Tribulus terrestris

Yesterday, I saw these flowers (Tribulus terrestris, according to my Wiki search) carpeting the airport grounds. Let them grow freely. Nature does better landscaping than humans do—at least in this part of the country.

On Perfect Days

Who else has seen Perfect Days? It's about a middle-aged man, Hirayama, who lives his every day. He wakes up early and hears the street sweeper outside. He rolls his mat, brushes his teeth, trims his beard, waters his plants, gets instant coffee from a vending machine, plays a song on a cassette tape, and drives to work. He is a toilet cleaner in what looks like an upscale neighborhood in Tokyo. He has lunch in a park where he takes photos with a film camera. He looks up at the sky and trees and smiles. After work he goes to an onsen and eats in an izakaya, where he has a glass of beer. He goes home, turns on the reading light, and reads a book before he finally falls asleep.

Nothing much happens. Hirayama hardly ever speaks. There's not a lot of dialogue. Other than the wonderful American songs in he plays in the car, the sounds you hear in the movie are mostly background noises, like vehicles swooshing, the toilet doors opening, or the leaves rustling.

I can't quite explain why I like Wim Wenders's film so much. Is it because I am in that moment in my life when I live almost the same way—getting through the day but finding quiet moments in between? Is it because the film is set in Japan, which has recently become one of my favorite places to visit in the world? Is it because the film seems free from distraction and celebrates the analog in an increasingly digital milieu? Is it because the ending features Hirayama listening to music and tearing up, like it was catharsis and thanksgiving in equal measure, and I often do the same, with prayer and remembering, because work can feel heavy? Is it because it is quiet and contemplative—and freedom from noise is what we all need at this point? 

I suppose all of those reasons are true. 

Image credit: IMDB.

Intentionality

Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, on Alice Munro:

Working with her on the last two dozen or so was both a thrill and a lesson in intentionality. Although her stories seemed to move organically, sometimes even to wander, often when I suggested cutting a passage that I thought was extraneous I had to erase my suggestion when the importance of that passage became manifestly clear a few pages later. Invariably, when I felt that something wasn’t entirely working in a story, she would send me a revision before I’d even had time to talk to her about it.

Alice Munro, 92

At 2 am, I woke to a text update about a patient. While scrolling, as I often do, I read the news that Alice Munro, one of my favorite writers, has died. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I sort of expected her passing, the way one does with old people. I knew Tita Alice had been frail these past years. She couldn’t even make it to the Nobel ceremony in 2013. But a part of me wished she would surprise the world with yet another collection of stories. No one else writes like her. You see, I had just been reading her, as I always do. No other modern writer speaks to my consciousness the way she does. Her prose is not elaborate. It is simple, deceptively so. There are no big words. But it is so sophisticated and complex and so well put together that I am always left in awe, even in the rereading. I don’t know what I feel—some sadness that I will not read a new story of hers, but mostly gratefulness for an impressive, moving, and extraordinary body of work that has stretched the limits of the short story, still my favorite form of fiction. 

Bic Cristal

I bought a few Bic Cristal pens abroad last year. I've been using one this past week. These pens are iconic. The design is simple and functional. 

Then I saw a video that calls it a pen that changed the world, significantly decreasing the cost of writing instruments through near-perfect design and engineering. The video is super cool and definitely worth your time. 

Mother's Day

1.

Before I would head off to work in the early mornings, Nanay sometimes asks me why I'm busy all the time. I tell her, "To sustain my mother's lavish lifestyle."

"Ano nga 'lavish'?!" 

2.

Here she is, on our last family trip, with her favorite: the firstborn son. She tells us, "Wala ko favorite sa inyo; tanan kamo favorite ko." But Sean and I know. 

3. 

Happy Mother's Day, Nay! You are the best mother God has given to us. 

The little bird

After rounds, I saw the little bird perched on top of my car. He looked at me, as if to say, "There you are," and ignored me for the next two minutes before he flew off. 

Website was down, but it's running now

For the last 4 days, this screen showed up instead of my actual home page. My apologies. There was a delay (not my fault) in processing the renewal of the dot com domain, but that has been fixed. 

Bawal magkuha

I saw this sign from a private garden in the neighorhood. Paul and I looked on, careful not to trample on the vegetables.

Iloilo

Iloilo City feels more like home than anywhere else in the country. My roots come from Panay, although we no longer have any connections with our relatives there, other than a vague recognition when someone shows up with a similar family name. Some cousins went to college there. The food tastes great, too. A great majority of residents from South Cotabato self-identify as "Ilonggo," even if some hadn't even been to Iloilo at all. 

Exercising

I wish I had paid more attention to physical fitness in my teenage years. Perhaps it's not yet too late to start.

Recently I've been walking the talk: doing regular exercises, getting myself a fitness coach, playing tennis once in a while. (Although, full disclosure here, I hadn't played in the court in the last three months). Much of physical fitness involves seemingly inconsequential choices which, when summed up in the end, might mean a lot: taking the stairs instead of the escalator, walking instead of driving, and so on. 

Months ago, the trainer asked me what my fitness goals were. I said I wanted to develop strength. I didn't care much about whether I'd look good. It was all about functionality. Before all this, I couldn't carry my own luggage at the airport. After months of doing regular exercises, I am pleased to tell you that my upper body strength has so improved that I even offer my own services to other passengers in the plane: "You need help with that, Ma'am?"

One great thing about exercising is that it keeps my mind sharper. I wish I'd known this before; I could have had better grades.

(Photo above: tennis court in Prague). 

Finding a place to live in

The writer of La Vie Graphite, one of the blogs I read closely and with much interest, has finally found a good place to stay. 

Amidst such anxious times, there’s a shelter in the storm for which to be grateful. Discovering a place and quickly moving in winter amounts to an unusual scenario for this area. My elation at finding a good way out of a bad situation generated its own traction gear, powering me through muscling the move and deep-cleaning both the newer and the former apartments. The season-that-was lasted nineteen excruciating months, devouring more than two-thirds of my earnings. There was nothing else to be found at the time. Now that episode is past; enough said here about numbers. Through the crucible, I could not have guessed at its duration, having to depend upon a housing market as feeble and fickle as the job outlook. But surely I know enough to be thankful. I mailed my first rent check in a thank-you note.

I remember about my own saga of finding a place to live in when I transferred to UP Manila for med school. 

Traveling at the speed of the soul by Nick Hunt

Nick Hunt on traveling:

There’s an old idea that the soul travels at the speed of walking. In an Arabic saying, according to the philosopher Alain de Botton, this is pegged specifically to the walking speed of a camel, which, at around three miles an hour, is the same as the average human’s. In “Essays on Love,” he wrote: “While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.”

Join me tomorrow as I speak with physician-writer Dr. Susano Tanael during the Book Talk of the PCP Committee on Medical Humanities

If you're free tomorrow, join me as I speak with physician-writer Dr. Susano Tanael. These past days, I've been immersing myself in his essays and poems. I'm excited to meet him. 

The PCP Committee on Medical Humanities warmly invites you to the: 

Book Talk with Dr. Susano B. Tanael on his Book Ambiguities of the Body, moderated by Dr. Lance Isidore G. Catedral 

When: 13 April 2024, Saturday at 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM 

Via Zoom Conferencing and Facebook Live 

 Register for free: https://us02web.zoom.us/s/87454793854?pwd=U3EzL3hnL2xpSjJSaE9xQWF5dkc0Zz09 

Dr. Susano B. Tanael has contributed to publications of local and international peer-reviewed medical journal articles. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines.

Daghang salamat, Prof. Marj!

Something came in the mail yesterday—Prof. Marj Evasco's precious gift, Ma. Milagros Dumdum's Falling on Quiet Water. The author is the wife of poet Simeon Dumdum, Jr, whose collection, Why Keanu Reeves Is So Lonely, I thoroughly enjoyed. 

Just a sampling of the excellent haiku (No. 18): 

Evening comes. I pray

With crickets orchestrating

Our pleas commingle.

On this warm April morning, I want to curl up in bed after reading that!  

Liminality

I envied this middle-aged woman who read beside me. Lost in her book, she ignored the noisy crowd in Montmartre, on a busy after-work afternoon in Paris. She had a glass of wine and dark olives. She smoked in between pages and looked lonely, completely lost in her thoughts. After hours of walking, I rested my legs, had a glass of wine myself, and sat there, watching the locals and tourists pass by. The lady then packed her bags and left. 

The image evokes the word, liminality—the in-between, the transition. 

Liminality represents threshold space, margins between paragraphs. If you can find yourself the luxury of pausing between obligations and demands, there you’ll find those mental spaces to muse. I remember a professor from graduate school, a brilliant lecturer, who would occasionally stop speaking and look out the window. I admired that, realizing he was reflecting in mid-flight. Because the constantly streaming media in our midst obstructs our natural musing tendencies, misconstrued as unproductive, threshold thinking becomes intentional.

The pausing and musing and resting are valuable ingredients to a rich inner life but things our generation often ignores and sets aside. We have lost the art of meditation and are now poorer for it, having settled for cheap alternatives, like social media. 

For the believer, this liminality can be likened to moments of prayer, those precious, Spirit-filled moments of quiet conversation and contemplation. 

Or Sundays, when much of the city gathers in houses of prayer, setting aside the cares of the world for a day devoted to church and, later, rest.

Undersea cables

Fascinating read: Undersea cables are the unseen backbone of the global internet, via The Conversation.

Have you ever wondered how an email sent from New York arrives in Sydney in mere seconds, or how you can video chat with someone on the other side of the globe with barely a hint of delay? Behind these everyday miracles lies an unseen, sprawling web of undersea cables, quietly powering the instant global communications that people have come to rely on.

Undersea cables, also known as submarine communications cables, are fiber-optic cables laid on the ocean floor and used to transmit data between continents. These cables are the backbone of the global internet, carrying the bulk of international communications, including email, webpages and video calls. More than 95% of all the data that moves around the world goes through these undersea cables.

Quiet contemplation on Easter Sunday

I enjoy the Holy Week to the same degree, if not more, as I do Christmas. These holidays, whose schedules are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture—a fact that dissuades other Christians from celebrating them at all—bookmark key events in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. Secular calendars designate them as national holidays. And rightly so. For who, in his right mind, would open cafés during this time, especially on Good Friday, when the inhabitants of the city are at home, recuperating from and avoiding the summer heat, or in church, deep in prayer and contemplation?

There is a season for every activity under heaven. So goes a line from Ecclesiastes, written by the wise King Solomon, who, when asked by God what gift he would like to receive, chose wisdom over riches and long life.

This rule, or reminder, if not fatherly wisdom, has encouraged my choice of quiet contemplation and prayer and the reading of books these past days. The harsher alternative would be to resume regular programming: going to work, busying myself with tasks and to-do lists. Honest work is a blessing from God. And so is rest. 

I could have chosen to extend my trip where it was nippy, sweater-weather and all, devoid of the discomfort of tropical humidity. But I could not quite pass the opportunity to enjoy my own room and my own thoughts and the thoughts of God. Rare are the moments when I can sit down with a book and a cup of coffee, my phone hardly ringing save for the reminder that my screen time is down by 25%, my presence hardly needed in hospitals (ah, what grace!). 

The ride from the airport early this week showed me roads that were almost empty, as in the pandemic lockdown. So hot was the weather that the grass by the road turned brown, and the trees looked thirsty. 

At home, the air conditioning is in full blast. Even Paul cannot stand the heat and would curl up in my mother’s bedroom, where it is cooler, and where he is conditionally allowed to stay as long as he remains a good boy.

I spent the greater part of Good Friday in church for prayer and fasting. Delighting in God’s Word was the theme of the congregational meditation, drawing from the riches of Psalm 119 and from the reminder that the Word is with God and the Word is God Himself (John 1:1)—beautiful theological and practical truths that animate my life and those in the household of faith. I was rewarded with a nourishing meal, the perfect arroz caldo, our local church’s tradition to break the short fast.

During this season I also enjoyed The Chosen (season 1) on Netflix. What I love about it is the tender portrayal of Jesus living a perfect life in an abject, sinful world, choosing to mingle with the demon-possessed, the lepers, the lowly.

I finished Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, her meditation on the first book of the Bible. Her close reading of Genesis has stirred in me a gratefulness for the priceless truths of Biblical Christianity, even if being a Christian has fallen out of flavor in the secular world. She writes about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, and Joseph; and compares and contrasts Genesis with the Enuma Elish and other similar accounts from surrounding cultures at the time. I read, but not wholeheartedly agree with, everything that Robinson writes. I do not find her particularly relaxing but always worthwhile. I often have to repeat myself and am rewarded by greater illumination after several rounds of rereading. I must have listened to all her podcast and YouTube interviews, and I love her novels and her essays. I am what you call a huge fan.




I finally got to finish The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, a gift from my friend Racquel Bruno in 2015, during our residency in internal medicine. I started reading it nine years ago. I got preoccupied with work. I was also bored by the first few chapters that I had to set it aside, hoping I would probably find the stamina and encouragement to complete it. In January this year, I took a brief survey of my book collection. Catton’s novel stood out like a sore thumb. I read it from the beginning—not from the middle where I had placed my bookmark, because so much time has passed that I’d already forgotten the plot. It is the longest book to win the Booker Prize with its 800-plus words. There was sweetness and deep joy in reading it the second time around, a reminder to myself not to give up too easily. My favorite part, ultimately, is the love story between the naïve but good-natured Emery Staines and the prostitute Anna Wetherell. Now I am itching to visit New Zealand and to read Catton’s Birnam Wood.




It is Easter Sunday today. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

Prague, for the first time

I took this in 2017, during winter. I rested my feet after hours of wandering aimlessly. I remember that all I wanted then was to experience the city. My budget was limited. I was in residency. That visit to Prague was largely unplanned, something I decided to do on a whim after a staying a few days in Vienna for a conference. 

When I travel, I have a vague sense of what to I want to do each day. I do not follow strict itineraries, as tour groups do. I remember visiting a bookstore near Vltava River before stopping to behold this view of ducks. Czech Republic was magical, the land of castles I'd normally see in films. 

I suppose these ducks would be dead by now, roasted or boiled or fried, dipped in gravy, with goulash on the side.

The rhythm of His grace

The Lent Project is a gift that keeps on giving. Alongside Scripture, the chosen author of the day chooses a poem, an artwork (painting or sculpture), and music to supplement and enrich the daily meditation. I had to take a pause from my daily Bible reading schedule to accommodate this enriching online devotional, which sends me email updates when new posts are available.

For March 7, Dr. Arianna Moloy writes about the ministry of love to the saints. The passages are Galatians 6:7-10 and Hebrews 6:10.

And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.

Allow me to share some quotable quotes from her meditation.

Exhaustion can cause mental overload and spiritual heaviness, resulting in a kind of chaotic weightiness making it hard to breathe.

And: 

Weariness skews perspective. Like a kind of emotional sunburn, any comment received in exhaustion lands in an overly tender and painful manner.

Dr. Moloy draws from the Bible's encouragement:

This is why Jesus’s invitation (e.g. Matthew 11:28-30) to draw near to him, receive comfort, and learn how to approach what’s before us with his guidance is such an incredible gift. The God of the universe offers to teach us the rhythm of his grace so that we might experience true rest in the very core of our being.

The "rhythm of his grace." I like that very much. In my moments of exhaustion—physical, spiritual, emotional—I should turn to Jesus' words (Matthew 11:28):

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

The song, Your Labor Is Not in Vain” from the album Work Songs: The Porter’s Gate Worship Project Volume 1, is just wonderful.