Gatherings 2026-04-10

2026-04-10

Just take this step... the horizon will look after itself.

In Mackesy's book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, the fox seldom speaks. It said it often feels like it has nothing interesting to say.

This morning, I feel the same.

It's been a while since I last walked this early. I decided to walk for this very reason. Opened my eyes a few minutes past five. Lied down for a bit more. Then finally woke up.

at 5:45,
orange breaks the sky
blood spatter of an unborn light

I cut these vines once a month. A few more than that during the rainy season when they try to occupy the wall. But this morning, I let them spread and sprawl in welcome of the sun.

At the intersection of Data and Ruby, sunlight, which has fed it with vigor, has yet to touch a flower-drenched garlic vine that has covered half of a wall larger than mine. The flowers have swelled and now spray the air with sautéed perfume. But as tag-init ripens, the sun will be too much for them. Soon, they too shall fall, one after the other, browned.

meanwhile, three tiny white flowers
before my feet at Ruby—
hello!

I count things that come in pairs. A pair of mesh metal trash bins: one empty, one barely filled. A pair of stools at a popular eatery, upside down on a table, waiting.

At the edge of Arayat, the tasteless morning air is suddenly broken by the smell of newly cooked lugaw, slowly mixing with vaporized cooking oil stuck on hollow blocks at the still empty store of fried chicken innards. I raised my eyes and saw

the moon
half-filled
where smells don't matter

There is no analysis deeper than simply being with things. At Tiongson, stairs of light appear between aircon units. A few steps from it, a white kalachuchi flower rests on a cold iron bar.

At Ela, a line of passengers wait for the next e-jeep to arrive. Their eyes glued to their phones, some sit on the monobloc chairs in front of the line, while most stand, their legs already working even before work. About two kilometers away, more passengers wait for jeepneys and buses at Olivarez. They will pay around five more pesos than a month ago and wait longer than a month ago as more lines cut their operations to stay alive as the prices of diesel and gasoline continue to soar.

kamias fruits hanging
one stubborn
barely kisses the ground

A pedestrian lane is a field of action. The driver chose to stop so an older woman and a younger man helping her could cross Ela. It was a long lane and her walk was slow like the traffic now building behind the halted car. Action begins with an intention to end. The car ends acceleration so the woman's walk may begin. One after the other, actions progress naturally. Endlessly, alternations between rest and action matter.

At Pili Drive, I tread on the broken sidewalk while looking intermittently at the still empty classrooms. Later, I entered the dirt path that passes on the side of the field where students experiment with GMOs and new pesticides. I greeted two men walking out of the path. One of them greeted back. Behind trees, someone burning something.

It's been a while since I last walked here. A part of the wall built by the university to settle its borders has been shattered, I think, by a tree that must've fallen during a storm. The tree is gone. Branches and pieces of cut wood suggest its fate.

Walking slowly toward the exit of the foot path to IPB road, electric posts that lined the railroad contrasting with the gentle light resemble crucifixes carrying the magdarame in Pampanga during Holy Week.

At San Luis Road, a dog whose white fur fails to cover all the red rashes under its skin, stares back at me as he stayed still on the pillion seat of a tricycle. I took his picture, cautiously maintaining distance.

In her essay, "Getting Here From There: A Writer's Reflections on a Religious Past," the novelist Mary Gordon admits she has never been drawn toward systematic theology. When she thinks of the spiritual or the religious, all she remembers is early memory and the body that has constructed them. Sounds, odors, movements, rhythms of prayerfulness—these are what constitutes her Catholicism.

Nevertheless, unable to use memory and body to contend with "religious impulse unmediated by reason"—that of the evangelical and the charismatic—she admits: "even though I can't be moved forward in any way by systematic theology, I like it to be there."

It is best to walk San Luis and climb Putho Tuntungin in the weekends when there are probably less vehicles. As I watch the cars, motorcycles, and tricycles approaching me, I blank out of words and images. At this situation, nothing is more interesting than being safe.

Without a choice, I became a fox.

at Hill road,
another hill—
then the bellows of carabaos

waiting for the sun
wet and eyes unmoving
a frog corpse