perpetuated by someone who should have known better was a brutal shock.