By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   I NORMALLY prefer the silence of the morning to inspire myself to write. Debussy competes with the silence at times, but not often. This morning I spontaneously played Debussy’s Clair de Lune, one of my favorites among his compositions. It is probably an impulse, or…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   MY niece, Ashang (Maria Graciela Pasalo Crespo), is going to Hokkaido. With today’s internet everyone knows where it is. She told me the weather is freezing out there, often below-zero degrees. She is being hired as an International Specialist Communication, which entails, “help business managing…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   Not love it was not love, I think, at first it was a recognition of something I owned lost in the papers on my table in the misery I tried to ease for others, or so I told myself not acknowledging my own there, in…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   WE used to visit a loved one in a temporary detention facility. In this place, a visitor can only see their friends or relatives through a picture on the mobile phone, which they can look at for less than a minute before the image was…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   SHE could not remember their faces. Their faces have changed with time, and the expression of their bodies changed with their mindsets and physical wellbeing. What is there to say after more than thirty years, barely touching each other’s lives or not touching at all…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   UNLIKE in jazz and rhythm and blues, where blue notes are used in spirituals, chants and rhymed narrative ballads, the blue note in poetry is melancholic, unrhymed and unsung. A silent, heart-rending wail living in between the verses, unable to shed tears.   The knowing…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   FOR someone who has not experienced addiction, it is easy to give advice and encouragement. It is easy, too, to condemn and ostracize. It is not, for one who had experienced the same. Lorenzo E. Gabutina posted this realization: “Recovery fr drug abduction is not…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   MY windows are always open to allow the air and the scents from the garden to come in. The gardenias, the ginger lilies, the jasmines and all the smells of weeds and grasses waft through the curtains as freely as birds fly through, and perch…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   I realized that some of the people closest to me are experiencing challenges which they have chosen to keep for themselves. Over the years, we have shared thoughts, acted on problems together and celebrated our successes. It is heartbreaking when you see them suffer, whether…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   AMONG the many adventures and memories of my travels is a Korean song, sang by a Korean religious, during one of the regular meetings for the World Conference on Religion and Peace held in Thailand. The song got stuck in my brain, hibernated there for…