Foot and Fire

When one is past her infancy in travelling, she learns to choose her steps carefully because time has more meaning now than before. It is not about ticking off the number of items in the list anymore. It is more about retracing the steps taken and carefully trailing the steps to be taken because space takes on a different dimension now than before. April of last year, Osmena Peak of Dalaguete, Cebu colored my summer. The first thing you will learn while going up the Peak is that Dalaguete is not pronounced as Dumaguete. It is silent E as in palette. But of course, when you reach the peak, the first things you will experience are: Fresh air, summer breeze, ocean salt feel, grassy hills, rocky cliffs, pretty karsts, short and long climbs, provincial scenery all conspired to evoke country songs in my mind and the paintings of Amorsolo of fields and golden colors. While taking in everything, you will also think of a thousand enormous and tiny karsts of Halong Bay as well as Tam Coc ...

One of the admirable traits of this house is its being built for a fairy tale, wherein the goddess of a verdant forest has to remain true to her environment despite her being placed by her circumstance in an urban setting called a subdivision in the heart of Bacolod City. Only a child by heart can appreciate this house made to dance with and among nature. Visit and delight yourself with a house made of stones to withstand the typhoon, open-walled in some areas to welcome the air, glass windows to let the light come in, growing pine trees along the winding stairway design so as not to cut the same, a semi-underground amphitheater with stone walls, walls with colorful paintings, vines occupying the floors, a hilltop view on top of the roof. Endless.    While this is not a museum or ecological site or a sanctuary, they are all like that for a home actually habited by people. Yes, there are residents there. Of course, the admirable fact is that the house is also ...

  The Ethical Executive (Becoming aware of the root causes of unethical behavior: 45 Psychological traps every one of us falls prey to) 2008, Stanford University Press By Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey I believe, all leaders and decision-makers of a country should read this book. I have read this book years ago and sometimes after I became a public servant. This has been in my mind for a long time already given our social and political realities these days. One lingering question I could not get off my mind after I read this book was when it asked and answered: Why many good people became instruments of the holocaust? This book offered the root causes of unethical behaviors so we can recognize and avoid traps leading to them.      This book has scientific approach, not just some philosophical, religious or business sense to ethics. One has to read the thin book of 118 pages only to understand, but let me run down the 45 traps so you can have a bird's ey...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist By Mohsin Hamid Novel, 184 pages I like the title of this book so I gave it a chance when a fellow bookwormie recommended it. When I started, I already liked the rhythm of this book, and I finished it in a two or three sittings. It is just long enough to tell everything and short enough to hold the interest of the reader. I came to enjoy and appreciate the literary devices employed by the writer. The speaker has a gentlemanly way of speaking, a Pakistani trait, which makes him endearing to readers and entertaining to the American guest he was talking to. The speaker's voice only tells us that he is back to the fundamentals of his own birthplace. But of course, he is opposed to violence but believes in freedom of expression when he returned to his homeland, a trait he got from his sojourn in America. The relationship that was created between the speaker and the guest in a day is hard to ignore though in the end the speaker has to give him away, bu...