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The Struggling Writer

Writing is a discipline. That perfect time when you'll have all the time to write
will never come. That time when all the literary energies will just write themselves on paper will never come unless you write everyday. No matter what, you just write. Even if you think you can't be proud of what you have written today. Just write.

I was watching Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino boxer who has garnered a lot of international awards, punching his way everyday always in preparation for a boxing event. He is a good boxer, always a victor, because he rehearses everyday. The writer does the same. There is really no special time to be able to have all the time and inspiration to be able to write flawlessly.

How to stand the day's stress and be a loving person

Every morning, my ritual is self-healing through EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). After my rhinitis and my asthma subside I create a positive circle of energy surrounding my whole being through EFT. This healing technique has become so much a part of me that I think I am becoming a better human being because of it.

Not many people believe me though, that EFT can heal. I think it's the programming since childhood that makes people suspicious of any healing outside of the mainstream method: that is, going to a medical doctor and buying the prescription from a drugstore, preferably from a drugstore selling medicine from multi-national drug companies. Any deviation from this programming can be called many names: quackery, superstition or ignorance. I risked being called all of the above for the sake of opening new doors to well-being. I have always thought that leaving one's comfort zones once in a while can make the mind sharper and therefore more useful.

The problem with not being able to leave one's comfort zone is that it makes a person
think of his/her thought patterns as the only correct patterns. This makes a person dangerous in the arena of relationships. We become less loving when we think that our thoughts are better than others.

Turn-over Ceremony of the Collected Writings and Memorabilia of Dr. Mary Racelis

Friday, March 7, 2008

Dr. Mary Racelis is a 76-year old Research Scientist and Professor in the Department of Socio-Anthropology of the Ateneo de Manila University. She is not just any research scientist in that she has always presented her findings to both local and international stakeholders to advocate for the well-being of the poorest in society. Dr. Racelis is also a feminist and her advocacy of women and children has caused policy changes in United Nations organizations.

There were tributes from friends who had worked with Dr. Racelis, be they in UNICEF or Civil Society. One tribute I liked was that of Atty. Hec Soliman who said that managing knowledge by preserving implicit knowledge through writing and archiving is providing society with the needed stuff to write history. Without recorded knowledge, there would be no history. What Dr. Racelis has done by way of her writings is providing society, Philippine Society in particular, the materials to continue writing Philippine history from the perspective of women and the poor.


I saw the turn-over ceremony beyond the personal life of Dr. Mary Racelis. I viewed Mary's pro-poor voice embodied in all her writings as a representation of a woman's soul, that soul being the collective energy of women needed in the continuing transformation of society. People die. Mary will one day say "yes" to her own mortality but her contribution to make this world a better world will stay forever.

Why is poverty getting globalized?

Sharing resources and spreading access to different kinds of opportunities is one of the ideals of a just society. When fewer and fewer people share resources and the rest of the world population share only deprivation and misery, this is another trend of a globalizing world.

The trouble with globalizing poverty is that humanity's higher self gets smaller and smaller until it is thrown into stagnation. Who rescues humanity's higher self?

Floods: What do they teach us?

I was in Legazpi on February 21, supposedly to prepare for the facilitation work for the Bicol Regional Rural Congress. It would have been a time to listen to the issues of people's organizations in the rural area.It would have been a time to think seriously of the link of the urban and the rural strategies in community organizing work.

In the afternoon of February 21, the radio blared: Albay is in a semi-state of emergency. Because of the continuous heavy rains since the week that passed flooding couldn't be avoided. This inevitable flooding after a week even with heavy rains didn't happen in the past 15 years. This flooding is the first after Typhoon Reming of December 2006.

Remembering the law of nature that says "Everything must go somewhere" I could only strike my breast in contriteness. Yes, by our silence, action or omission, we have allowed plastic garbage to clog the city's drainage system. We have allowed deforestation. We have allowed the unabetted emission of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. All these affirms nature's law: Everything must go somewhere. We have allowed forces to weaken or cut the connectedness of the web of life. Now the floods come to our doorsteps.

More than what we carelessly do to destroy the balance of our ecosystems are the thoughts that we nurture to weaken or destroy our inner person's ecosystem. Quantum Physics teaches us that thoughts are energy. Everything must go somewhere. Where do our thoughts go? Do we let them loose so that they do not return to the home of our human values but to wander in the dimension of human greed and the limitless need to acquire that which would never satisfy the human heart anyway?

Flooding is the universe's way of letting us remember our birthright: We have an individual as well as a universal purpose in life. Our thoughts, contrapuntal, that is, must go somewhere. Unlike the garbage that we throw into the drainage system which brings us floods, our destructive thoughts thrown into the ecosystem of our hearts and minds work inwardly by cutting our connection from the source of all matter, being and intelligence.Everything must go somewhere. If what we do is to turn away from the source we find ourselves somewhere far away from the source. It would take a lot of hard work on our part to go back home to that somewhere, to that place where we will get connected again to everything that is life-giving.

The Government Hates "Eyesores".

I was with a group of Thais on an exposure visit to Manila. They wanted to learn why it is so easy for people in power to violate the laws that are supposed to protect the poor in the city. They wanted to learn if people with higher income in the Philippines had it in their sensibilities to see the deprivations and alienation of the poor from the standpoint of the poor. It is not just in their own country that they know of poor people's rights being violated. That's the reason they came. To see how poor people in the city fare in this so-called "pearl of the orient seas".

We went to Tatalon, a place near a waterway that the government wanted cleared of urban poor homes because the sight of shanties offends the eyes of investors. For the city to look seductive there should be no "eyesores".

Narrow views on "eyesores". For an introspecting government, success isn't dispossessing the poor of the city. It is identifying how their human potentials are maximized. This was not so in Tatalon.

Entering the covered basketball court, you see 88 families each occupying around 2 square meters for whatever it is they have in life - a kettle, a frying pan, a disfigured basin, old mats, old pails, a few plates a straw sack of clothes. Not much in terms of acquisition which you would think is actually an indicator of success if you were a philosophy student.

As you set your eyes on the different corners of the covered court, you see a number of women sleeping at a very untimely moment of the day. Because they had nothing to do. Because forcibly evicting them from where they were making a living was reducing them to liabilities. And we complain about poor people becoming social problems.

Talking to some people in the covered area, we were told by one mother that the night before bullies in the neighborhood hurled stones on the door of the covered court.
When their men went out to look for the offenders, a man from nowhere hacked at one man's back, the blade of the big knife used fortunately had not cut the upper back portion of the man. But in the end the hacker had succeeded in hacking at the hand of the intended victim and saw the small finger of his left hand dangling like a doll's finger pulled off by an angry toddler. On another night, the previous night,
another group of bullies came near the door of the covered court. When asked why they were there, they angrily retorted that they were the ones being provoked to anger by the language of their eyes. The wife of the leader of the group was in tears when she was relating what happened two nights before.

You wonder how people in power carry out the oath that they pronounced when they took the responsibility of being a public servant. Oaths are taken always in people's name .But these promises remain empty words.