HOW ARE WE FEELING Mental health factors a lot in our day-to-day decisions A couple of days ago, we celebrated World Mental Health Day. In 2019, as records show, 970 million people around the world were living with some form of mental illness. This number increased significantly during the Covid-19...
ANCIENT TRAVELERS Scholars believe the existence of a maritime tradition practiced by early Filipinos to get around the archipelago (Source: Tadhana Vol. 1 Abridged Edition 1982) In my previous article, I talked about the Austronesian Migration Expansion and how maritime technology increased our...
I was on a small island in Garchitorena, Camarines Sur a few years back. The island had a small number of inhabitants—fisherfolks mostly, who earn their living from the sea. I would often visit the island as a child and I still do visit, but not nearly as often anymore. During one of...
Photo: Freepik Culture finally caught up with me that I experienced “wordnesia.” For the first time since I started writing for Manila Bulletin, I encountered a blank. Literally. Surprisingly, I never feared the blank page. I am most comfortable with having mental diarrhea on paper. Sometimes,...
Native royalties in pre-hispanic Philippine archipelago Through the centuries the Filipino had been putting on a mask in order to confound his conquerors. When the time came for him to take off the mask because it was no longer needed, he found that it had become part of his face. This is the...
"Our Street" at Manilla during a Flood , hand-colored wood block engraving, 7x10 inches (Source: Salcedo Auctions, Illustraded London News) The Philippines has established a culture of disaster, “a societal or organizational mindset that develops in response to frequent or severe disasters,...
ONE WITH NATURE Bhutan Art Tour participants led by Robert and Jetro I have known Robert Alejandro a few decades now. He was the resident artist at Coke Bolipata’s Casa San Miguel Art Center in Pundaquit, Zambales. He wasn’t part of the Philippine documentary show The Probe Team yet. He was shy...
I was in the company of the family matriarch Imelda Romualdez Marcos when Typhoon Carina and the accompanying southwest monsoon hit the country. The Philippines, specifically Metro Manila, was being battered by torrential rains and epic floods that, by early afternoon Wednesday, the entire...
I did it in three hours 30 minutes. This is how long it took me to get from the Oblation of the University of the Philippines in Diliman to the gates of my village in Makati on foot. That’s 17 kilometers. I have been going to UP of late in preparation to enroll in the UP School of Archaeology...
It was the Romualdez family matriarch Imelda Romualdez Marcos’s 95th birthday on July 2. For one of the celebratory activities held in her honor, I was tasked by her daughter Senator Imee Romualdez Marcos to set up an exhibition on her mother’s life to date. Last...
Our family matriarch Imelda Romualdez Marcos turns 95 in a few days, on July 2, to be exact. She was born Imelda Remedios Visitacion Trinidad Romualdez to Vicente Orestes Romualdez and Remedios Trinidad in 1929. My aunt’s life is a testament to resilience and determination in pursuit of the...
One morning, I felt like having a pandesal that could bring me back to my childhood—warm, chewy, and kind of sweet. Sadly, our modern-day grocery and fancy chic supermarket bakery don’t make pandesal that would bring back remembrances of things past. I sometimes get treated by a batch of...
