Sunday Musings

Soaked in the quiet of the early morning.

My son just called from the airport a few minutes ago and said, he is excited. This is actually his first long vacation after so many days and months of stressful work.  He, his girlfriend and three friends are going to Boracay  for a week-long stay. White sand,  pristine beach, lovely sunrise and sunset and amazing dream of a place for vacation. I wonder though if that still holds true because in the last few years, local and foreign tourists alike visit the place in droves.  I haven’t been there  so I could not aptly describe how it looks and how it feels staying there for a while. If you ask me, I’d rather spend a much-needed vacation in a quiet place, communing with nature without the noise of night parties and beach dancing. Palawan maybe would be best, my daughter  raved about the place when she went there with some friends years ago.  This is off-season though so probably Boracay is not that crowded compared to the summer months. I still dream of going to the northern part of the Philippines and Batanes is still number one in my bucket list and next to that would be Calayan and Ilocos. Each of us has preferences where to go, what to see and discover. He asked me what I want so I said, “find me some seaglass and a lovely key ring”. I hope my son would enjoy his vacation before he starts with a new job at JP Morgan Chase in over a month. He told me he will file his resignation in his present job when he comes back.  I really prayed for this, that he really finds another job with added financial renumerations and perks to booth. The stress at work will always be there but the new work environment is something to look forward to and the new job is something that would add up to his experience.

The silence quiets the mind.

And the world is quiet here except for occasional barking of the dogs and noisy motorcycles that pass by. Khaled  Hosseini couldn’t have described it best when he said and I quote: “Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.” That’s a quote from his book, The Kite Runner. I am almost done with The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan. I enjoyed this book tremendously compared to the first two books that I’ve read before by the same author. I  so love the character of Kwan. Maybe in a month or a few days, I would be able to finish Anna Karenina, I’ve set is aside temporarily to read other inspiring books. Don’t ask me why, it’s an excellent classics but sometimes my eyes get tired of those long and hard to pronounce characters.

It makes you a bit introspective.

Ah,  so I won’t have to set the alarm clock to wake up early. Plenty of time to read and to garden in between.  The  mind is busiest in these quiet moments and  you can hardly keep up with the chasing thoughts that you would want to put on paper or the many stories playing in your head that you would want to relate and share. Here are some quotes that I hastily jotted down while in the middle of reading Amy Tan’s book.

“Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”

“Too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.”

“The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. . .And believing in ghosts – that’s believing that love never dies. If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses. ”

Have a nice weekend everyone!