Morning Pages and Exhaling and Ocean Park 031708.....

'Sapsap ' Galore

First , pictures I took on my cellphone cam on my visit to Ocean Park last summer.

Stingray Beside Me

Stingray Belly on my Head

Vertical Fish

'Sapsap' Galore Up Close

Nemo_Found_1

One 'Dalmatian' Fish with Faux Neon Green Corral

Not So Scary Shark

Amazonian Fish in a Tank

Plaque Says It

Two Nemos Found

'Sapsap'-py Faux Shipwreck

I'ts Not the Faux Coral, It's the Vertical Fish!

Nemo_Found2
Fish-Face-Up_Front

Fish_Spa_My_Foot

Clammy Close-Up

Statue of Sn Lorenzo Ruiz at the Luneta.
Gift of JPII to the Filipino people.

July 29, 2008

Four …. Been occupied at work …. Utang muna ang morning pages ngayon …
Just want to jot this recurring thought …that if I am allowed only three short sentences to say to God , they would be these ---- ‘ I love You. I thank You. Please forgive me’.

July 30, 2008

Let me begin my morning pages by quoting these reflections :

First and foremost : ”Matthew 13:44-46
44 Jesus said to his disciples: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. 46 When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.”

“There are things in the world to which we have to attend. However, our eyes and heart must always be directed towards the Kingdom of Heaven.
Dear Jesus, if I don’t seem to pay attention to You, nudge me strongly so I refocus my eyes on You, my Pearl of Great Price. “ “


Quotes on design and such things :

From a Filipino designer based in France .

“Living in France freed me to be myself, to discover who I am and express it to the fullest. Design is about being honest with myself. Before, I would do projects that were client-oriented and I would look at the magazines and propose an idea. Now, it’s all about me,” he says.
“In France, artists are called ‘createurs.’ The idea has to come from you. That’s what I’m trying to teach when I’m in the Philippines. Many are lacking in individuality. Big cities in France celebrate culture and creative people who do new things and make you feel it.”
“Design, or art in general, is about finding your truth and translating that,” he adds.

Me : I too, dream of being a ‘ createur ‘. I plan and I need and want to spend the rest of my life , starting now as that . Idream of being in the south of France , in Eze, in St. Paul de Vence (did I get this right?) and inhale the atmosphere of art, culture and sunshine ...


From a businessman/photographer :
“My signature is elegance. Sometimes these young, beautiful models can’t project sophistication the way a mature person or a woman of stature would. It takes a certain age before the elegance is projected naturally. You can’t buy that. Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder. I’ve had subjects who were plump, but they were happy.”


2:30 PM I had to spray myself with a strong dose of ‘profumo di oliva’ to keep myself awake ….. OK , let’s make this an exercise in perseverance , professionalism and fortitude under the torture of doing-something-that-is-interesting-in-but-believe-in-anymore ( isn't that confusing?)…….. I will be very grateful if these work hours ended today without me abandoning this thing … So, help me God.

3:30 Dear God --- this is a cry for help …. Please let me last until five … I’m already experience a hardness of mind and emotions ….. trying to be productive under the circumstances …

4:00 God, please … I’m trying to be productive, useful and relevant here , hopefully , according to Your will and plan for my life … or what’s left of it …

Lord, in the past , I’ve run my life with my decisions that may have been intended by me for good , but didn’t turn out to be so. I also don’t want my life or what’s left of it to be driven by other people . I really pray that this time , it is Your will that propels it .


4:30 : Dear God, I’m waiting to exhale ….


5:00 …. Exhaling now ….. Dear God … I pray tomorrow will be a better day …. Thanks for the day.

Morning Pages , Haptics and Prague

I've uploaded a video file of my vision board on my travel and stay in the mother of cities ... Prague .... Thanks and acknowledgement to the owners of these photos ... these have been my inspirations .. and I'm looking forward to the time when I will be posting photos of Prague I've taken myself .... Thank You, Father God for that day , soooon .....

July 28, 2008

Dear God, I’m really going to try to make this day an offering to you … and I pray that all my activities and thoughts will be according to Your will … although , if You ask me I’m just trying to go through the day …I don’t want to think that it will just be another groundhog day , feeling the way I do at this very moment …. I am praying for a pleasant and extraordinary surprise from You …. Not that I don’t find the trees, the grass, the flowers, the rain, the sky pleasant and remarkable….

One teeny-winnie thing I changed today, first thing in the morning , was the content of the picture-frame which does not really contain a human picture but a quotable quote with a picture of a creamy white baby otter so innocently tilting its head , as if to get a better view of something interesting, evoking curiosity. So this one goes … it’s a quote from Marcel Proust --- “ The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes .”
Well and good , but I’ve been having these intuitional thing that the message doesn’t affirm my purpose of seeking to change my external landscape , work-wise … doesn’t affirm my travel plans …. So today , for the meantime , until I come across an appropriately affirming message … I’ve replaced my picture-frame content with this quote from Andre Gide , a French author . I know I’ve read a book of his way back in college … I just forgot the title …. Hey, thirty years have passed … So the quote goes : “ I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower .“ I mean , who but an artist would have written such a line of substance about a seemingly quotidian event..
Which reminds me , I do have one thing to crow about this morning … I’m having Japanese broccoli with my salmon this morning ---- ‘ashinaga’ broccoli , it is called.
First time in my life to have a Japanese-sounding broccoli. Hooray !And this week-end , I tried for the very first time ever, my detoxifying drink of juiced cucumber-parsley-and-celery … was wary at first , gulped one or two shot-glasses with water-chaser. Then I began to love the very chlorophyll-green colour of the juice, the raw grassy-planty smell of it , thus I think, I’m gonna be hooked …. Very healthy , too !

Hmmm … learned a new thing today … so there’s this thing ‘haptic’ technology ….
There’s this new Samsung cellphone called the ‘Anycall Haptic’ which has the capacity daw to “ enable the users to feel clicks, vibrations and other tactile input. In all, it provides the user with 22 kinds of touch sensations.
“Those sensations explain the use of the term haptic in the name. Haptic is from the Greek "haptesthai," meaning to touch. As an adjective, it means relating to or based on the sense of touch. As a noun, usually used in a plural form (haptics), it means the science and physiology of the sense of touch. Scientists have studied haptics for decades, and they know quite a bit about the biology of touch. They know, for example, what kind of receptors are in the skin and how nerves shuttle information back and forth between the central nervous system and the point of contact.”
Grabe …. There’ so much to be learned … so many interesting things to know and I’m stuck here …. Hello …. I don’t really have the right and reason to be bored …

Five, bye …

Morning Pages and 'Aha'

July 17, 2008

While on the taxi to the office , this thought recurred …… the ‘power’ of ‘and’ in expanding one’s mental horizons and opening up one’s mind to tolerance and perhaps enlightenment … as opposed to a pervasive ‘or’ viewpoint… of course, I realize that there contexts and instances when the ‘or’ thing is the only way … like the choice between good or bad , in which case , we go for the good.

Once instance when thinking of it as an ‘and’ is quite liberating …. perhaps an ‘Aha’ moment …. Which occurred while on the taxi … on one hand Jesus teaches to love and give preference for the poor (‘ Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto Me’ ….) . On the other hand , He says that the poor will always be with us ( when Judas was carping about a woman pouring precious oil on Jesus’ feet , saying that it should have been sold instead and the proceeds given to the poor). For the longest time and up until now , I’ve always thought of this as an ‘or’ situation , a ‘ conflict ‘ in the gospel message which sowed germs of doubts in my mind … The ‘Aha’ factor is when I realized that it was not a conflicting message … that it can be viewed as a ‘balancing’ thing … an ‘and’ instance when both situations can exist side by side….avoiding extremes from either side ….
/******************************************************************************/
Quote this from a travel blog piece. Speaks of the kind of life/worklife I am envisioning
for myself … in the very near future , maybe next year …huh? Picturing myself with a laptop/notebook , a professional camera , sitting in a café in oh, Paris, Prague, Budapest, Bellagio , Istanbul … other nooks and crannies of western and eastern Europe, pounding on my laptop , writing reviews and observations of places I’ve seen and stayed in , and getting paid for it …. What a dream and what a life …
“This list is admittedly subjective, but comes from 30 years of professional wandering. Some places are more well-known than others, but all share a sense of tranquility and wonder. And since I review small boutique hotels for a living, I have included nearby recommended places to stay. Happy travels!”

/*************************************************************************************/
I would like to think that I am making a significant headway towards reprogramming my feeling inner world from a pervasive heavy and gloomy one to an upbeat, optimistic, forward-looking, happy-joyful and lighthearted one , not that I want to become a mindless , ignorant, naïve Polllyana again. Having gone through the dark , I want to be a realistic optimist , inwardly happy and steady and unfreakable , regardless of what’s happening outside of me . Then , my optimism for the most part was anchored on the good things that are happening to me and outside of me, and that is not a stable place to be … the other side would be that if bad things are happening outside of me or to me , my insides also become unhappy and freaked out.
/******************************************************************************
Made a last-minute search on the web for the word ‘love’ and what do you know …
there are about 4.47 billion references …. Oh well …

It’s five , ta-ta …..

Morning Pages and Then Some

July 15, 2008

Lunchtime and there’s a heavy rain outside ….. storm ‘Helen’ entering Philippine territory.. I haven’t written a word or letter this morning for my required Julia Cameron/The Artist’s Way three morning pages …So this lunch break , feasting on bangus-fish and okra in olive oil and three pieces of bananas , am going to jot down anything that comes to mind .. like , didn’t I notice that most of the pictures I’m uploading in my blog are not mine … of course I thank and acknowledge the owners of those pictures … see … I have future plans for this blog … this blog will mutate into my travel blog when I embark on my post-retirement tour of Europe , both East and West , the Holy Land and Turkey ( is it part of Europe?) and then into my business blog/website when I put up my own clothing and home furnishings line/designs …I believe ….. Already, I have a byline for my designs --- “ I only wear originals ….. mine .” . But of course, that won’t do for a business ad copy … Maybe I can change that to “You only wear originals …..mine . Still doesn’t sound perfectly right for business purposes … I’ll think of something ….

I’m getting the hang of preparing my own meals … I have to watch my diet and nutrition . Got high marks (not necessarily good) for my cholesterol and triglyceride levels in my lipid profile , twice …. My HDLs, the bad guys, are way up here when they should be down there … and my LDLs , the good guys, are way down there when they should be up here , thus the oatmeal-salmon-lettuce-celery-broccoli- tuna-carrots-bananas-olive oil-grapeseed oil-and-the-like meals I prepare …sounds gourmet hah …I also do galunggong or bangus in olive oil, tilapia in olive oil next , kamote tops and okra in olive oil …. Maybe I’ll also try something French like ratatouille ( hmmm …. No red rick-racks underlining … I got the spelling right the first time …. …pat on my back …) feeling good about this diet thing …

Talk about my own photographs which I took with my cell phone cam , basic. One is the stingray pic I took on my solo visit to the Manila Ocean Park . I’ve titled it ‘Stingray Belly on my Head’ ---- funny the nose , mouth and eyes on one flat surface… called it that because I love salmon-belly and bangus-belly dishes . Another are the pics of my pet cats , the males in my life, Salvatorre (Badong) and Francesco (Coocoo). Badong in his , what I call, the emperor pose … I marvel at his natural aristocratic air , and Coocoo , in his shy, quiet, nondescript poses ….But he’s the easier company , quiet
and non-intrusive, the perfect condo cat . Badong is … I’ve never seen a noisier and peripatetic cat . Ninety percent of his six waking hours ( cats are supposed to be asleep about 18 hours a day) is meow-time while running up and down on whatever elevations there are in our tiny condo unit … and most of those six hours are during the wee morning hours. …. Arrrggh !!! I’ve turned into a screaming hag because of that ….

Bye time now …..

Groundhog Chronicles

July 03, 2008

Gray morning today …both the weather and me …..woke up with some grey thoughts and feelings ….grey thoughts related to the past ….And I thought I was beyond them already …. I guess they will float in and out of my mind unannounced and without my permission …But I sure can keep them from harming me again … In fact I’m going to use them as a footstool so I can stand higher and have a larger panoramic view of life …
Easy….easy …. I’m already trying to live the ‘unexamined life’ and live a light-hearted life at this stage . What’s good now about all those ugly periods in the past is that they have now become wellsprings of laughter at my stupid reactions, my stupid seriousness and over-involvement . Feels good to be able to laugh at what I was in the past….. the present , too.

10:30 A.M.

You know what I pray will happen today ?… that this will not be just another day like yesterday and the days before…. Surprise me , God, please , pleasantly and major(ly) , of course .. Please , not like the surprise a few minutes ago --- I landed on my butt slipping on a wet floor …..but something like me getting on an airplane for a week or a month in Paris and Prague ….


2:00 P.M. Per Julia Cameron’s instructions in her book ‘The Artist’s Way’ , morning pages should be three … At the rate I’m going, doing these at the office, I might not be getting the optimum results from doing this exercise which is supposed to remove artistic blockages in the mind……


5:15 PM ….. Spent the rest of the afternoon doing applications test …. Time to go again …. Thank You , Lord God….


By the way, above are Ricardo Larrabure's photos I mentioned in the July 1 page. I crossed-posted that from my multiply blog and somehow the pictures did not come through. I couldn't edit the blogspot page either.