“Wag mo lang gawin ang hindi ikaw.”

Originally posted here.

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Had an interesting conversation with the young’uns during this morning’s cabinet meeting. While our principals were defending their budget lines, four of us spent the intervening five hours chatting about how we’d ended up in government. The most arresting narrative was from J, who handles the day-to-day ops of our Secretary for the Interior and Local Government. She comes from a local political clan, worked on him for her undergraduate thesis, interfaced during the 2010 campaign—but what struck me the most was what SILG gave as marching orders when they began. He said to her, “Wag mo lang gawin ang hindi ikaw”. Just don’t do anything that isn’t you—or to steal from a Janet Jackson song, just be yourself, and let that be your guide.

It makes me wonder: how can one carry out those orders when the Self is thrust inside an institution the negates the self?

Maybe the Self has to be so strong that no institution could ever break it.

Space/Place/Sacredness

Originally posted on 5 May 2011 here.

Last week’s grisly events at Laperal Compound prompt me to riff on something near and dear, but is rarely spoken of by fellow Manileños: our relationship to space and place. Not a fan of violence (or the criminal elements taking refuge in such slums), but if someone’d raze my community to the ground and dismantle the boards of my home, then I’d certainly feel like hurling molotovs and shitbombs too. In the midst of the protests, one Laperal Compund leader even said that they’d rather die where they stand than relocate to far-flung Calauan or Montalban, where death is a greater, if slower, certainty: no electricity, water, access to health services, schools. In such conditions, she said, “unti-unti kaming pinapatay ng pamahalaan: magiging libingan na namin ang lupang pagtitirikan namin ([they] are being killed slowly by the state: the land [they’re] cast to will be [their] graves)”. [1]

But what differentiates us middle-class folk from informal settlers anyway? Not much, really. Just the luck of being born into the socioeconomic means of legally owning/renting a home–with its accordant veil of delusion, thinking that our shoebox condominiums and gated subdivisions are somehow better, safer, healthier places. But we’re just as disconnected.

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Initiative and Initiation: Beginning a MISSION in the Philippines.

Originally posted on WeStrive.org. Published in LILIPOH, Winter 2011, Vol. 16 Issue 62, p44-45, a PDF of which is downloadable here. (Or here: LILIPOH_Initiative_and_Initiation)

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“Freedom is the capacity to begin–and to begin again.”

These are words spoken by Orland Bishop barely an hour ago, words which I find myself meditating upon as I sit on a window ledge in Stuttgart, Germany–more than ten thousand kilometers from the Philippines, the land of my heart and birth. They say that distance lends one a deeper level of understanding, and each experience of beauty on this continent leads to thoughts of the work back home, where initiatives are sprouting in rapid succession, mostly in response to the intensity of need. Each whiff of cold, crisp air brings to mind Manila’s ecological and societal pollution; each conversation (oft-accompanied by biodynamic bread) with Europe’s initiative-takers reminds me of friends in the budding social threefolding movement in the Philippines, of other young people who are equally hungry for a better world.

Not to encourage some romanticized dichotomy between the developed world and the global south, but it seems that on the physical plane, third-world activists have a distinct advantage. As opposed to a society where everything “works” and the spiritual crisis is comparatively invisible, for the most part, having in-your-face corruption and degradation makes for a tangible sense of task. A task to begin anew; to start the process of building a better world. After all, when you’re at the absolute rock bottom—as the Philippines seems to be—there’s nowhere to go but up.

Hence, our involvement in MISSION.

Continue reading “Initiative and Initiation: Beginning a MISSION in the Philippines.” →