Release your thoughts and feelings through writing

Abe V Rotor

Writing on the ground with stick – it’s blackboard of sort, and more.

Puerto Sunken Pier, San Ildefonso, Ilocos Sur

Without map and you are in the field, the best thing you can do is get a stick and draw on the ground.

That’s how village folks plan out irrigation schedules, show the location of a remote sitio (purok), design a makeshift hut – or simply to while away time in thoughts and ideas.

Christ did write on the ground, and on one occasion made two curves facing each other to look like fish - one end its tail, the other its head. It is the simplest yet most symbolic drawing I’ve ever seen. Before he uttered these famous words, “He who has no sin, casts the first stone,” He wrote something on the ground which we can only assume to be a mark of supreme meditation.

Writing hones the senses into deeper thinking and analysis, catalyzes understanding and comprehension, and keeps memory longer. Scientists say that we learn but a measly one-fourth of the lesson by just listening to it alone, but with the use of pen and paper, learning can be enhanced twice, if not thrice.

“Put it in writing,” goes a saying. Yes, even only on the ground as our old folks have always done.

By the way, who has not experienced “writing love letters on the sand?” Listen to balladeer, Pat Boone, sing the song of the same title, and you know what I mean.

Or write your problems where the sea rises and ebbs, and watch how the waves erase them away. This is therapeutic, try it. ~

On Writing

1. To Rizal:
Someone may try to silence your writing,
and also your freedom;
the lamp flickers its last rays at dawn
to seal your martyrdom.

2. To Aesop:
Ah! Animals talk louder than men,
though in bahs and bleat;
yet by moral and sanity, speak
not the language on the street.

3. To Hemingway:
You seemed as brave as the old man
in your great masterpiece;
the soldier, the hunter, the dreamer -
yet wanting a life of peace.

4. To Darwin:
You did not give up to your critics,
who only prayed and preached;
Around the world you witnessed,
Change by random and fit.

5. To Lola Basiang
You touched a million-and-one lives,
around campfires in their prime;
like Grimm and Anderson and Homer,
storytellers of all time.~