doon sa manila bay

I’ve been in places where I felt I had no choice in the matter…it was like living in an empty room…no one to talk to…no one to reach for…I’d cried because I had no clue about how to help myself. I’d been into situation that everything seemed to wither. Bothering questions arises. But no answers found. Fervently I live life according to what I understand…according to what I like…according to me…

But I’ve always believed that we make the best of whatever life hands us. And that God will never let you go without letting you know that life is beautiful. God has its own ways to reach us on how to live life. We sometimes find and learned it in the street…in our home…with love ones…with friends…even in strange things…and sometimes in a very painful way. And people around us had been part of it. Just find way to reflect.

He illuminates my life with things that I seemed not to appreciate before. Opening my mind with the essence of living in this world and by helping me accept him in my heart. No one can move mountains except him. Somehow, I knew that the answer to all my questions are inside me…it’s just that I need a little sometimes.

They may not come easily and they may seem to be hiding, but I trust God and myself enough to follow my heart and intuition. It’s the only way to go. I have no idea on how long will this be, but I refuse to stop trying to make life better. And that’s because he teaches me these:
If I think I can make a difference by changing something that I do, I won’t give up until I do. I would rather go down fighting, hoping and praying than giving up.


Now, I know, no matter what the trial, no matter what others say, I’ll hold on to him and steadfastly believed that I will not be defeated.

For I earnestly believe on what he had promised to us, that if you try to keep your life for your self. You will have hard times. But if you live life with me, you will find true life!.

Now I take time to smell the flowers…to breath…to laugh…to let tears flow with happiness…to sing…to dance…to play with babies…to hug someone everyday…to appreciate every little thing that I see…to enjoy the haggot of life…to love and be loved…to feel beautiful…to pause and pray…no place for worries because indeed, life is beautiful.

your mouth is lovely

Its title taken from a Russian Jewish saying pronounced over a child speaking her first words, Nancy Richler’s novel Your Mouth Is Lovely brings to life a tiny Russian Jewish village of the early twentieth century and the brutal imprisonment that socialist agitators were subjected to by the imperial government.

The storyteller is a young mother, Miriam, 23 years old and already jailed in Siberia for six years. The story is her memoir in the form of a letter to her six-year-old daughter, who was taken away from her at birth. It starts with the painful circumstances of Miriam’s birth and abandonment by her superstitious mother. She’s raised at first by a family friend and then by her father and stepmother after they marry.

Miriam’s village sits between a pine forest and a vast marsh that locals are drawn to even while it frightens them and fuels their belief in a malevolent supernatural. Most of the characters are women, and they are both superstitious and smart, judgmental and kind. Richler controls the potential sprawl of the plot and settings by staying focused on the details seen through Miriam’s eyes. Her stepmother satisfyingly evolves from a young wife who doesn’t particularly want Miriam in her home to a stern, loving, and steadfast mother.

The few male characters act as catalysts in the plot, starting in flashback to Miriam’s late mother’s seduction, and continuing as time passes and some of the young villagers begin to agitate against the tsar’s regime. The novel exposes the brutality of the regime as well as that of the radical socialists, who in 1905 struggle through one abortive "revolution" after another. Tsarist police throw teenagers in jail for distributing leaflets; radical organizers exploit and steal from each other. Young women activists touchingly confide their longings for a beautiful coat or dress only to a trustworthy friend so as not to be thought decadent by their comrades.

Miriam is first doomed and later helped by her stepmother’s idealistic sister Bayla, who rejects a traditional arranged marriage within the village and vanishes to Kiev with her socialist lover. Eventually the distant Bayla grudgingly admits she longs for true love, to be cherished for herself instead of earning her worth by struggling for revolution. Her more stridently political lover admits to feeling a fatal reluctance at a crucial moment. Mixed feelings are everywhere. Miriam’s views of the swamp, the forest, her parents and friends, and the few affluent villagers change throughout her young life. She’s a completely believable character, with the warmth and the fears and flaws of a real person. The reader’s sympathy for Miriam grows as she begins to long to make independent choices, though she is not well equipped for them thanks to her sheltered upbringing. Her healthy adolescent drive for a life and an identity independent of her family’s is what pushes her into the circle of doomed revolutionaries. The reader can almost see what is coming and it’s poignant to know this noble young woman is going to lose her freedom. (This is not a plot-spoiler; the book is told in flashback.)

Miriam spends most of her time in flashback, but she gives us glimpses of her life in prison. She lives with several other women "politicals" in a frigid shack whose interior is coated with ice all winter. In summer, they grow a stingy garden in a courtyard outside. The women pay visits to a nearby house of criminal women, who live in even more squalid, crowded conditions, to help them stay as clean and healthy as possible. Madness is always on the edge of each woman’s consciousness, and it intrudes so frequently that they have devised specific methods of trying to help each other hold onto sanity.

Miriam’s driving hope, the source of her will to survive, is her letter to her daughter, whom she knows she may never see. Her hope and her persistent work on the memoir is fueled by letters from her daughter’s foster-mother and from her own stepmother, who now lives as far as it’s possible to get from the village where the story began. At the end, I closed the book feeling equal amounts hope and doubt, just as I would in a real life-and-death situation. The author could have afforded to let the plot of Your Mouth Is Lovely ramble a bit more, but I loved it anyway. If you prefer books that are tightly written and unified in viewpoint, this is an especially good read. ----google.com----

kami ni crayola

One of the memories that I will always have about when I was in Kindergarten, was the day my friend taught me about crayon boxes. She was my first real friend, and my best friend at the time. One day we were coloring, and she let me borrow crayons from her huge 64-count box. I thought they were so cool. My little 24-count box was nothing compared to hers.

As we were coloring, I reached over to put a crayon back in the box. If any of you have ever used crayons, you know that sometimes they don't go back in as easy as they came out, and that sometimes you end up with a huge bulge in the box. Well, that's what happened with this particular crayon.

I kept trying to force back in the box so it would fit, and my friend didn't like that too much, since it was her crayon box. She started throwing a fit and I remember her yelling, "Don't force it!" Then she continued to give me a demonstration on how you push the other crayons out of the way to make room for the other one going back into the box.

As we were growing up, we continued to stay good friends in grade school. I remember always teasing her about it, and she said she never remembered that day really, but I know it really happened, because I think it was the first time she ever yelled at me.

When we entered high school, things started to change, like they most often do. We still talked when we got the chance, but we started to make our own friends. We've stayed in touch, always saying hi in the halls and everything, but we weren't the same best friends we were in Kindergarten.

In my fourth year, things really started to change for me. So many different things happened, I felt like I was lost in the world. I didn't know what to do or who I could turn to.

Then one day my friend came to my locker after school because she saw that I had been crying after spending the afternoon in the guidance office. She asked me what was wrong and I knew I could trust her, so I told her everything that was going on in my life. I told her this in a 7 page note and gave it to her in school.

A couple periods later she had stopped me in the halls and gave me a note and told me how she understood and everything. She wrote me and told me how I just need some time for things to get worked out, and that everything will be okay. At the end of the note, she wrote one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me. She wrote at the end: "I'll give you the same advice I gave you back when we were in Kindergarten: Don't Force It!"

When I read that it put a smile on my face, the first smile that I had cracked in awhile. I told her that I appreciated the note totally. It's funny that out of all the things people have said to me and tried to help me, those words she wrote in the note were the most inspirational.

It's weird that 18 years later the advice she had given me in kindergarten would help me out so much now. She can't give me a demonstration on how to push things away, like the crayons, but she made me open up my eyes, just like she did when she yelled at me in kindergarten.