walk in beauty

My great find of 2018 was a little gem of a book - "The Alchemy of Abundance" by Rick Jarow.

I first met the author in one of our sessions at the New York Open Center's Integrative Sound and Music Institute - at a nine month certificate program for sound healing.

Rick Jarow, is a practicing alternative career counselor, a professor of religion at Vassar College, and the author of Creating the Work You Love, In Search of the Sacred, Alchemy of Abundance, and more.

His popular seminars, based on years of research and practice with lineage holders in both Eastern and Western traditions, focus on interweaving inner experience with effective action in the world.

national holidays

June 14 was Flag Day in the US.

Betsy Ross Painting - Betsy Ross 1777 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

June 12 was Independence Day in the Philippines

The Making of the Philippine Flag by Fernando Amorsolo

I wonder what was going on in these women's minds and hearts as they sewed together what would be the symbol of their nation?

Lost and augmented as their histories have been embellished and now recorded for posterity, we are left to wonder how our current times and leaders will be memorialized and written into our history.

May they live up to all the potential and possibility we hold in our hearts.

times we are [not] a'changin'

Returning to the Philippines on an election year is always chaotic and discombobulating.

Archipelago of colors, one strong weave. 
Image courtesy of Haim Chicken

This time a man proud to be known as the Donald Trump of the East may yet reign supreme.

Yet another halfling with pretensions to manliness and personal power runs a close second.

In the wake of Mother's Day Facebook is flooded by such ugliness.

Disappointment overwhelms in the difficulty to reconcile beloved homeland with reviled behavior.

O Pinas kong mahal, so tortured by this whole convoluted affair.