I reeked tobacco. People avoided me, but how did I know, if I couldn’t even smell myself?

From cigarette to pipe smoking – then I stopped.

A personal saga

I reeked tobacco. People avoided me, but how did I know, if I couldn’t even smell myself?

Dr Abe V Rotor 

I did not only smoke cigarettes, I graduated to pipe tobacco smoking. When you have tasted Half-and-Half or Captain Black, believe me Marlboro and Philip Morris taste flat. That’s how one gets addicted to more and stronger nicotine. And having a pipe on a Monday, and a dozen more to fit each day or occasion, and dress code, makes you stand out of the crowd, so to speak. Wow! Sikat! And you feel a special person. For in the seventies, up to now, pipe smoking people have either the British or American accent. I even tried Australian but settled poorly with Ilocano, my native tongue. Now compare pipe tobacco with pinadis (hand rolled cigar) tobacco, exaggeratedly foot-long. I almost forgot my origin.

So you see smoking is air, it is high society, it is macho, it is advertising something you do not really have, or have to. I wore coat and tie once in a while with Sherlock Holmes’ “S” pipe, or wore khaki jacket and denim pants and had MacArthur’s corn cob pipe. I also had pipes with the bowl covered with genuine leather from camel, kangaroo and anaconda, and made people believe I have gone all over the world including the Amazon. Which actually I hadn’t except a stopover once in Europe which introduced me to the idea of shifting to pipe smoking.

And I had a friend, Sel, who shared the same idea. So after finishing our doctorate, we started scouting for the best pipe in town. Definitely it should be briar wood because it’s the only wood that does not burn, and its nesting weight on the palm of the hand is assuring. I suspect that it’s being a briar is not the species but the age of the wood, perhaps as old as the Redwood or the Bristle Cone, estimated two to three thousand years old. Imagine holding a piece of time as early as BC. And history! Just like what the great English poet William Blake said, “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” You hold too, time and space. Pipe smoking leads you to hallucination.

I tell you what the substance is – the filler tobacco - that rouses the olfactory more than grandma's pie? It must come from a combination of selected tobacco varieties, cured with the best liqueur, and hermetically sealed to greet the user as fresh as it was blended. In Europe a blend is highly personalized, like wine. This is top secret of connoisseurs. For us here, I for one settled for two brands, American and European pipe tobacco in can, then the only available ones. Believe me the difference between the two is indistinguishable. It’s still Nicotiana tabacum, the same tobacco of Fidel Ramos, Deng Hsiao Ping, Fidel Castro, et al.

More about the art of pipe smoking. I lit my pipe with a special lighter whose flame goes downward into the bowl, and witnessed in the process of huff-and puff a Krakatau in the making. I peered into the glowing crater. Then I would savor the maiden smoke as fresh as morning air, blowing it in a series of “O’s” which takes skill to perfect it. You don’t inhale, unlike cigarette. The smoke runs through the oral to the nasal cavity and out through the nostril, gently fuming a cloud of smoke that surrounds the face, with your eyes half close in dreamy relaxation. It was really thrilling, exhilarating. What on a Sunday morning with brewed black coffee and newspaper and elevated feet?. Ah, and ahs….

Some high-chin and easy-chair years passed. I was in my middle thirties, still a bachelor. I wondered if pipe smoking attracted women of my liking. Or did I drive them to safe distance? On the mirror I didn’t change, not a bit American or European. Not even with sparse moustache which I jokingly tell my barber it is insured like that of Clark Gable. My lips were a little deformed now, and being right handed the pipe tended to settle rightward, with some teeth bearing the weight giving up. My lips lost their natural curve and color, and my teeth permanently stained no toothpaste would dare clean it in advertisement. My fingers could be mistaken for pellagra. If only they had the Midas touch!

I reeked tobacco. People avoided me, but how did I know, if I couldn’t even smell myself? It’s true. Smokers are immune to the smell of tobacco, and it is stale odor – breath, sweat, clothes, books, bed, and the like - so whom would they trust to tell them so? And my skin became dull and dry, and episodes of feeling down became frequent – so with refilling and caressing my pipe. In short I was already addicted to the nicotine and the pipe is now only secondary to it.

Nicotine is a poison, a very strong one. The extract of one stick of cigarette when directly injected into the blood stream will immediately kill the person. So why don’t we die with packs and packs of cigarette or can after can of mixed tobacco?

Doctors tell us that it’s not the nicotine per se that kills, it’s tar its carrier and medium of a dozen other poisonous substances. The tar deposits into the alveoli, the countless air sacs in the lungs, constricts blood vessels, and stains teeth and clothes. The alkaloids pile up in the kidneys and liver, and restrict natural elimination of other toxins. Elevated heart and pulse rate is our body’s coping mechanism, but like a car running uphill it loses steam fast and soon and conks out. Eyesight blurs, sense of taste deadens, so with sensation to touch, pain and pleasure. Alertness slows down, sex urge decreases and staying power shortens.

And it is not the tobacco plant itself that's the enemy; it is how it is grown. The plant picks up the arsenic dusted or sprayed, the lead and mercury in contaminated soil, so with cadmium from batteries today. Systemic pesticides that kill insects, nematodes and mites ensconced in the plant body, unreached by ordinary spraying, persist as residue of high dosage.

By the way, there’s something in the tobacco that changed biology on the concept of what really makes a thing living?. It is the tobacco mosaic virus, Marmor tabaci. The rod shaped virus infects tobacco on the field just by rubbing or mere touch of a diseased to healthy plants. And it infects as well all members of the tobacco family - Solanaceae , to which Irish potato, pepper, eggplant, tomato belong. The virus remains domant in as long as twenty years in the cigarette or filler. And when you touch any of the host plants, it resurrects into virulence. Luckily, scientists assures us the virus has no effect on humans.

But with millions all over the world dying from smoking and its many complications, I believe the virus has mutated - even if biologically it is not considered a true organism. Mutation is still governed by error in DNA replication. And the virus basically has the DNA structure like all other things considered as living.

Really there’s nothing good about smoking, contrary to advertisements. I wonder how one can go a mile for a Camel when he is already exhausted at the start. Didn’t the cowboy in Marlboro retire too soon? Salem doesn’t make a beautiful landscape. Fortune isn’t something one expects. Fighter did not make us in our time as brave as Buccaneer.

Take the economic side. Our DOH says the government spends every year some P235 billion a year to treat illnesses caused or related to smoking like heart diseases, stroke, emphysema and lung cancer. And what does the government get in return from the tobacco industry? Only P23 billion, a measly 10 percent of the cost. PDI’s editorial The Puff that Kills, June 1, 2011, reported smoking kills 10 Filipinos every hour, or 243 a day. That’s 87,600 a year – and that’s a conservative estimate. Here is a case of an “old” goose laying the golden eggs, not worth it.

One day I was diagnosed of ulcer in the mouth, a wound that doesn’t heal. If you can’t eat, imagine the rapid decline in body weight and the various ailments you fall to. My clothes became oversized. I likened myself to a POW in a concentration camp in WWII.

“If you don’t stop smoking, you will die,” my doctor warned. “And soon!” he admonished.

Period. My pipes became museum pieces. A beautiful girl came. We got married, and have three children. We are now living happily.

Smoking changed my life – when I stopped it completely. ~

 

Rizal as Zoologist

Rizal as Zoologist 

Dr Abe V Rotor

As a zoologist, Rizal discovered living organisms unnamed in his time, such as a flying (gliding) lizard (Draco Rizali), Harlequin Tree Frog (Racophorus Rizali), among others, named after him. 

While not a professional zoologist, Rizal's keen interest in nature and his collections of specimens from Dapitan earned him recognition as a naturalist. He studied and identified various species, and some were even named after him, according to the University of the Philippines Los Baños. His contributions to understanding Philippine biodiversity are acknowledged, and he is often considered the "father of Philippine biodiversity".AI Overview

            

Acknowledgement: Internet

Book Manuscript: TREES FOR PEACE

"When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace 

and seeds of hope."   

- Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Don't Cut the Trees, Don't by AV Rotor published by the University of Santo Tomas 2009 Manila

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Open avrotor.blogspot.com Living with Nature (also,  Naturalism - the Eighth Sense) to get access to a good number of articles contained in this book manuscript.  You may download and print it for your research and educational needs.

Example: No. 56 - I talk to the trees and they listen to me Copy the title of the article and search on avrotor.blogspot.com 

Here is the result.

I talk to the trees - and they listen to me.

"When in bloom golden, only for a day or two;

confetti follows where the bees have gone,

in every flower is born a new life

in another place and time."- avr

Dr Abe V Rotor

New forest stand at Tagbilaran, Bohol

Saplings race to meet the sun,

lanky to posts they shall become;

sans branches but bole and round

soon fall to the ax one by one.

Heritage Mabolo tree on Mt Makiling, Laguna

You bear the hardest wood -

ebony in deep shiny black;

your foes no less my kind

feeling and love we lack.

Towering Kalumpang atop a hill at Tierra Pura, Tandang Sora, QC

Sunrise, sunset, the ground is alive,

lilting children under your care

that make up for your loneliness

in a world with so little to share.

Leaning mango tree at Masinloc, Zambales

You were once doomed by the wind,

but benevolence saved you;

by your fruits and resting limbs,

sanctuary and playground, too.

Strangler's fig or balete on Mt Makiling, UPLB Laguna

Black and white makes you bold and real

of your strangler's reputation,

climbing on your host tree to the sky,

a piece of mystery of creation.

Tree  house on acacia at Burgos, La Union

Tree house I see built on your limbs

has stolen your view on the scene,

the breeze in your leaves hushed away,

a living monument unseen.

Embroidered talisay, Cebu City

Embroidered leaves by the bagworm,

turning to crimson and fall;

mutual indeed is host and tenant,

nature and creatures all.

Elephant like tree stump at Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Re-incarnation - this elephant tree had been

once roaming around in band;

threatened, endangered and gone,

what would it become the next time around?

Felled Balete tree at Lagro QC

Whoever felled this old balete tree,

drove the deities away;

and the spirit of the tree shall not rest,

no prayer can repay.

Ghostly shadow at UST Manila

Shadow of death I see across the lawn,

save the sun all mourning;

haunting the playground empty and quiet,

save a dead tree walking.

Tree wearing a veil at Ateneo de Manila University QC

To the conscious passerby,

in the morning holy,

in the evening scary,

a veil to laugh or to cry.

Living figurine tree at St Paul University QC

Young devil tree, but you aren't;

your eyes but holes to your heart;

your arm raised to praise, to call

a friend, such is nature's art.

Super Nangka at Agoo, La Union

Over laden, if all these fruits,

a burst of a lifetime -

young to die like a mother

cut in her prime.

Rubber tree hammock at UST Manila

Living cradle to while away the time,

to catch up with many a lost sleep;

watch out, a nap gone over the clime,

where time and opportunity slip.

Acacia blooming with Christmas lights at AdMU QC

Pendants you wear in the night,

blinking with the chilly air,

bring tidings beyond your shade,

to far places poor and fair.

Narra in bloom at SPU-QC

When in bloom golden, only for a day or two;

confetti follows where the bees have gone,

in every flower is born a new life, the embryo,

seed to a tree in another place and time. ~

Convert unserviceable jars into garden decors

Utility to Aesthetics Recycling 

Convert unserviceable jars into garden decors 

Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.” —Georges Bernanos

Dr Abe V Rotor

Convert cracked and broken jars into works of art. 

Make them a part of your garden landscape

 

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” Marc Chagall

Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together with art and taste. Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art.  Wikipedia

Author-and-artist at work

Rehabilitated jars are secured with waterproof adhesive and clear 

fixative emulsion.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Pablo Picasso

Painted jar serves as substitute of earthen or plastic flowerpots.

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” - Francis Bacon ~

Nesting Swallow in a Museum

Nesting Swallow in a Museum

Swallows build mud nests, often attaching them to buildings or structures. Both male and female swallows collect mud and other materials, often mixed with grass stems, to build the nest which is semicircular or full cup in shape.

Dr Abe V Rotor

Museum of Natural History, UPLB, Laguna. Photo taken by the author.

It's alive, this elusive bird called swallow or swift, 

     Golondrina in Mexican folklore;

I thought it was just one of the stuffed specimens; 

     but here a nest she sits on and nothing more.

 

What message does this bird convey, why of all places 

     the museum? Did it come from a foreign shore? 

I wonder if she has kin from where she came, and where; 

     and here a nest she sits on and nothing more. ~

*The common swallow (Hirundo rustica) belongs to the swallow family Hirundinidae with other passerine species. Swifts on the other hand, though superficially similar to swallows, are not closely related. Swifts are placed in the order Apodiformes along with hummingbirds.

Ecology in Miniature Dioramas

         Ecology in Miniature Dioramas

A diorama is a replica of a scene, typically a three-dimensional model either full-sized or miniature.

Dr Abe V Rotor*

Coral Reef

A diorama is a “view window” reproduced from an actual or imagined event or scene made by artists who have a background of painting, architecture and sculpture combined, and of course, history. In this particular case, the diorama artists must have a working knowledge of ecology and biology.

One who may have visited any of the following museums has a better understanding as to what a diorama is in terms of structure, content and medium: National Museum in Manila, Ayala Museum at Greenbelt in Makati, and National Food Authority Grain Industry Museum in Cabanatuan. But the dioramas in these museums are large and spacious. It gives him the feeling that he is right on spot where the event is taking place or where the scene is located. This is enhanced with the right ambiance of lighting, musical background, narration or dialogue and the like.

Here are seven mini-dioramas depicting the Tropical Rainforest, the Ocean, Pacific Lagoon, Coral Reef, Alpine Biome, Savannah and the Desert,

1. Tropical Rainforest

The earth once wore a broad green belt on her midriff – the rainforest – that covered much of her above and below the equator. Today this cover has been reduced - and is still shrinking at a fast rate. The nakedness of the earth can be felt everywhere. One place where we can witness this is right here in the Philippines where only 10 percent of our original forest remains. Even the great Amazon Basin is threatened. As man moves into new areas, puts up dwellings, plants crops, becomes affluent, increases in number, the more the tropical rainforest shrinks. Our thinking that the forest as a source of natural resources is finite is wrong. Like any ecosystem, a forest once destroyed cannot be replaced. It can not regenerate because by then the soil has eroded, and the climate around has changed. It is everyone’s duty to protect the tropical rainforest, the bastion of thousands of species of organisms. In fact it is the richest of all the biomes on earth.

Tropical Rainforest

2. The Ocean

Scientists today believe that eighty percent of the world’s species of organisms are found in the sea. One can imagine the vastness of the oceans – nearly 4 kilometers deep on the average and 12 km at its deepest - the Marianas Trench and the Philippine Deep - and covering 78 percent of the surface of the earth. Artists and scientists re-create scenarios of Jules Verne’s, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” such as this diorama, imagining man’s futuristic exploration in the deep led by Captain Nemo, the idealistic but ruthless scientist. Such scenarios are no longer fantasy today – they are scenes captured by the camera and other modern tools of research. And the subject is not one of exploration alone, but conservation, for the sea, limitless as it may seem, is facing the same threats of pollution and other abuses man on land, in water, and air. The sea is man’s last frontier. Let us give it a chance.

3. Pacific Lagoon

The vastness of the Pacific Ocean is disturbed now and then by the presence of islands – big and small, singly or in groups - that appear like emerald and pearl strewn on the dark blue water, presenting a most beautiful scenery that attracts people to experience true communion with nature. Originally these islands were the tips of volcanoes, at first fierce and unsettled, but later became tame to the elements that fashioned them through time into lagoons, and other land forms of varied geographic features. As seen in this diorama, this island typical of Boracay is rich in vegetation, coconut trees grow far into the water and on the white sand that cover the shores. The coral reef teems with many kinds of marine life, from rare shellfish to aquarium fishes. In fact the whole island is a sanctuary of wildlife. It is a natural gene bank, a natural museum of biological diversity.

Tropical Lagoon

4. Coral Reef

Second to the Tropical Rainforest in richness in species diversity is the coral reef, often dubbed as a forest under the sea. Corals are simple animals of the Phylum Coelenterata, now Ctenophora, that live in symbiosis with algae. Algae being photosynthetic produce food and oxygen that corals need, and in return receive free board and lodging, and carbon dioxide. Within this zone grow many kinds of seaweeds, some reaching lengths of several feet long as in the case of kelp (Laminaria), and Sargassum, the most common tropical seaweed. As a sanctuary it cradles the early life stages of marine life until they have grown to be able to survive the dangers and rigors of the open sea. Coral reefs are formed layer upon layer through long years of deposition of calcareous skeletons of Coelenterates which is then cemented with sand, silt, clay and gravel to form into rock. Limestone is a huge deposit resulting from this process Scientists believe that without coral reefs islands would disappear and continents shrink. Above all we would not have the fishes and other marine organisms we know today.

5. Alpine Biome

Isolated from the lower slopes and adjoining valley, this ecological area has earned a distinction of having plants and animals different from those in the surrounding area. Because of the unique climate characterized by an intense but short summer and extreme cold the rest of the year, the organisms in this biome have acquired through evolution certain characteristics that made them fit to live in such an environment. Alpine vegetation is dramatic owing to its ephemeral nature. Here annual plants bloom with a precise calendar, attracting hordes of butterflies and other organisms. The trees are gnarled as they stand against the howling wind, mosses and liverworts carpet the ground, streams are always alive, and migrating animals have their fill before the cold sets in. We do not have this biome in the Philippines, but atop Mt. Apo in Davao and Mt. Pulog in Benguet, the country’s highest mountains, lies a unique ecosystem – a combination of grassland and alpine. This could be yet another biome heretofore unrecorded in the textbook.

Alpine 

6. Savannah

Home of game animals in Africa, the Savannah has the highest number of herbivores of all biomes. It had always been the “grand prix” of hunters until three decades ago when strict laws were passed prohibiting poaching and destruction of natural habitats. The diorama depicts the shrub-grass landscape, a stream runs into a waterhole where, during summer, attracts animals from the lowly turtle to the ferocious lion which stakes on preys like zebra and gazelle. Beyond lies Mt. Kilimanjaro, Hemingway’s favorite locale of his novel of the same title (Snows of Kilimanjaro). It is said that the beginning of the Nile River, the longest river in the world, starts with the melting of snow atop Kilimanjaro, right at the heart of the savannah.

7. The Desert

Scenes of the Sahara flash in our mind the moment the word “desert” is brought about to both young and old, in fantasy or reality. Here lies a wasteland, so vast that it dwarfs the imagination. 

Deserts are found at the very core of continents like Australia and North America, or extend to high altitude (Atacama Desert) or way up north (Siberian Desert) where temperature plunges below zero Celsius. In the desert rain seldom comes and when it does, the desert suddenly blooms into multi-faceted patterns and colors of short-growing plants. Sooner the desert is peacefully dry and eerie once again, except the persistent cacti and their boarders (birds, insects and reptiles), shrubs and bushes that break the monotony of sand and sand dunes. But somewhere the “desert is hiding a well,” so sang the lost pilot and the Little Prince in Antoine de St. Exupery’s novelette, “The Little Prince.” I am referring to the oasis, waterhole in the desert. It is here where travelers mark their route, animals congregate, nations put claims on political borders. Ecologically this is the nerve center of life, spiritually the bastion of hope, a new beginning, and source of eternal joy particularly to those who have seen and suffered in the desert. The desert is not a desert after all. ~

-------------

*Faculty Curator, Former St Paul Museum, SPUQC.  These mini-dioramas have been removed to give way to a new project in the former Museum. This lesson is dedicated to the students who made them, and to visitors who appreciated the value of these masterpieces. The idea of miniaturized dioramas depicting ecological scenes was pioneered by students taking up ecology subject at St. Paul University QC. Their works - two dozen mini-dioramas depicting major ecosystems - were displayed for 15 years at the school museum, then the centerpiece of natural history. The mini-dioramas at SPUQ are much simpler and smaller. They are works of amateurs but nonetheless exude the quality an artist cum ecologist can best show with the help of faculty members and the museum staff.

In celebration of Fathers' Day June 15, 2025: The Return of the Prodigal Son in Our Troubled World

The Return of the Prodigal Son

in Our Troubled World

"When the world is being ripped by conflicts or pampered with material progress, when mankind shudders at the splitting of the atom,  the breaking of the code of life, when the future is viewed with high rise edifices, clouded by greenhouse gases... "

I am a postmodern day Prodigal Son. I spent sixty long years searching for a place I may call my own in the whole wide world ... until I found my way barred by the deadliest pandemic in modern times ... and there's no way out but to turn back and go home." - avr

Dr Abe V Rotor

I am a postmodern day Prodigal Son. I spent sixty long years searching and searching for a place I may call my own in the whole wide world. Yes, sixty long years of my youth and in old age – thrice longer the fiction character Rip van Winkle did sleep – and now I am back to the portals of my hometown, to the waiting arms of my father.

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt van Rijk.  Are you the repentant prodigal son, or his proud brother?

The proverbial Lamp I still hold flickers, but it is but a beacon in embers now, for it had spent its luminance in the darkness of human weakness and failures, it beamed across the ocean of ignorance and lost hope, it trailed the path of many adventures and discoveries, and it kept vigil in the night while I slept.

And what would my father say? He meets me, embraces me, and calls everyone. “Kill the fattest calf! Let us rejoice.”

San Vicente is my home. It is the bastion of my hopes and ideals. At the far end on entering the old church is written on the altar, faded by the elements of time and pleading hands of devotees, Ur-urayenka Anakko – I am waiting for you my child.

When the world is being ripped by conflicts or pampered with material progress, when mankind shudders at the splitting of the atom or the breaking of the code of life, when the future is viewed with high rise edifices or clouded by greenhouse gases – my town becomes more than ever relevant to the cause for which it has stood through the centuries - the sanctuary of idealism in a troubled world, home of hundreds of professionals in many fields of human endeavor.

“Kill the fattest calf,” I hear my father shout with joy. It is celebration. It is a symbol of achievement more than I deserve. But my feelings is that I am standing on behalf of my colleagues for I am but an emissary. Out there in peace and trials, in villages and metropolises, in all endeavors and walks of life, many “Vincentians” made their marks, either recognized on the stage or remembered on stone on which their names are carved. I must say, it is an honor and privilege that I am here in humility to represent them that I may convey their unending faith and trust to our beloved hometown.

The world has changed tremendously, vastly, since I passed under the town arch to meet the world some fifty years ago. I have met wise men who asked the famous question “Quo vadis?” - where are you going? I can only give a glimpse from the eye of a teacher, far for the probing mind of Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, or those of Naisbitt and Aburdane, renowned modern prophets. Teachers as I know, and having been trained as one, see the world as it is lived; they make careful inferences, and take a bird’s eye view cautiously. They are conveyors of knowledge, and even with modern teaching tools and communication technology, cannot even qualify as chroniclers, nay less of forecasters. I have always strived to master the art of foretelling the future, but frankly I can only see it from atop a misty mountain. How I wish too, that I can fully witness the fruits of the seed of knowledge a teacher has sown in the mind of the young.

Limited my experience may be, allow me to speak my mind about progress and developments in the sixty years I was away from home, but on the other side of midnight, so to speak.

1. We face an invisible enemy, mean and deadly - the Coronavirus Pandemic disease or COVID-19 - respecting no nation, race, belief, ideology, economic status, etc., reminiscent of the Black Plague that plunged the world into the Dark Ages for almost ten decades.

2. The monster that Frankenstein made, lurks in nuclear stockpiles today loosely in the hands of  superpowers following the end of the Cold War.  Lately, newly industrialized nations are building their own nuclear bombs, like Iran and North Korea.

3. Like the breaking of the atom that led to the discovery of nuclear power, and the building of the atomic bomb, biologists have succeeded in breaking the Code of Heredity, and through genetic engineering succeeded in creating new life forms - the GMOs.  There are dozens of Genetically Modified Organisms - plants, animals, drugs - in the market today, and more in the laboratory phase.   It is believed that the corona virus to be a product of genetic engineering, so with its variants.   

4. Our blue planet has an ugly shade of murk and crimson – fire consuming the forests, erosion eating out the land, polar ice shrinking, rising sea flooding the shorelines, and gas emission boring a hole in its jacket.

Dead planet, wooden chandelier by AVR 2019

5. One race one nation equals globalization. How we have taken over evolution in our hands. We are playing God, is Paradise Lost Part 2 in the offing?

6. The world is wired, it travels fast on two feet – communication and transportation. The world has shrunk into a village. Homogenization is the death sentence amid a bed of roses for mankind.

7. Man-induced phenomena are too difficult to separate from those of nature. We take the latter as an excuse of our follies, a rationalization that runs counter to be rational. Only the human species has both the capability to build or destroy – and yet we love to destroy what we build.

Our living world gone wild. 

Painting by AV Rotor 2020  

8. The dangerous game of numbers is a favorite game, and our spaceship is getting overloaded. Man’s needs, more so man’s want, become burgeoning load of Mother Earth, now sick and aging. Will Pied Piper ever come back and take our beloved young ones away from us, as it did in Hamlyn many years ago?

9. Conscience, conscience, where is spirituality that nourishes it. Where have all the religious teachings gone? Governance – where is the family, the home? Peace and order – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan – another Korea, another Vietnam, only in another place, in another time. And now social unrest is sweeping over North Africa and the Middle East.

10. Janus is progress, and progress is Janus. It is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is The Prince and the Pauper. Capitalism has happy and sad faces – the latter painted in pain and sadness on millions all over the world. It is inequity that makes the world poor; we have more than enough food, clothing, shelter, and energy for everybody. What ideology can save the world other than capitalism?

As I grew older I did not only learn to adjust with the realities of life as I encountered it but to grasp its meaning from the points of view of famous philosophers and writers. I studied it with the famous lines from William Blake’s famous poem, Auguries of Innocence. 

  

To wit.

“To see the world in a grain of sand;
     And a Heaven a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
     And eternity in an hour.”

             - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

If ever I have ventured into becoming a redeemer of sort, armed with a pen in hand, I too, have learned from Blake’s verse of the way man should view the world in all its magnanimity yet in simplicity. If ever I have set foot to reach the corners of the Earth, and failed, I am consoled by the humble representation of “a grain of sand” that speaks of universal truth and values.

And beauty? If I have not found it in a garden of roses, I dare not step on a flowering weed. And posterity and eternity? They are all ensconced in periodicity, a divine accident of existence – to say that each and every one of us is here in this world by chance – an unimaginable chance – at “a certain time and place” which - and I believe - has a purpose in whatever and however one lives his life. But I would say that a lifetime is all it takes “to see the world” and be part of it. It is a lifetime that we realize the true meaning of beauty, experience “infinity and eternity”. Lifetime is a daily calendar of victories and defeats.

While the world goes around and around . . .

The world like in Aristotle’s time continues to struggle with the preservation of values; the species will continue to evolve as postulated by Darwin; culture will express itself more fully since the first painting of early man dwelling in the caves of Lascaux in France.

Trade and commerce will continue to progress, reaches a plateau and declines - a normal curve that goes with the rise and fall of civilizations. Yet leaders do not see it that way. Not even the Utopia of conquerors like Alexander the Great whose global economic vision two thousand five hundred years ago is basically the same in concept as that of the great powers of today - United States, European Union, ASEAN.

The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. The Book of Revelations in the New Testament lists the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as conquest, war, famine and death, while in the Old Testament's Book of Ezekiel they are sword, famine, wild beasts and pestilence or plague.

The great religions will continue to bring man to his knees and look into heavens amidst knowledge revolution and growing complexity of living, Man’s infinitesimal mind continues to probe the universe. Never has man been so busy, so bothered, so confused, yet so determined than ever before, trying to fill up God’s Seventh Day.

As I go on reflecting I came across the book of Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 1994. He warns us succinctly.

“This world, which appears to be a great workshop in which knowledge is developed by man – which appears as progress and civilization, as a modern system of communication, as a structure of democratic freedom without any limitations – this world is not capable of making man happy."
                 - Pope John Paul II, On the Threshold of Hope

Now I am home, my father, in my hometown. I do only wish for comfort. I just want to thank you for you have taught me and instilled in me the spirit of virtue and fortitude. Thank you for making me a Vincentian.

Let me rest now in your arms. ~