astreamofunmanagedthoughts

what do i do when i close my eyes?
what to I think about ? where is the answer to life's eternal question?  there is no such thing? I try not to look outside for fear thatI will find the answer there.
I hear the roosters scrowing and fainly hear what I really want to hear and yet when I focus my earto where the faind sound is coming from, i hear it clearly and I feel good. 
The birds are singing and if i don't pay attention it will not be noticed or heard at all. 
There's a lot of noise in our mind but if we only sit still in silence and perhaps close our eyes to what we see instead of hear- then we discover the beautiful rhythm of the world. 
there's courship in the air and travel in the sky that i hear right now.
there's the sound of one waking up or getting ready for the day.  Why?
It is Sunday and we mark our lives with hours and days, or minutes and hours, weeks and months and years.
Amazing how we struggle to be heard and not to listen.
Imagine how we struggle to be busy and make our lives preoccupied.
What is living? to o drown our senses to accomplishments and expectations of others/
this is a tricky question!
I hear the voice of one who is just starting to live.  5 years ago is not a long time.  3 years is not even old yet but we say everytime we talk of age and length of time, we say, "old". 
I met a man who did not care about "old".
He sees his world with his hearat and not his eyes.
I was taught by this sage that there is beauty in everything
and there is life beyond all this.
Now that I see this in my life I believe that we have imposed a lot on ourselves.
the birds are calling their mates or maybe thannouncing where the food is.
(pause)
my mind's eyes are closed and I look at my keyboard without looking really, not intent except to just stare and listen to my train of thought.  Here is a morning wh (pause) space silence i hear the birds again but this time they are more audible than the roosters. I hear motors running very faintly and now that i hear them I remember the sound of the river just right beside me I hear it gurgling and babbling and water faling from a height.

I hear a kind voice I have been loking at for the last 30 years but this morning I hear him clearly and sweetly in my mind's ears. there is notheing in between my ears but instruments o fsound interpreting things around me.  from one voice  i hear two then three.  I am inside this tube now pretending to be the ear,  the other day, I focused on my tongue and it is a very different experience.  i know that i am making a lot of typos but it does not matter. remember that i am writing mwith my eyes closed and my ears open.  there is  pause pause pause pause pause like a meditation.

12 hours ago: Friday night to Sat morning

lamb caldereta
diliscious sinangag
pako salad
maja blanca
cassava cake with buko tops
sikreto ni maria
rose tea (one definitely has to with the above)
(Paused: woke up at 3:28 a.m. to say bye to Vitty)
badobo in Marty's pan de sal
tsokolate -A (na)

Hoping and praying that we eat enough till we see our children's dreams come true!

the first 10 minutes

eyes newly opened
my name being called
a request and some questions
roosters crowing
first ray of sunlight
pitter patter of little feet
cheek to cheek with Jacob
Jose smiling...
Justo with Ana
thoughts drifting to Sophia and Ziva
sunlight in 8 Mile
hedcen...

just washed the curtains

Dressing up windows

 with living fabric

 and patterns that change with sunlight and rain.

 My windows' curtains have just been washed while I was sleeping!  With little boys who are allergic to dust, this is just the cleanest and healthiest approach to window dressing.

Who cares about the neighbor?  The truth is they do.  When we moved in our Frogglerocks home, they started putting up fabrics, indignant at being subjected to our varying states of undress!!

His Golden Garland is in Profuse Bloom

I am wondering if my mom from her place in heaven had been sending angels who whispered into the ears of those who were in my midst when I needed help.

Our house,  now the school was at the far end of the main road.   We were not the only one.  Isolated, yes but there is a bungalow where lived my neighbors who became very good friends and supporters. They brought my 3 yr old son to the hospital when he cut his finger while I was in my daughter's first communion, 17 years ago.

When I started my preschool, Tito Naz was the president of the Homeowners Association.  He gave me the permit to operate inside the subdivision. As the school grew a little, it  was besieged with territorial issues by some residents.  He backed us up.  He stood by our side negating complaints that we were nuisance. His argument, being my immediate neighbor shutdown all allegations, imaginary and concocted.   

In all these years, he greeted me with a warm smile on his kind face.  He made it possible for the school to grow right beside him!  There were things he commented on- our school owl's lonely call at night and the dust that would be stirred during PE on very dry days.  Outside of that, he was too busy having a grand time with life, with his work, or garden that there was hardly nothing at all to complain about.

Now, this morning as he lay sick and paused, I was helpless and felt utterly useless.  There was nothing I could do in return for all the love and affection he quietly and diligently stood for.

I  know that God has different ways of answering our prayers.  I would like to imagine seeing him back on his feet again and while we wait for a full recovery, this interruption is making me look into the interesting times of my life and project.

I know that we have thanked Tito Naz many times but I had to tell him again today.  When he wakes up from this, he'd probably say, "you are welcome. Emma, kumusta? ".

His golden garland is in profuse bloom- I wonder how he does it.  I have to ask him when he gets back home.

maderwud and some truths

There is a children's story about a duckling or a chick who  went around the farm looking for his mother.  He saw a horse and asked:  are you my mother?  He met all kinds of animals and asked all of them the same question before he finally, at least found his parent or maybe just got adopted by a mom who really could not tell anymore if she lost a chick or a duckling or gained one more! Readily, this lost fellow was taken "under the wings" of a gullible fowl!

I can't blame this chick or duckling for getting confused, for how can you really tell from among the hens that are clucking or the ducks that are quacking which one is yours?

I really cannot understand for I have never been there, how nannies or yayas are able to love someone else's child completely and many times over than the real mother?

There are  siblings who sacrifice their own dreams for their other siblings and will not in the world count the cost.  They know nothing else, not even the word "sacrifice", because there is no time to mope.  It just happened that their mother or father gave birth and that's all. There was no choice left for the "good" child.

These are stories of motherhood in different contexts and personas.  One does not have to be a mother to give enduring and heroic love. In the same manner that you would be lucky to have a great mother, one is cursed to have a very BAAAD one!

Today, on our way to Shangrila to get some clothes for Justo,  the topic of becoming a mother came up in our conversation.  It started with the hamsters that Jacob and Jose are now crazy over.  I don't remember if someone said that he is the mother of Fluff and Muff, that the concept of  "boy mother" was once more mentioned.  This idea came from Jacob in our nightly bedtime stories where I would tell about a T-rex egg (Jose) that found its way to a brontosaurus' (Jacob) life.  Here in this story, Jacob took care of the T-rex Jose. Then  Jacob would say, "I take care of him because I am the "boy mother".  Then they will act out a situation with pillows and blankets dramatizing scenes from the "Land Before Time". 

Anyway, Jose asked today while crouched on my lap:  "What's a boy mother?"  "A boy mother is like our story of the T-rex and a brontosaurus," I said.  "The mother is not a girl but a boy who takes care of a baby just like a real mother would." 

"Who's 'maderwud' Ima?

(It would help if you know that before this, Jacob complained of a headache and Jose echoed immediately that "I av a eggache too!""

"Maderwud" is not all about being great and enduring.  It is something that happens because you have to do it, otherwise your young will go wandering around looking for his mommy and finding a "tikbalang" instead.  Motherwud is not always the way pictures show it or stories tell it.  All the more it is not as sweet as how Hallmark depicts it.  It is about getting up in the morning, dragging yourself to the kitchen on hard and difficult days, cook breakfast no matter what.  One does not always feel the love overflowing, nor smiles radiating from a kind motherly face.  A mother is an ordinary person doing a job that is sometimes greater than her/himself.  Some mothers would even have to take anti depressants just so they can look at their babies!

For all the wrong and right things, we "maderwuds" reach the point in our lives when we are halfway there and we cannot believe that our children have grown and that we have actually nurtured human beings if not monsters or gremlins. 

Just thinking outside the box.

my son Vitty with daughters Sofia and Ziva

Daddy and my older sister, Ellen

Happy Mother's Day my beloved mommy-Mary, sister Ellen, daughters Ana & Marie, sis in law Fay, Jessie, Tpie and Eva and everyone who came from a mother- let us toast a hard-boiled egg!!!!!!!

my brother Emmanuel and daughter Jodie

Sugar and Ana

Sugar and Juaqui

Sugar and Vitty

Jasmin at 91 watching her daughter Roxy with new pups

N.B.  The moms are not in the pictures because they were busy taking the picture. :)

In-between and Gabby's letter

Pre Retirement:
Goal - Pleasure with Business

Post Retirement:  Watching life
No goal

This formula can only happen when you panic less.  The more you try to breathe, the more you get suffocated!

Pre-retirement was business 12 hours a week, pleasure was 28 hrs a week.  When business tries to mix with pleasure during pleasure hours,  then I decide to transform business to pleasure.  It isn't always easy but it takes practice to master it.  You can ask me how but there is only one way:  decide not to sabotage your plan- no self-inflicted pain, no self-flagellation, nothing that will diminish my creativity to turn work to bliss. 

Post retirement is a conversion of hours of pleasure to hours of "work".  After mastering the art of pleasure with business, work becomes pure pleasure, and pleasure becomes more gratifying.

Presently, I am indulged in the pleasure  of observing, data gathering, assessing, reviewing some pertinent past, listening, laughing, getting annoyed, watering the pechay outside my kitchen, picking lime, guavas and macopas and discovering...

Discovering the freedom and boldness in using flat brushes in my watercolor paintings have brought me "kilig" moments.  "Kilig" moments for me is when something new titillates your senses- the way a baby would react to a new taste like the tartness of green mango or ripe tamarind.

I am also presently involved in making a survey on people's behavior and the patterns by which I may predict results.

Lately, I have also been experimenting on manifestations: what comes without even looking for it!!!!
One must know what one wants- and it has to be something you must have thought of or wished or prayed for... then forgot. 

So I work the long hours of the day till late at night sometimes.  I am an observer in activities involving teachers and young leaders, as of late.  I met my mentor a few days ago.  I am reviewing my notes which are mostly the basis and framework of my "project" and I read a student's letter of nostalgia and reminiscence of her vivid and innocent experiences of the past and the future.

With her permission, I am posting her letter on this blog.  One of the things I do now is enjoying some of the moments that bring fulfillment whether I looked for them or not.

Gabby Ballesteros and her beautiful letter on my page...

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If you're reading this, I guess you know me. Female, Filipino, USED to go to HEdCen.

'HEdCen?' you may be asking. Holistic Education Center, dearie, don't forget it. We're what you would call a 'private school', or a 'special school'. I mean, what other school lets five-year-olds touch a constrictor snake, and teaches Physics in Grade One?

Yeah, life was hard there, and my classmates were douch es sometimes, but loyal to the very end. This may seem melodramatic, but they were family. Juju, Raffy, Gail, Pat, Cheskie, Kylie, Theresa, Anakin, Aaron/ Sarah, and the others, though I still haven't forgotten you guys.

And then there were the teachers. All helpful, all kind, not always understanding, but that, my dear friend, is human nature. They preformed as best as they could, and though they got angry at us many times over the years, we knew that they cared.

But those times are past, and the gang is breaking up. We finished Grade One to Grade Six; that was the aim of many of my batchmates, myself included, before we were transferred to other schools.We'll meet new people, some are even going abroad!

Now, let's be a bit more grounded in reality. It's a truth that perhaps someday, I'll forget their names, their faces. Let's be realistic; we're only in Grade School, after all. Won't affect us much if we forget about each other. However, like a castle in which you are knighted, I'll at least try to remember the experiences.

Yes, THOSE experiences. Remember the invisible ink pen, the Sci Expos, the experiments, the field trips, the cleanups of the Tungtong River? The tears, the scoldings, the sadness, the sermons? But it will most of all make me think about the LAUGHTER. For we, as a batch, brought a little laughter into the world; engrained it in each of our hearts, minds, and memories. Perhaps even our teachers' hearts and minds, too.

I say the dreaded thing: We WILL drift apart, we WILL leave someday, and we WILL grow up. A transition from childhood to adolescence, a journey that we started to take the moment we said goodbye. Childhood is a dream; a dream that we must all wake up from it journey into another. However, though for now I am uncertain, I think we'll cross paths again very soon, for time is but a minute and but a eternity in a dream, is it not?

Now that you mention it, life there in HEdCen was a dream in itself; pure bliss, yet the time spent there went so fast. Honestly, I thought Grade Six, my time at HEdCen, would last forever and a day. Turns out, it went by faster than I thought. Now it's high summer, and more than a month since I left the grounds of HEdCen as a student for the very last time. I'm pretty sure the grass is withering from all this heat, though.

I used to cry when thinking about HEdCen and the fact I was leaving for good. Now, I think I have accepted it, no matter how sad that may be.

The mango tree right outside my window is what I'm looking at while I type; it is a veritable ecosystem in itself. The mangoes, though not yet ripe, are heavy and large, bending the tree over the roof. Meanwhile, a large vine curls around this tree's trunk, splitting into many tendrils at a point and covering the length of this tree, intersecting at various points all the way to the great blue sky. Perhaps we're like that, or perhaps I am merely feeling nostalgic for it already.

No matter. We go our separate ways, that's for sure. But maybe, just maybe, we're still growing together around the tree trunk of life, separate tendrils, yet crossing each others paths once in a while. Acknowledging each other but silent, all the way until we are together again at the very top, where the earth meets the cloudless blue sky.

Ta-ta!