almost there...

last year, i remembered. i was far away for the 28th...

and as the days wore on --
stripping himself of all,
surrendering himself
to the deities --

the fog conspiring with
the sky to bring good rain;
with ridges and rocks
and river falls;

-- he finds his life
re-aligned,
once again,
re-born.

a few hours more, i will greet the 29th.

cambuhat river, buenavista, bohol

piggish

i noticed everyone was staring at me. i never bulged before. now, however, is different, and everyone seemed to have noticed how much i have bloated. it was not entirely due to an amass of feeds. i don't claim myself as lean meat but i am not fat either. unlike others i've met, i am still able to freely roam.

it must be time to round walking and running again. (pig from buenavista bohol)

loboc tarsier

still without the least inspiration to write, my wife asked me to post photos of interest. nothing however seems to be of interest. and my wife, although she gazed at me once while i was waiting in the airport. i glanced back. she smiled. i closed my eyes in acknowledgment. when i opened them, she was gone.

isulan, sultan kudarat

lambayong, sultan kudarat

rice people (1994)

the life of a farmer is tied to the land he tills and the seeds he sows...

for most in a farmers' life, the hardships endured from the harrowing to the harvesting, in the end, consummates primarily with the amount of harvest left, and equates to the same situation as or worse off than before...

rice people is thick. post-khmer-rouge. displacement of farmers seeds. collateral lands lost. erosion of local knowledge.

revealing the never-ending struggle of cambodia's rice-paddy farmers in a powerful story of loss and survival, one family, in a span of one cropping season from early land preparation to reaping the harvest, manages to endure the difficulties of living in the rice fields where strong natural elements often off-set the seeming balance in the interdependence between man and nature.

midnight's children

... who what am i? my answer: i am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all i have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. i am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world afected was affected by mine. i am anything that happens after i've gone which would not have happened if i had not come. nor am i particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'i', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. i repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.