In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus teaches us the profound lesson of loving our neighbor. The Samaritan, an unlikely hero, saw a wounded man and showed him compassion, while others passed by. This story challenges us to go beyond societal boundaries and personal prejudices, extending kindness to all, even those we might consider strangers or enemies. In our daily lives, we are called to act as the Samaritan did—offering help without hesitation and loving others as ourselves. May we open our hearts to God’s love, reflecting it through our actions towards everyone we encounter.
100 words on ‘being’ between Heidegger and Levinas
Heidegger and Levinas both explore the concept of being, but from different perspectives. Heidegger’s existential analysis in “Being and Time” focuses on “Being” as the essence of human existence, emphasizing individual authenticity and the nature of existence itself. For Heidegger, understanding being involves confronting our own mortality and the concept of “Being-toward-death.”
Levinas, on the other hand, critiques Heidegger’s approach, arguing that it overlooks the ethical dimension of existence. In “Totality and Infinity,” Levinas prioritizes the “Other” and the ethical responsibility we have towards others. While Heidegger seeks to understand existence in isolation, Levinas emphasizes relational ethics and responsibility as central to being.
100 words on Another Person’s Moment
Gazing at another person’s moment in time involves deeply witnessing and appreciating their unique experiences and emotions. It’s an act of empathy that transcends mere observation, allowing one to connect with another’s lived reality. This perspective fosters understanding and compassion, revealing the intricate tapestry of individual lives. By focusing on these moments, we acknowledge the significance of each person’s journey, recognizing their struggles, joys, and transformations. This practice encourages a profound respect for others’ experiences and fosters a sense of shared humanity, reminding us that each moment is a vital part of the broader human story.
Every career option seemed to come to me as a favor. My first job was a favor from a friend, FR, from KAMI (Kulturang Aming Minana). I jumped at it because it was 1984, I had graduated from college, and I didn’t like to stay idle and jobless. As the eldest in the family, I felt guilty staying at home, even though I was also busy with ‘art-for-art’s sake’ things. My degree of Bachelor of Arts major in English seemed useless.
KAMI had by that time long concluded its theatrical productions and I was listless. F was officially a medical representative for Pascual Laboratories Pharmaceuticals Inc., but he moonlighted as a freelance artist and subcontracted his Batangas coverage area to me. The job was to cover physicians in Lemery and Lipa, to promote Betadine Povidone Iodine, Pascual’s main product line. Eventually, I applied to Pascual, thus I became one of its sales representatives from 1984 to 1985. It was a strange first job: since I was much given to introspection, I often spaced out in hospitals, missed my doctor calls and failed to meet my sales quota. Despite my bombast and aplomb at the product training, I was a total failure in the social field of sales and promotion.
Walang Sugat
In the theater group called KULTURANG AMING MINANA [KAMI], FR was the stage director, and DR, his wife was the voice instructor. They found us as Tanghalang Dalwa Singko via PETA and gave us an audition. Once they’ve chosen their cast, they directed and managed their presentation of the zarzuela ‘Walang Sugat’ in Tanauan first, then in Batangas City. We held our production with tickets at the St. Bridget’s Auditorium in 1980. The original libretto presented at CCP was the very same libretto we acted and sang at the SBA, but much abridged to accommodate our limited voice range and lack of training in musical theater.
Sa Langit Walang Beer
F and D were probably trying to establish themselves as independent producers, and for their foray into provincial theater, they conducted theater workshops and began a series of stage plays in Tanauan. We presented at least two plays in Tanauan Cultural Center – Sa Langit, Walang Beer, and excerpts of Walang Sugat. Then, F and D collaborated with PETA on the production of Carlos P. Romulo’s Daughter’s for Sale, to showcase in Intramuros theater that same year. DFS became KAMI’s final production, and my part in that play was another tale about me being ‘favored’.
Daughters for Sale
The 1980s was a time of unrest for most Filipinos who were haunted by the horrors of martial law. Focus magazine was one of the more progressive publications at the time. In Intramuros when we presented Daughters for Sale, the lead actress, CC, who was also an editor of Focus, was suddenly unable to perform live because of a threat to her life. As the understudy, I was the immediate substitute to play her role-Rosario-in Daughter for Sale. So I had to wear her costume, say her dialogue, follow her blocking, and interact with fellow actors on stage. As an understudy, I was familiar with the script and blocking of DFS, but I still wasn’t prepared to actually play the part on the actual play date. The love interest of my character was played by actor LV. At the time, I wasn’t intimidated despite his reputation as an excellent actor because I was more conscious about my unfitted costume than of my poor acting. Actress C had a round, full body, while I was paper thin. I felt unwrapped even if I was wearing period clothing. Still, with the help of the other actors, the play began and ended as it should.
The following day [or weekend, I can’t recall] the columnist Crispina Belen thought I winged it, and gave me a warm ‘kudos’ tweet [no Twitter yet in 1981]. She wrote in her column in Bulletin Today, ‘kudos to Jophen Baul’ for her performance in Carlos P. Romulo’s Daughters for Sale. I clipped this public ‘tweet’ in a periodical, totally assuming it was me despite the wrong last name. This clipped memory of my fifteen minutes of fame is a treasured whatnot among my files.
when I wake up and before I sleep, when the feeling of not being ok is most sharp.
From books to TV dramas, this topic of acknowledging your feeling of not feeling ok is becoming a cliché. The premise for this adage is that most of us are not honest about our feelings. As we move within our professional circles or communities, we tend to camouflage our feelings especially when we are supposed to lead the way, in mentoring persons or groups. Before friends, we tend to pretend in order to blend. We hide our true selves before our loved ones to avoid adding to their burdens. Acknowledging the feeling of not being ok is easier said than done. For if we can’t acknowledge it before others, then we have not acknowledged it at all.
talk to someone
Most TV dramas I’ve watched involve close friendships and buddy relationships. The teleplay will always craft a loyal, unassuming friend who listens and responds compassionately. This buddy and companion always gives their friends priority attention in times of need. It takes a long time to develop this kind of relationship. When a fall out happens, the misunderstanding leads to ghosting or erasure. All light and heavy conversations about anything with friends will cease. Lost is the privilege of talking to someone without fear of judgment. Gone is that lightness of being resulting from sharing. Then it will take a long time to find a new confidante.
engage in self care
My niece told her mother about her boredom with house chores. She had to give up her work in advertising when she had a miscarriage. After that, even working from home presented too much risk. So she stopped working altogether. Eventually, she got depressed. My sister advised her to go window shopping. When she was a young single mother, she used to take her children to the mall, whenever she felt tired and lonely. Her daughter remembered those times in the mall. In those times of useless malling her Mom fitted shoes and clothes without buying, pleasing herself with a momentary new look now and then. My niece obeyed her mother’s advice and went window shopping. She came back home with an upbeat energy, having momentarily escaped that feeling of not being ok.
meditation in poetry
The poet Christian Wiman wrote, “Poetry arises out of absence, a deep internal sense of wrongness out of a mind that feels itself to be in some way cracked.” My ‘meditation’ happens on paper because writing is therapeutic. Poetry in particular is a way of thinking meditatively. In writing poetry, I pause at every line. I struggle with every word and phrase. The meaning of the poem becomes clear to me only when the poem has finally become a poem. Writing a poem is multiple rewriting of structured notes, similar to the endless revision of our lives as we discover some new ways of being. The very first poem I wrote is entitled
How not ok I feel could be expressed through aimless walking. Walking without a destination turns negative energy into exhaustion. This exercise cause my pale skin to turn red. I lose the zombie look and gets a halo.
creative expression
One thing that I had always done, collecting art materials and storing them in my old leather bag. I have always wanted to paint. However, I have not painted at all. Not ok with not having done a sketch of even one decent picture, I do an inventory of my paint colors and brushes now and then, to keep hoping. My last sketch was of my Mother when she was still with me. I can’t find this sketch immediately but its the widget at the bottom of Page a Writer that links to this Y.A. blog.
set small goals
I’ve always gotten ahead of myself, or counted chicks before the eggs have hatched. My mouth outpace my vision and I end up projecting but not delivering. But dreaming is a way of coping. When I am not ok, I review the dreams in my journals, highlighting what has been achieved however teeny-weeny.
keep the space clean
I am not ok with noise and a messy home. I can feel clutter even if I don’t see it because my house is small. Every bag and basket in my home is for storage of basic and mundane things. When I am not ok, I destress by organizing those ‘bagged’ objects, ensuring that every thing I’m keeping away deserves the space. This relaxes me.
listen to music
I find walking with earphones, and listening to music while doing something else, tedious and stressful. Restaurants play background music too loudly-not at all music to my ears. Neighborhood karaoke singing assaults my ear drums. How do I cope in the midst of noise and mess? I leave that space for one that is quiet and orderly, where music adds to the ambiance. But almost always, this space is expensive.
maintain a routine
There is the routine bad habits and the routine that is productive. Routine bad habits include drinking expensive coffee every morning, eating halo-halo or puto bumbong for dessert, risking a sugar spike, and binge watching on Netflix until very late in the evening. The routine that is productive involves the exact opposite of those three. But when not ok, meryenda and watching K-drama on Netflix is my default-not- ok normal.
seek professional help
My doctors are the following: An endocrinologist, a cardiologist, an EENT specialist, an ob-gynecologist, a breast cancer surgeon, a throat specialist, and an ophthalmologist. Aware of my mortality, I am ok only as far as ok can get. Indeed, my health card is proof of this.
When my mother got ill with cervical cancer, I resigned from my job to be with her. Her body deteriorated slowly until finally, even putting her in a wheelchair could break her fragile bones. Staying long with her at home was not difficult, but I missed the stimulation of the city. Cooped up in our small apartment, I resorted to online translation and flourished.
Our small apartment was the last in five doors and the smallest in square meters. We could hear our neighbors all the time, even when their doors were closed. We had only a ‘right of way’ to our little gate being the last door in five, so I was a body visible to every neighbor as I walked in and out of our house. Ironically, this made me more protective of myself, that I hardly talked or mingled with a neighbor, unless it was Christmas or New Year, when everybody would be out to greet each other and make noise.
WRITING POETRY WITH INAY
Although weak and weary, my mother, Inay, maintained pots of bougainvilleas and San Francisco plants, and some fortune plants as well. She loved her plants, but when she couldn’t any more water them herself, it became another one of my chores.
Working as a translator at night and trying very hard to sleep by day, I always forgot to water those plants and was delinquent as well in cutting and trimming them. But Inay wasn’t complaining. A time came when her periphery of vision was not going beyond the front door. Upon waking up, she would just get up and sit on the bed until she felt the need to relieve herself. She occupied a wooden papag downstairs, while my ‘office’ was upstairs. In the morning before breakfast, I would walk to the market to buy some tamales, or kalamay, or puto and the two of us would have that for breakfast with coffee. During those breakfast hours, she would tell me stories about her younger self, and I savored those moments. The two of us would be eating lunch together while watching Eat Bulaga, and supper together viewing some Teleserye.
When my mother was still able to move in her wheelchair, she prepared and cooked all our food. But when it was not possible anymore to get out of bed, she did not resist when I opted to take out fast food from the nearest restaurant. Sometimes, I tried to cook, however, I could not enjoy the food I cooked. I had always been underweight but with Inay always cooking the food I bought in the wet market, I happily gained weight.
Hopelessly, I went back to being thin again when she stopped cooking.
As my mother weakened, I felt helpless. All the poems I was writing at the time were about her. Whenever I felt too tired and lonely, I often left for a while, took the bus from Batangas City to Makiling in Laguna, and just stared at that lovely mountain for about two hours. Then I would ride the bus again back home. Once home, the only place to be when I was feeling exhausted was the terrace.
VIEW FROM THE TERRACE
copyright (c) Jophen Baui April 4, 2007
I tire myself over a book
Stocking insights for future verses
Otherwise, it is limited to the color and smell
Of spaced-out neighborhood
Devoid of will and yet full
Of natural excesses:
In the vicinity of pots
Creeping vines unnamed and unbecoming
Are as wanton as their dreams.
Indecisive bougainvillea devoid of a trellis
Hanging on to wash lines,
No wind touches a petal of their pink profusion.
Each stem of the neighbor fortune plant
Struggles to be free from juvenile entanglements
Of surreptitious vines clinging to posts
Blackened with secure grime.
Every will of greatness has been tampered.
Pools of mud from overflowing canals
Humid April dulled visions
Immune even to the noise
Of children’s nonsense
That can break through
This weary plainness.
RE-IMAGINING INAY’S POTTED PLANTS
Revising this poem made me re-imagine my mother’s potted plants. After she died, I left our house and went back to Manila. Back on the streets and commuting, I was now seeing the same kind of plants on the road. Some bougainvilleas were planted in some island parts along EDSA. Some plants crept under the overpasses, others fell on their vines from the highest brick of a walled subdivision. At first, I enjoyed the long ride to school when I lived in Cavite after thirteen years of staying in my mother’s house. I always brought a book to read on the bus when traffic stood still. I realized that my time slowed down so I had to speed up. But I somehow enjoyed the unhurried pace and often tried to retrieve images from my mother’s full life.
If you are like most writers, your first hurdle is how to start writing. You may have cultivated the habit of journaling or writing in your diary, yet when it is time to write that book you have been dreaming about, you end up staring at the screen, or in a dramatic showcase of frustrated writing, your trash-can overflows with crumpled paper. But when does writing commence? Writing begins when you sitdown and write.
IN BRAINSTORMING YOUR SUBJECT
As soon as you begin encoding letters, words, and phrases, you are already writing. Rarely will the codes you type be considered final sentences and expressions of your ideas. But whatever they are that you have initially penned, those are your starts. Those ‘brainstorms,’ are sparks of creative insights that may or may not find their place at all in the final document.
A common misconception about brainstorming is that it is a random formulation of subjects from a clash of many heads. But writing is the job of one single person at one set continuous time. The brainstorming is done by only one creative head who will inevitably talk to itself alone throughout the writing process. This means that the author-originator must be deliberate with a free and unencumbered brainstorming. If in the process they end up with more than three pages of nonsensical and unorganized thought, so be it. Stop crumpling the paper, but save the document with a date, and dating subsequent revisions as well, keep the initial drafts on file.
Brainstorming yield your first thoughts in writing. You may not yet be aware of your subject but are biased towards an opinion or viewpoint. You may not have yet established how you’re going to package your ideas, but are leaning toward a form. You may not be fully informed but eager to research and dig deeper into a topic. Whatever your leaning may be, brainstorming will light them up for you so you will find the way toward a vision for a project.
IN GATHERING YOUR REFERENCES
Research is a fearsome word. The stereotypical impression is that of a scholar buried under a pile of paper, glasses falling off her face as she reads through pages with furrowed eyebrows. However, as a writer you need to seek out the relevant literature at the very start. You need related texts to capture the free fall of creative imagination. Research will give you a framework. It is a wisdom catcher that will bring your ideas together. Resulting citations will have made you check, suspect, or validate assumptions and presuppositions. You gain authority in the subject matter at hand.
IN JOURNALING YOUR EXPERIENCES
What about the process itself? Writing is a reflexive exercise. Once you sit down and write, you are very much aware of your process. How efficient is your method of writing? How disciplined? How relaxed? How egoistic? How sensitive? Often writing starts here as well, when you become self-aware. Do you take down notes on the go? Do you keep a notebook and change it only after you’ve filled it out entirely? Do you write down dialogues you hear as you commute? Do you keep a notepad of quotations?
Consult your journals, your letters, your diary, and even those back of receipts where you wrote down bullet points of wisdom. What is it that you always wrote about and why? How were you able to write in an unhurried pace or under a tense situation? Can you recall how you came up with one cohesive statement? Are you writing about personal desires using gut expressions? When you start writing, every process is a precious first note of how your text may eventually sing.
IN WRITING A FIRST DRAFT
You have reached a point when all that brainstormed ideas have narrowed into one united thought. Now is when you try to harmonize your concept by thinking about an audience. You need to ask at this stage, who will read what you have written and why? How will that reader not misunderstand? How will this writing resonate with that audience hearer?
Writing the first draft involves a hearer. There is always that ear of attention an author-originator will have to seduce through set, contemplative ways. That ear will hear because what the final draft is saying has aimed for it to listen. Deliberately, writing the final draft is a performance of careful attention to detail. The grammar, syntax and diction forming the major units of thoughts need exactness and fluency. Usually, the draft will, at this final form, exhibit the writing voice, or the style, or the angle, or beat. The final draft has made only one cohesive claim or perspective. Ambiguity is completely gone, and at least for that one target hearer and audience, a point has been made.
