Enriching Lives, Knowing Yourself

Holy Wednesday ended up with a visit from our neighbor who is a good friend. We had a lovely and enriching sharing. She gave me a jar of pickled papaya.  Yum!

Last night I also watched the Sambuhay TV Mass Holy Recollection 2019  with Fr. Pao Asprer who is also a friend at FB.  Sambuhay is sponsored by the  Society of St. Paul. Learned a lot about faith, temptations and prayers. It was a very meaningful and inspiring Recollection. Fr. Pao is that good, a young priest who was ordained four years ago. I jotted some points which he discussed.

• Proximity to power is power in itself
• True prayer is listening.
• If you know yourself, that’s a sign of true wisdom.
• In the face of temptation, we’ll know ourselves better.

He touched on some quotes by Thomas Merton and I am glad I am reading one of his books at the moment.  The Seven Storey Mountain is a 467 pages book  with so fine prints.  I don’t read it at night because the prints are so small. Good luck to my eyes. It’s not that kind of reading that you have to finish in one go. There are so many words that you can reflect on.  This book has been on my wish list for quite a while. Maybe Grace (my friend from Canada) saw it on Goodreads so she gave me a copy.

By the way, Grace posted  the photos they took when she and her husband were here for a while last month.  She was the one who gave me a copy of the book. I grabbed this from the album she just posted, the two of us together at the lobby of Richmonde Hotel in Pasig City.

We’re getting old, imagine more than four decades of friendship. and I’ve always said that  “when friends meet, hearts warm”.

 

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And More Books

Saw this on “my memory”  app at FB yesterday.  I can’t help but repost it. The value of reading….priceless.

I marked this quote when I started another book yesterday. It’s by  Martin Luther King.

Faith is taking  the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

Gosh, I just love, love this book. For a first time author, Amy Markstahler is pretty good. Love, family life, second chances – they’re all here. I cried at the scene when Tyler gave a eulogy on the death of Elsie’s dad. That was so sweet. Another book that I read in one day. It was that good. I was clearly surprised seeing that the author just followed my review at Goodreads. I hope I could find more stories like this.

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The Rooster Bar

Read this in one day and that’s a feat. Another John Grisham book that I love. Although most of his stories are about the lives of lawyers, I love most of his books although I don’t regularly read them.

I love courtroom scenes but this has not much of it. It’s more on  the three characters, Mark, Todd and Zola, law school students thriving on student loans. Though their school is not a top-notch one, a diploma mill,  they try to finish their degree despite individual problems in their families. Zola, although she was born an US citizen, her parents and two brothers are undocumented immigrants. Mark’s brother has his own problems. Todd works as a bar attendant. They were on their last semester of law school and with no job to look forward to and  mounting student debts, so they decided to put up their own law firm despite being unlicensed and undergrads.

This is quite fast-paced, never boring but a little bit unbelievable that just mere law students could dope people. They succeeded for a while until they were on the run. You’d think of course they will be caught in the end but of course the ending is favorable. I am giving this four-stars. Another winner from John Grisham.

 

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What Tuesday Feels Like

It’s cloudy but it is still super hot.  Summer is really, really hot. Yesterday, even the water from the tank was lukewarm.

Haha, Sen. Grace Poe just passed by. NO VOTE for this lady.

If you ask me why I am not blogging regularly, I am now more focused on social media , particularly on those topics regarding the upcoming election. So many things have surfaced lately that an ordinary citizen who loves the country cannot just ignore. Drugs, drugs, drugs everywhere and yet, the three years that Duterte has been president, no drug lord  was caught, those poor drug addicts were the victims instead. And every personality who were jailed because of plunder and such serious crimes are now scot-free. I often ask myself, “where are we really going?”. The  boat is rapidly sinking. It is sinking fast.

I still read at night of course but it is now taking me so long to finish one. Three days and I am still in the middle of it. I found this lovely book about family relationships, how sometimes one person could change our lives.  It’s a story of a child born with a rare health condition.  I was hooked because of the title, The Secrets of Clouds.

Come to think of it, I don’t even want to go out because of the heat. Oreo sleeps in the bathroom most of the time. The tiles are cold to the touch.

I like summer but the humid weather is too much.

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Here And Now And Then

 

This book is simply “it”. Amazing, lovely,interesting story line.

The last time I read about time travel was when I encountered The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. We have two copies in the shelf, one is a mass produced book and a trade paperback.

I understand this was published lately back in January 2019. A science fiction fantasy that takes you to two worlds, century apart and how life was then and now. An adventure-filled story in the life of Kin Stewart, his family back in the 21st century and his future in the year 2142.

I really hope there would be a movie adaptation someday. I gave this five stars at Goodreads. It’s my 46th book by the way for this year’s challenge.

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Forty-Six Years And Counting

Yes, it’s been almost forty- six years. We met for the first time back in 1973 when I reported to work as student librarian at the University of Santo Tomas. We both worked at the university library until I was in my third year as Economics major and she finished her Library Science degree.

The friendship has come to a point when we would write each other daily on date due slips of the library.  She was Nissa’s godmother during her baptism and again one of the principal sponsors during Nissa’s wedding. She migrated to Canada sometime in 2001.

The last time we saw each other was almost eight years ago until yesterday. A happy reunion between friends, a lovely tête-à-tête updating each other on what’s happening in our lives, non-stop smiles and laughter. Her husband showed me their photos when they were in Japan before coming to Manila a week ago.

And a happy reunion would not be complete without some photos, right? Although Mark took photos of Grace and me, I had a couple of shots in my phone taken by one employee of the hotel where they stayed.

Mark, Grace and I

She gave me two books, a copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and a trade paperback of Maya  Angelou’s The Heart of A Woman. We developed our love for books when we were both assigned at the Humanities Section of the UST Main Library. Can’t wait to read these two.

Friendship is a lovely thing. When you find true friends, being apart for so many years doesn’t really matter. It feels as if you’ve seen each other only yesterday.

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The Bell Jar

Ah, we really had nothing in common except we share the same birthday. The very first time I discovered her works, I was working at the Humanities Section of the UST Main Library. Ariel was the first book I read of her. Then last year I found a copy of The Unabridged Journals  of Sylvia Plath. I read a few paragraphs in between my Goodreads’ reading challenge. She kept a diary during the last twelve years of her life. Her life was tragic. She died at the young age of thirty.

Finally I found a copy of her book  The Bell Jar  which is a sort of semi auto-biography of her.  This has been on my wish-list for so long. I was curious to find the real reason why she  committed suicide aside from the fact that she was betrayed by her husband later in their married life.  I am still curious to read about her life.

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy”.

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