By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   AFTER a year, I’m happy that the adjacent vacant lot, which used to be a garbage dump, has now become an urban food forest. Anyone passing can pick chili, talinum (waterleaf), ternate (butterfly pea), palyan balang (wild bitter gourd), kamote (sweet potato), malunggay (moringga), mulberries…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   IN a blink, my suitcase was gone my passport, my documents my formal shoes, my camera gifts I bought for my friends, my lipstick I lost everything the police took my statement making me repeat my family name, spelling every letter “P as in property,…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   IN a dream, I found myself among a throng of people at a party. In that dream, my sister Emma was gifted with a box of birds. Most of the birds were small, the size of maya birds (tree sparrows). Some birds were the size…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   II was Nico, my nephew, who informed me of her existence. She lived alone, abandoned by the house owners to fend for herself, with no food or water. She was thin, her flesh hanged over the skeleton within her frame. Whenever he could, Nico slipped…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   AT night, in the dead of the night, you are alive, a living dead haunting, ripping the edges of my wounded heart I chase away, again bits and pieces of remembrance of the way you smell, feel, taste like a genie, you rise, in the…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   IN this day and age, women have lesser tolerance for philandering partners but it doesn’t mean they do not respond or react. They respond by not saying a word, or a tirade of so many words, or throw unidentified flying objects, leave, or wait. I…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   “HE appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   SISTER Mary John Mananzan, a Missionary Benedictine activist nun from Bayambang, Pangasinan, told me that on one of her trips to Tagaytay, she followed a bluebird and it stopped at a property in Mendez, Cavite. It was in this property where the Women and Ecology…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   I came across a post today complaining that most people on Facebook (FB) refuse to engage in a conversation on Messenger, even when they are “Friends”. I find it curious because I have the impression that most young people find relationships and share intimacies this…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   IT’S not often, but sometimes, I have this uncomfortable feeling that we’re stuck, no matter what we do. I should not even say this, aware that most people expect me to inspire, to say positive things. So, we’re in this space, called limbo, not in…