A Mammoth’s Tooth

I had to check the spelling of “mammoth” because I haven’t encountered the word in a while. But it was the topic of last night’s voice note from a dear colleague and friend. This week, she had dinner with a friend who brought old rocks and aquatic animal’s teeth found by fishers on a beach. She told me that as she was looking at the rocks on the table, holding them. Her friend told them this:

“This is probably the first time in hundreds of years that these rocks, bones, and teeth have been held by human hands.”

Upon hearing this, my friend, suddenly, felt zoomed out of time, or rather felt so strongly the presence of time, it’s immensity, and how this point of contact had bended — making her life of thirty something years encounter a hundred years of existence through a single touch.

When I heard this on the voice note of my phone, I felt how lucky it was, or how lucky I was that she experienced this and now, through sound waves on a phone, I experience it too. How many times do I encounter things or instances as rare as a mammoth’s tooth, and be completely oblivious to its existence in time. Time too immense and things and life and people, too complex to understand that it gets difficult to be clear sighted at how miraculous it is to encounter each other, almost as impossible as holding a mammoth’s tooth on your left on a random Tuesday night.

When Hackett’s Paw Lands On My Knee

Hackett is my mother’s cat. He is 11 years old. When he was 5, he felt incredibly unhappy inside the house, looking out the windows, meowing until he was brought outside. He loved the outside cat life. He became part of a gang of cats, had a few babies until he was neutered at 6 years old. The neighbors have this joke that he’s the kingpin of all the cats. Recently, he’s been less active and started to want to stay inside. He’d recently taken up residence in my room.

I noticed he had this habit of resting his paw on my knee as he fell asleep. I never took notice until this morning. Here is a photo of the paw of the kingpin of this alley’s gang of cats– resting on the side of my knee. An old cat, finding rest in the bridge formed by a tiny touch.

Green Grace

For my sister’s birthday we met her in an island 5 hours from the city she lives in today. We walked in the forest near the opening of a road and found greens covering the side of the road, it was always summer in the island but underneath the trees, were the greenest greens that were cool to the touch

I think I’ve been Waiting

Today, I felt incredibly lethargic before I took lunch. Perhaps I was hungry, it is 3pm and I had a late breakfast. I found out a month ago that I was not producing enough cortisol. Apparently, cortisol is not just a stress hormone (contrary to what I thought), it also helps you get moving, get on your feet and be energised, it helps you metabolise and aids in your body in regulating stress better. Producing enough, and you feel fine, produce less than enough and you could find yourself crashing, slow, sluggish, not metabolising. My doctor asked me once, “Minsan ba, nararamdaman mo na ubos na ubos ka na?” (Do you sometimes feel that there is nothing left in you?)– Wow “ubos” seemed accurate. I told her, I figured I was lazy but I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong. But I do not remember when it started– the feeling of running out.

When we started to get to work on getting better, I started to feel energised again. Some days, I felt like I was shining. However, last night, I slept late, went to work and forgot to do the daily regimen. By afternoon I was crashing. The physical feeling is followed by another more invisible feeling of running behind something that is impossible to catch. The doctor told me this condition I have can be a result of prolonged exposure to stress. Which shocked me, “I’m not stressed? I’m sure I’m not.” Anyway, stress can come from anything even the less obvious things. Overdoing anything can lead to stress to the body. But I don’t understand, am I overdoing things?

I told my friend J that I am dreaming of growing a garden. “But feeling ko, lagi akong naghahabol ng I don’t know what”. (But I feel like I’m always chasing after something I don’t know what.) It is a long conversation which began with a recommendation of a book entitled “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” She wrote many things but this one

I don’t know which one came first, the feeling of chasing after something endlessly, or the feeling of exhaustion. Or maybe it is like a carousel– with no beginning or end. Maybe this is the stress — the quiet one that puts a shade over the things of everyday life.

“This is not it, so we better run faster to where we have to get to so that we can find joy.”

I’ve put off so many things — wait, that’s incorrect, I lived so many things in a hurried manner because I thought

“once we get through this, then we will arrive, to the place where we can enjoy. “

But I’m thinking more and more, that this is it. This is the real thing, the minutes where we are here. I realised I am exhausted because I thought that running will put an end to the waiting. But the destination had always been here, and now. I write it to remember– so that I can recognise that what I had been waiting for is already here.

The Heaviest Snow Since 1981

I rushed out of bed to open the window as soon as I read Yoonsoo’s message:

“Omg there’s snow.”

Never mind that I was in a T-shirt fit for filming in Manila’s summer heat.

I did not want
To miss a second
Of this beautiful snow
Knowing that it would evaporate before we knew it

We kept the window open,
laughing
Never mind that we might get sick
Or that our heads might ache from the cold.
That fear felt small
Compared to joy of touching a gentle snowflake

I rejoiced at it landing on my skin
and
saw it quickly transform into a drop of water

Slowly, snowflakes started to populate my palm
Turning into a puddle of water

And I wondered
how gravity told something so tiny, and fragile
to trust

To land onto my warm hands–
to let go of its apprehensions,
to not fear changing.

As if it was running toward my heat,
knowing it would be —
wanting to be–
transformed.

M

Two years ago, I spent my birthday on the other side of the world. Bogota was the farthest city in the world for me. It took a 35 hour journey for me to get there.

That day, we walked in a garden and looked at flowers. When I was 12, I thought that when you turned 30 – a person becomes this “fuller size” of human — someone more actualized, or someone completely complete. But now that I am here, in this time, I realise that “completeness” is not a one time thing or a destination to arrive at. Perhaps we are always, and have always been complete, evolving everyday, into something new.

Mga Kaibigan (Friends)

I take a lot of photographs but it often takes me months before I see them again after the moment of taking. I mostly photograph people around me. I used to think that I would have a life as a photographer but right now, that’s not the life I have. Today I found these photographs of a trip I took in April 2019 with my friends.

Continue reading “Mga Kaibigan (Friends)”