Reflected thoughts about life and death, and in between

1. Tomorrow, we will meet our students in an extradordinary time. I know I must sharpen my listening skill because everybody has a story to tell.

2. Today I took pictures of newspapers headlines that has something to do with Ondoy. I was not able to read newspapers for several days because we are busy cleaning the house.

3. A co-teacher of mine said that he plans to take a housing loan and have a three floor building for his family's use. He is damn tired cleaning his house when flood waters reaches his abode.

4. Some people do not want to revisit the past because they have felt that it can be a burden to them.

5. After Ondoy's wrath, any heavy rain we will be experiencing will be communicating to us to listen to its fall. I pause and listen and time the length as to its downpour.

6. True, Ondoy devasted a huge swath of land, it has made a deeper impression to the consciousness of people who have been affected by it. Our contours of thinking has drastically been altered when rains fall even a gentle one.

7. People should be demanding to their government accuracy of weather reports, which means PAGASA should have the necessary instruments at their use.

8. Our memories are the places that we inhabit at will. We can go in and out of it. We can learn from the import of its joy and pain. It is a special place. To some it is a sacred place. I think, this is the reason why it is important that we remember.

9. Night bath, a good book by Randy David, a night to sleep. This is what I need.

10. At last you are married to your spouse, in due time your will realize "You cannot escape your in-laws".

11. In our modern society the mind will constantly seek its own home. Some say it is a "homeless-mind". Others, will rest in the comfort that the mind is a perpetual seeker. Thus, it wont find a home of its own.

12. There is no (magician) to be discovered in yourself. You have to create that (magician). That requires new imagination about your life, new strategies, new vocabularies and metaphors.

13. Typhoon Ondoy brings out the best and the worst in us. We saw the see of humanity volunteering to help the flood victims. On the other hand, refugees vandalized a school and a report that some robbed the students when the school opened.

14. According to BBC weather report, we will be experiencing sunny days up to Wednesday. I will now have time to clean our concrete slab and apply elastomeric paint.

15. Photos are being dried at the roof. Some photos are now relegated to a tearful goodbye. I simply can't reconstruct them. It's totally destroyed.

16. Do you know the value of those photos that have been washed by an un-welcomed typhoon? God, its priceless.

17. With those photos gone, my memories about them may go with it. It unburdens me with the past but my grand daughter and the generations that will come may be burdened by such a loss.

18. Mr. Rod Stewart, of the Great American Songbook, is now entertaining my evening as I type my postings in this little box of significance.

19. Sorry if I am not responding to request on remembering my birthday. I am off the calendar and I dread high numbers these days.

12. Our concrete slab that acts as our roof is now painted with elastomeric elements. We are now planning to have the second floor fixed for habitation. In case of another Ondoy type we have a place to evacuate.

13. Night is for sleeping. And we value it for what it is.

14. "An Inconvenient Truth" communicated by AL Gore, the media, and other scientists brought to us an understanding of global warming. The recent typhoon that visited us surely says that the weather we are experiencing will never be the same again.

15. I just finished re-tiling part of our living room floor. It is a social labor.

16. "Work is a slice of your life. It's not the entire pizza" - Jacquelyn Mitchard

17. "Few things move as quickly as the future" - Bern Williams

18. "Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." John Updike

18. "Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away." - Tom Brokaw

19. "It's never too late for a happy childhood" - Gloria Steinem

20. "Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything". Alexander Hamilton

21. We can't live in the past because the present is a daily offering. It should be lived now.

22. "All of us have something to gripe about, but for how long and to what extent will we be trapped in it?" - Ernest Tan, How to atttract love.

23. There is also this human possbility to be able to care, love and be with others. It also promises the possibility to enjoy them.

24. I will be having a Magic for Beginners seminar this coming Saturday 24th October from 10:00 to 5 pm. Interested please ask for details. It will be held at our house at 137-B. 20th Ave. Quezon City. Near Ali Mall.

25. The language of love may not be in the words that you read, rather in the actions that you see.

26. When a person informs you that he/she has changed her number, that person is making you a part of his/her world.

27. School graduation is a modern idea. It is an idea of a life transition that is shaped by a high value on knowledge. There is a time in human civilization that ignorance is the better value than knowing. Hundreds of years ago there is no sense for the vast population to be going to school. Theres no need.

28. Our lives is a constant project of overcoming.

29. Not all overcoming can be good to our life. Sometimes it brings us to more troubles. Remember some people who wants to overcome the raging waters of Ondoy?

30. "What is important is that a recollection of the past should always strengthen rather than weaken one's resolve to face the future." - Randy David, sociologist.

31. Still I find Noynoy Aquino to be a stranger to me. Except that he is the son of Ninoy and Cory and that he is a senator. He seems to be in the background and cultivates public invisibility. His giant parents continues to overshadow him and this is a problem he has to overcome. A proclamation to run as a president is different from the actual accomplishment done in the past.

32. When I post my ideas in this portal it is open to be attacked or supported by readers. Some can make a comment on it.

33. Please do not put my birthday on your calendar. I don't do birthdays today except when I am performing a magic show.

34. A mystic (then) asserts in the first place that knowledge is not attained only by the senses or the intellect or the normal processess of consciousness, but that the highest is attained, and can only be attained by this spiritual sense of intution. - A mystic statement.

35. From a mystic, "God decided to make our soul-spirit its home."

36. When I am hurt, I always withdraw to a place of my own, being alone, feeling the pain, writing about it. Somewhat, I am thrown in a place that is strange to me, trying to know the fabrics and contours of that place to that I will be able to communicate with it.

37. Some people give lame excuses for not showing up as promised. Then you tell yourself that you are not like that. That shapes your behavior in the future.

38. I performed a magical show last 20 September at the Center for Migrant Youth at East Fairview QC. This is the residence of Fr. Ben Villote, a long time and very good friend of our family.

39. From a boyhood friend of mine who posted the following: "I believe in miracles. I see a lot of stupid drivers on the street. It's a miracle they are still alive and to have even passed the driving tests, sheesh!"

40. Still working on my 55 canvass just like a work of art.

41. Nice to have known May Sarton from York, Maine. She opens door for me. She is a poet at Eighty.

42. But May Sarton passed away in 1995 of cancer at Maine. She has published lots of books. I am now reading her book, Poems, Coming into Eighty.

43. The first duty of love is to listen. - Paul Tillich

44. The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory but progress. Anonymous

45. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous human interest in what is being told us. - Alice Duer Miller

46. What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish. - W. H. Auden

47. "We cannot love that which we do not understand. We can't protect that which we do not love." A quote from an envronmental activist.

48. "Day begins. I only have my body. Aching from comfort. I wait, for some kick-starting-mechanism. Be they hunger or purpose, relief, a job to do. Or, a wife's call for coffee".

49. "A day can be laid out like a canvass. What work of art shall I do today? How shall time wrap me with it sweet and bitter embrace?"

50. "Without music, life is a mistake". - Friedrich Nieztche

51. "Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd preferred to talk." - Doug Larson

52. Of course one of the modern addictions that we are developing and spending most of the time is our engagement with Facebook. In the post-modern paradigm face-to-face encounter will be valued highly.

53. I am happy because we have a country, whatever its in there.

54. "Day begins. I only have my body. Aching from comfort. I wait, for some kick-starting-mechanism. Be they hunger or purpose, relief, a job to do. Or, a wife's call for coffee".

55. A soldier will always believe in the just cause that his country is fighting for. But when his leaders are the one that becomes a traitor to the country it is time to switch the direction of the gun.

56. Still many of this night are rabidly running away from their real problems, that they feel, they are being consoled and comforted by their own nightly distractions.

57. Any event that happens, that has been decided upon, will have their own ramifications in the future. That is inevitable.

58. Humans will always be living in a society far from its satisfaction. This is why we have religion.

59. Without love, our souls would be likely a dried prune.

60. What is achieved when we experience pain? We learn how to experience it alone.

61. The strength of belief is in the belief itself.

62. A politician will now have to struggle in plugging the holes in his political life boat. It will take sometime to undo a decision that is within a web of relationship. Given the present political contour, such a decision will be judge if it is foolish or wise.

63. Dreaming, sleeping, eating, procrreating, these are the myriad activities our ancestors engaged in. To this day, we are still doing them.

64. A faith can be overwhelming eventhough it disregards the truth.

65. The reason why corrupt officials are likened to crocodiles is that crocodiles did not change for the last million years. They will continue to be so for the next million years. Their predatory tactics will still be there practiced highly.

66. We are shaped by the truths that we live by, not knowing those truths may well be un-truths.