oh my stars

from astro dot com

An evaluation of goals ***
Valid during many months: This is a challenging time in your life. You will have to make many choices about what areas of your life to emphasize. Will you work to build up a new career or continue to build upon a current one? Will you work to make your personal life as satisfying as possible? Will you work collectively with many other people or by yourself?

Often there is an "alienation crisis" with this influence, a sudden feeling of being cut off from everyone else, as if you have spent too much energy pursuing purely personal goals. This in turn generates loneliness and a feeling of being distant from others, even loved ones. Or you may suddenly feel that you no longer have the strength to go on in the direction you have chosen. Fears of your own inadequacies may distort your perspective. All of this is most likely to happen if you have neglected personal relationships in your life. You cannot go on forever without supportive emotional relationships, and you may have been trying to do so.

Sometimes this influence can have the opposite result, and you discover that various personal entanglements have been interfering with the pursuit of your valid goals. In this case you will break off relationships and gain the freedom to go your own way. The issue here is the balance between personal relationships and advancement in life.

On another tack, this period can test your choice of goals. You may encounter opposition from others that forces you to examine whether your goals are really valid for you. If they are, the conflict with other persons or against trying circumstances will be useful. But if you find that your heart is not really in the path you have chosen, you may have to make adjustments and change your course of action. It is far better to do this now than several years from now, when you may be overcommitted to an inappropriate course and discover that you are trapped. Now is the time to change. It may not be pleasant, but it is possible.


Saturn Square Med.Coeli ,
activity period from 30 October 2007 until beginning of August 2008.

staying?

if it's not galore,

it's work
or the kids
or the church
or food (eating)
or spirituality
or money
or sex
or love
or shopping
or beauty
or the rules
or drugs

what makes life worth living?
(what puts pain away?)
being.

what do you say to another?
who are you to say?
in lieu of?

how to be filled from within?
how to find joy?
breathing.

cooking up a storm

it was just past eight when i texted atej to take the tapa out of the freezer, pork or beef it didn't matter. i wanted to cook myself a hot meal soon as i arrived, not so much for the food, as for the comfort of cooking one's self, something, well, food.

who knew i would come to this? just a few days before the trip to the mountains, my cousins' eyes almost fell off watching me unwrap a thawed chicken, place it in a baking dish, and pop it into the oven. me who only knew enough to push around some tinned food in some oil with some onions, garlic, and sometimes, tomatoes. gisa, it's called.

the day after i arrived, the menu was:
breakfast: mess of hot and spicy tuna, omelet/scrambled eggs, loads of onions, tomatoes and garlic
lunch: steamed kangkong leaves
dinner: chicken-cabbage soup, fried little fish

yesterday:
breakfast: tortang talong, squid uga, pinakas

and today:
breakfast: homemade yogurt with bananas, honey, and muesli
lunch: leftover chicken pineapple fried rice, leftover uga
dinner: pasta with beef strips in a yet-to-be created white sauce :D

one-step above just "gisa the can", but you know, it's the cooking act itself, even the slicing of onions into paper thin strips.

so therapeutic.

"The key to getting through difficult times is to take to heart the lesson offered by all the mystics down through the ages. For the mystics remind us we cannot be truly effective in dealing with life's difficulties, unless we ground ourselves in silent meditation and prayer. For in the receptive stillness of meditation and prayer we discern the still small voice that guides us through the night. As we listen intently to all that is going on within us, we can begin to sense the blessings that are already present in the apparent loss and hardship we may be going through at the moment. Surely, this is deathbed wisdom. For, as our faith assures, the moment of death is not simply the end. Death is a door that opens out upon new and unforeseeable beginnings that never end. Learning to see this gain out of loss, this birth out of death rhythm; learning to step into the stream of this rhythm, to move with it, and trust in it always, is to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of the world."

-James Finley, www.myss.com

swimming

lumalangoy lang po!
just swimming.

sobrang dami ang mga nangyari nitong mga nakaraang linggo. karamihan dito ay mga tipong nangyari lang, hindi mo ini-skedyul pero nangyari na lang. hindi dahil sa walang mga kinalaman ito sa mga nangyari sa nakaraan, kundi ito ay ang mga bagay na basta na lang sumusulpot. at ang puwede lang gawin ay harapin ang mga ito.

so many things have happened in the last few weeks. most of these are things that just happened, that you don't schedule but just crop up. not because these are not somehow connected to things that happened in the past, but because these are the type of things that will just arise out of the blue. and the only thing to do is to face these.

there are no heroes, but we all are ourselves. i love that everyone is just themselves. it is in being ourselves that we are most able to help each other, no matter the conflict, the tears, the pain. there exists as well joy and hope. when each one tends to what is true to them, and takes care to grow and learn, there comes always understanding, love, compassion.

for somehow, these are all adventures in compassion. compassion for ourselves, and compassion for the other. that is why we are all in this together. we are inter-connected in life's weave :).

we have been Kissed!

akala ko puwede na akong sumaya.

the diwata kisses the tree


you wouldn't think for a minute, the original scene


was this.


this is how rusty my kissing skills are.