Journey with my own clutter By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   ONE December, I photocopied a book on how to manage clutter and sent them as Christmas gifts to close friends. My friends to whom copies were given, also asked me to reproduce for them, to be given to their friends….

What are you doing? By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   “WHAT are you doing?”, my niece Ashang casually asked me yesterday, and without waiting for an answer, a follow-up question, “Why do you do the things you do? The first question requires a simple answer. On second thought, it is a…

A breath of starlight By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo WE have lost most of the trees after a long and painful struggle. There are many sectors who participated in the movement to save them, and I am grateful to everyone. I would like to particularly cite the consistent support of the…

Scent of a father By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   I MISS you. I do not want to cry on Christmas, and I will not. You taught me not to cry so much, and I am not supposed to cry, especially because it has been over two years since you passed…

Challenging the principle of eminent domain By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   WE are at a painful point when we are still fighting, despite the fact that so little has been left of the once stately canopy of trees along the Manila North Road. For what would a resolution from the…

Narco-politics and vegetables By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   TESS de Venecia, one of my best friends, and Regional Director of Women in Development (WID) Foundation, is now resting in heaven. But now she comes to mind, having realized that the society we are trying to change is in much greater…

An Eye for an eye By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo ON a Thursday morning, Francis Fernandez tagged me to a post of Gabriel Cardinoza quoting Ellen DeGeneres, “If we’re destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there’s got to be…

Pacman of the trees By Virginia J. Pasalo PACMAN is a game where the player increases its strength through power-ups to turn around to catch the ghosts. The player gets bonus points and extends his life after gobbling up enough ghosts. In the Philippines, it originally refers to a person…

Vulnerability By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo TREES are vulnerable to certain predators, and more and more, they are vulnerable to the unabated push for non-sustainable development and human greed. Vulnerability is the state of exposure to the impact of development concepts, natural elements, and personal agenda, present and sometimes imagined, so…

Finding Truth By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo LOGIC is concerned with truth, and it has presented us with a set of rules which are assumed to be self-evident. But not all truths are self-evident. What maybe logically true may not be the truth, in reality. Over time, I realized that there…