I WAS reading Rumi’s verse “[as] you live deeper in the heart, the mirror gets clearer and clearer.” I got to a similar realization by observing folks. I came to believe that life is a choice – to live a life of highest energies of loving yourself and others, or to live a life with a heart full of dark energies and toxic darkness, that being around you is like being pricked by sharp cactus spines.

Do you have the courage to live as a person with bright light within you? That being with you makes one feel your inner radiance? That you seem light in volume? Let me illustrate, using three examples: Yoshiki and two unnamed folks.

“AND the young man with the serious look on his face, out there at the back of the room, raises his hand and asks: ‘How do you know that what you do is the best that you can do?’ Our answer – perhaps as good as yours – calls for working in terms of integrity, validity and accessibility. Surely these words cannot be too frightening. A reader enters a piece of writing only when it is accessible, enjoys it when its parts are valid enough to hold together, and endorses it in admiration when he realizes that its author has put something of himself on the line. For the writer, the process must work in reverse. In the end it is the work that matters.” – NVM Gonzalez, Work on the Mountain, 1995.

One weekend, NVM Gonzalez visited, while he was UCLA’s Regents Professor of Philippine Literature in English. In his class on literature, some of his youngish UCLA students had already published poems and short stories.