inspiration and stimulation for our current projects
This year end festivities at NYC's Big Apple are a spectacular extravaganza of bright lights and colorful displays.
One of the city's main attractions is a holiday walking tour of the fabulous store front windows in and around Fifth Avenue's shopping center in Midtown Manhattan.
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| "Destination Extraordinary" theme designed by David Hoey |
This holiday season we celebrate hope and peace as we find ourselves in the darkest days of the year on winter solstice. Wars and illness, hatred and repression have invaded our lives. It is the very time for us to nurture the light within and ignite hope for a better world.
There are so many more people in the world than the few who work on controlling us. We the people are here to participate in our communities and neighborhoods if we want to create a better world.
the solstice energy portal is open
The Goddess for this season is the Divine Mother - Mother Earth, Mother Mary - our inner mothers. These next three months are a good time to nurture a new life for ourselves and our tribe.
With the success of the Artemis I mission NASA proudly shares a look back at an astronomical year.
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| Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI |
2022 was a big win for NASA and all of humanity. We unfolded the universe, launched a mega Moon rocket, moved an asteroid in space.
wonder | wander | world is glad we got front row seats to all this awe and wonder.
wonder | wander | world pick of the week is Murmurations with adrienne maree brown - bringing her profound and practical voice of reason into our chaotic current events.
Two years into a global pandemic, adrienne maree brown invites us to root into compassion and reconnect with our state of interbeing.
illustration by Michael Luong
A writer, activist and facilitator, she describes her thought as postnationalism - others have described it as Black feminism or womanism. She also supports, among others, the Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements.
Brown's anthology Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good was released in February 2019 "demonstrates how activists can tap into emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression." In September 2021, Brown published the novella Grievers, her first long form work of published fiction.
Adrienne Maree Brown invites YES! media readers to join her in writing “fan fiction and fan poetics for the future.”
Her next and final column for this series, she will explore the practical wisdom of “transforming ourselves to transform the world” - tying together the arc of accountability into a cycle of dialectical humanism that allows us to not just survive but evolve.
A recent post on Change Warrior featured conversations over Thanksgiving - diverse and even difficult yet so worthwhile. Here at wonder | wander | world we add two more for this week.
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| "y’all" serves an important function but can have negative connotations |
Thanksgiving at home with family and friends is a joyful occasion. 2022 was a hard year on many of us - some more than others.
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| Russ Berrie pilgrim trolls |
All the more reason to celebrate these warm and happy moments - gathered together in comfort and celebration.
Happy Thanksgiving to us all!
wonder | wander | world love to collect valuable resources and information - especially innovative projects that promote small and local produce, products and production.
We are grateful and gratified to have stumbled upon John Sherwin Felix. This young man is a knowledgeable fountain of information on native food heritage and agrobiodiversity.
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| lokal+encyclopedia & online archive of Pinoy food |
You can find him at Lokalpedia - a visual archive of endangered, artisanal, heirloom, and small batch Philippine ingredients and food items.
This lovingly curated knowledge is a project of The Banana Leaf Kitchen - where John shares his love for Philippines cuisine and local ingredients.
some native food & plants
What a great find indeed - we guarantee you will be intrigued, informed and inspired. Food of the gods for our starved souls - enjoy!
Mad in America is a non- profit that promotes rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). It is their belief that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change in science, psychiatry and social justice.
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| Cognitive Dissonance on display |
We are smack in the seismic shock window of November 8 - blood moon total lunar eclipse at 16* Taurus, conjunct volatile unpredictable Uranus, overshadowed by Saturn, Lord of Time and Karma - this wild card eclipse acts as an influx on steroids, deleting the past as it sweeps our slate clean.
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| transforming human consciousness |
This is the grand lead in for the coming attractions of 2023. As the evolutionary burn intensifies - a period and process predicted to induce extraordinary transformations in human consciousness - everything feels different.
Still reeling from the triduum of Allhallowtide - All Saints’ Eve (Halloween, Oct 31), All Saints’ Day (Nov 1), and All Souls’ Day (Nov 2) - our state of bardo is magnified and multiplied. Stumbling in the mystical mists that are intermediate, transitional, liminal - suspended in a state between death and rebirth.
Declaring our intent up front - wonder | wader | world believe nothing trumps Chinese operatic drama in its colorful outstanding opulence and its sheer epic scale - in our opinion.
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| Photo: Nick Knight/Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Trunk Archive |
Consumers will soon see a new face peering up at them from the United States quarter: Anna May Wong, the glamorous Chinese American movie star.
Halloween is creeping in on us with autumn chill reminding us to make hay as winter is coming. Samhain is a celebration that acknowledges and deepens the occasion.
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| Yuko Shimizu, harpy - DC comic art |
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| Art by Karen Hallion |
This is a key priority of the Generation Equality Action Coalition for Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality. The Coalition is bringing together governments, tech companies, the UN System, civil society organizations and young people for a more equal and diverse digital transformation, including by preventing and eliminating online gender-based violence.
This week on wonder | wander | world our pick of the week is Candy Gourlay - London based Filipino author of fiction for children and young adults.
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| the author |
It took her years to learn that Filipino stories too, belong in the pages of books. Her novel Bone Talk was recently shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Costa Prize. She lives in London with her family, where she wages war on the snails in her garden.
Her multi-awarded books have brought joy to many readers, young and older.
September 26 is Save Sierra Madre Day. Once again the mountain range has saved the Philippines from another major storm - Karding/Noru. Yet this valuable resource is constantly under threat, sorely lacking conservation and protection.
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| forest cover as of 2010 |
The Kaliwa dam project is threatening the endangered species living in the sparse remaining forest of Sierra Madre Range and indigenous people's lives in that area.
In honor of International Day of Peace 2022 - this year's theme is end racism, build peace - wonder | wonder | world pick of the week is the newly released Ken Burns documentary on PBS - "The U.S. and the Holocaust".
As proud Americans who honestly believe in this country and its people - this documentary is a brazen eye opener. The Holocaust has many lessons it can yet teach - pray we remain alert and attentive.
Did you know that Hitler so admired the US government segregation practices among Native Americans and Jim Crow laws for African Americans - he was so inspired he studiously copied a few of them in his grand plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe?
The UP Institute of Human Rights presents: The Legal Construction of Dictatorship: We Remember.
This will be a week-long Martial Law Series from 12-21 September 2022. The major events that led up to President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law, as well as the events that came after, will be posted on this page everyday until 21 September 2022, the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration of Martial Law.
This series aims to help the post-EDSA generation understand how the one-man rule was sustained from the proclamation of Martial Law in 1972 to the ouster of the dictator in 1986.
It will look at how the law was used to legitimize the dictatorship. It will enable and empower today’s generation to be wary of similar attempts these days, and alert them to seemingly subtle maneuvers that erode our democracy.
Join us in looking back and recalling one of the darkest chapters in the country's history. We will remember and we will #NeverForget.
The palace has just announced that Queen Elizabeth II has died. God save the queen!
Eternal she is not even if for many they have known no other monarchy in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth II, who reigned over the U.K. for 70 years, dies at 96.
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| © Campress/AP |
Queen Elizabeth served as a constant and reassuring figure in Britain and on the world stage as she served to lead her family, monarchy, and country through a period of profound shifts in geopolitical power and national identity.
The Queen holds the newborn King Charles III - with her parents
wonder | wander | world is immersed in a deepening all-encompassing cycle of life and death. As our elders live bonus years in their 90s and 80s we celebrate our 66th and 43rd birthdays. Multi generations in life's second, third, and fourth acts.
In a culture that dreads the inevitability of aging - treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence - forgetting that growing old is a tremendous privilege not given to most.
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| @wwwomen decades ago |
Hardly questioning imposed external ageism obsessions with cosmetics and cosmetic surgery come by what scholar Kathleen Woodward calls “the youthful structure of the look” - a harsh gaze that turns the old into “The Other.”
It's your birthday and we feel your absence more today here at wonder | wonder | world. It's a day to celebrate you youer than you.
From our pre-Mahala, pre-Oro, pre-Mother Lily days of being your student, mentee, adoptiva to quiet lunches out, one on one chats, sleep overs - years piled on years yet never enough and all too precious.
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| Maurice "Peque" Gallaga, bugal sang banwa |
We spent Mahala's first trimester kapit-tuko to Madie and her last Wanggo trimester - while you left us to wage your battles in Manila. Born six months later into a world that shook, rattled and rolled us out of our quiet little lives into the limelight.
Bright lights, big city blues - green means go, red means stop - but not for us. We made hay and broke those damn rules. Laughing maniacally and sticking it to all those shmoes.
Years unfolded, folks came and went - friends made and friends lost. Hearts on fire, hearts shattered - boom kaboom!
What was all the drama about or for? Scattered pieces gathered slowly and carefully. We stopped the frenzied dance to quietly waltz through life once more.
We are forever grateful beyond and above for countless highlights of our lives - together and apart yet always shared. We love you mumo!
Neil Gaiman’s beloved The Sandman comic books finally gets adapted into a Netflix TV series and we are all smitten.
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| Sandman on Netflix |
Spanning 10 books published between 1989 and 1996, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book series features an enormous ensemble cast, including angels, demons, wizards, superheroes, fairies and playwrights.
All of them come into the orbit of the titular character, also known as Morpheus or Dream.
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| Neil Gaiman’s Dream Country: A Dream of a Thousand Cats, No. 18 (August 1990) |
Three decades after they were first released, our dream has come true with this TV series that lives up to Neil Gaiman's original work.
Plus a bonus episode at the end hinting of more to come. What a delight!
The Earth satellite, the moon, has long been the subject of all kinds of fascinating legends and myths associated with the celestial body and its cycles.
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| Moonlight in Naples / Ivan Aivazovsky / 1842 |
For thousands of years, people have used its light to guide them in the dark - personifying the moon as a deity. It has influenced the behavior of all living things on earth including the weather, tides, people, animals, and plants.
Bugal sang Banwa is a local term we use back home that translates to pride of our town.
Whether that is her island home of Bacolod City, Negros Island or Brooklyn, New York; the Broadway stage or on the big screen - Lydia Gaston Greenberg has found her place in the sun and is shining bright.
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| Lydia Gaston plays Jo Koy's mom Tita Susan |
Actor, singer, and arts educator - she has succeeded where few dare to tread. She has carved a name for herself in bright lights and our hearts.
wonder | wander | world is proud to have interviewed her recently - as we covered her decades of work on stage and on screen for Negros Season of Culture.
Catch Lydia Gaston as comedian Jo Koy's mom Tita Susan in "Easter Sunday" #brava #kudos #congrats
This week wonder | wander | world picks Laura Gibbs' Tiny Tales. 100-word stories inspired by traditional folktales. So far Gibbs has completed ten books of Tiny Tales, each containing 200 stories - not so little a compilation after all.
Here is a sweet sample: "Sita Rewards Hanuman" |
| Hanuman watercolor |
After Rama's coronation, Sita honored Hanuman with a pearl necklace.Hanuman started biting the pearls, cracking them open and looking inside."What are you looking for?" Sita asked, laughing, and all the people in attendance laughed too."I am looking for you," said Hanuman, "and for Rama. Without you inside, these pearls are useless.""Rama and Sita are on their thrones!" the people shouted. "How could they be in the pearls?""In the same way they are in my heart," Hanuman replied, tearing open his chest; everyone could see Rama and Sita there. "Are they not in your hearts also?"
There's also an audio version to listen to - available on SoundCloud.
As we keep our hope afloat in these tumultuous times, wonder | wander | world looks to modern science to bolster our faith in the evolution of humankind as our faith is tested by the seeming devolution of humanity.
If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fall outs you might have even hoped it was a sign that you were adopted.
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| jumping genes, aka transposons, help to explain octopus intelligence |
Scientists in Darwin’s time and through most of the 20th century could only work out the branches of the evolutionary tree of life by looking at the structure and appearance of animals and plants. Life forms were grouped according to similarities thought to have evolved together.
The Yanktonai Dakota painter Oscar Howe, who died in 1983, is the subject of a remarkable retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian. ~ The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl
“Dance of the Heyoka” (1954)
"Dakota Modern,” crisply curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, consists almost exclusively of works in tempera, watercolor, gouache, or casein on paper. The execution is phlegmatically deliberate. Photographs of Howe, always neatly dressed and placidly industrious, usually seated at a table, consort oddly with the power-packed compositions and aggressive hues of his pictures.
The upshot is a channeling of sheer, visionary imagination, as if the artist were taking dictation from an unseen demiurge. Do some of the effects seem cartoonish, with figuration that anticipated popular styles of graphic fiction which took hold in the nineteen-seventies? Perhaps.
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| Oscar Howe, photographed on March 30, 1958 |
Still, generic characters in melodramatic poses strategically depersonalize subjects to the benefit of thematic punch and decorative finesse. The results exalt audacity and breathe beauty. Howe seldom repeated himself. Each work can feel one-off, fulfilling a special mission to a fare-thee-well. If any quality is consistent, it’s suddenness.
