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ARTiculo The change of form of one being to a completely different form of existence is one of the world's many miracles... +

26/05/2026

𝖧𝖮𝖶 𝖳𝖮 𝖦𝖤𝖳 𝖮𝖵𝖤𝖱 𝖫𝖮𝖲𝖨𝖭𝖦 𝖲𝖮𝖬𝖤𝖮𝖭𝖤?
𝖠 𝖧𝖤𝖠𝖱𝖳𝖶𝖠𝖱𝖬𝖨𝖭𝖦 𝖠𝖭𝖲𝖶𝖤𝖱 𝖡𝖸 𝖠 𝖬𝖮𝖭𝖪

A woman once asked a Zen monk,

“How do I move on after losing someone I loved deeply?
Their absence follows me everywhere.
No matter how hard I try, my heart still aches.”

The monk quietly lit a candle and used it to light another.

Then he asked,

“When one candle lights another, does its flame disappear?”

“No,” the woman whispered.

The monk smiled gently.

“Love is the same.
People may leave this world physically,
but the love they gave does not vanish.
It continues living within the hearts they touched.”

Tears filled the woman’s eyes.

“But why does the pain feel so heavy?”

The monk replied,

“Because grief is love with nowhere to go.
You are mourning not only the person…
but also the future and moments you imagined with them.”

The woman lowered her head.
“Then how do I heal?”

The monk pointed to a nearby tree.

“Every autumn, the tree lets go of its leaves.
Not because it stops loving them,
but because life teaches it to trust the seasons.”

He continued softly,

“Healing does not mean forgetting them.
It means learning to smile at the memories
without breaking apart inside. 🕊️

One day, the memories that now hurt you
will begin to warm you instead.

Until then,
be gentle with your heart.
Cry when you need to.
Speak their name.
Pray for them.
And slowly return your attention
to the life that is still waiting for you.

Because some people never truly leave us…their love simply takes a different form within us."

✨🤍

She was eighteen years old when she wrote it. Françoise Sagan dashed off Bonjour Tristesse in a few months, published it...
26/05/2026

She was eighteen years old when she wrote it. Françoise Sagan dashed off Bonjour Tristesse in a few months, published it in 1954, and became an overnight sensation rich, famous, and scandalous. The novel is barely 130 pages, but it changed French literature forever. The narrator is Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl spending a lazy, sun-drenched summer at a villa on the Côte d'Azur with her wealthy, charming, utterly irresponsible father. He is a widower who drifts from woman to woman. Cécile adores him. She has no mother, no schooling, no morals to speak of just a taste for suntans, slow afternoons, and the cynical pleasure of watching adults behave badly. Then her father falls in love with Anne, a cool, sophisticated friend of her dead mother. Anne is kind, intelligent, and everything Cécile is not. She plans to marry Cécile's father, send Cécile to university, and impose order on their chaotic lives. Cécile decides to destroy her.

What makes the novel so disturbing is Sagan's prose. It is simple, elegant, and completely amoral. Cécile describes her scheme with the same calm detachment she might use to describe the color of the sea. She enlists her father's former mistress, a silly, good-hearted woman named Elsa, to make Anne jealous. She lies, flirts, and plays the innocent. The reader watches her do it and cannot look away. Sagan never judges Cécile. She never offers a lesson. She simply shows you a girl who has never been told that other people are real, and then gives her a summer to prove it. The novel's famous first line "Bonjour tristesse" is the last line of the book, spoken by Cécile after everything has fallen apart. She has learned something. What she has learned is that sadness is a permanent resident. And she greets it like an old friend.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4f1wnLX

You can get the book and also enjoy up to 90% FREE Audible books using this link

Bien Chabacano proudly congratulates the winners of the first-ever Bien Chabacano Writing Contest!LIST OF WINNERS(presen...
24/05/2026

Bien Chabacano proudly congratulates the winners of the first-ever Bien Chabacano Writing Contest!

LIST OF WINNERS
(presented in no particular order)

DONDE ESTA
Jayline Gonzales-Barredo

TIENE BA
Nin

SECO
Jason Kris Kanindot

CHAVACANO DE ZAMBOANGA
Mark Matthew Delos Santos Viñas

EL FUERZA DE MIO MAYORES
Rocel Matthew M. Gregorio

EL SOL ABAJANDO
EJ Franz Hugo

MEMORIA
Isidro Floreta

The winning entries were selected based on their emotional impact, creativity, and message. Since spelling variations exist and standardization is still ongoing, technical aspects such as spelling and orthography were not heavily emphasized. The goal of the contest was simply to encourage authentic and meaningful expression in Chabacano.

Each winner will receive a small collection of Bien Chabacano gifts by mail, including a copy of El Diutay Principe, Chabacano merchandise, and a certificate. Winners will be contacted via email regarding the delivery of their prizes.

Thank you to everyone who echoed our call for submissions, and especially to those who answered with their words, creativity, and love for Chabacano.

Enhorabuena na maga ganador!

❤️
15/05/2026

❤️

What links this painting to 'Alice in Wonderland'? 🤔Quinten Massys's 'The Ugly Duchess' is one of one of the most arrest...
14/05/2026

What links this painting to 'Alice in Wonderland'? 🤔

Quinten Massys's 'The Ugly Duchess' is one of one of the most arresting faces in our collection. The portrait depicts an elderly woman with exaggerated features, leaning against a parapet and offering us a rosebud. She is elegantly and aristocratically dressed, although by the time this picture was painted her clothes would have been many decades out of date and her cleavage considered scandalous. She brazenly challenges every traditional canon of beauty and rule of propriety.

This is a satirical portrait, intended to mock the vanity of the old who dress and behave as if they are still young. In the 17th century, the painting was misidentified as a portrait of Margaret Maultasch, Duchess of Carinthia and Countess of Tyrol, a historical figure who had been defamed by her enemies as the ‘ugliest woman in history’. On this basis, the painting later gained the nickname ‘The Ugly Duchess’. In the Victorian era, this picture inspired John Tenniel’s depiction of the Duchess in his illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland':

https://bit.ly/3LSjYuQ

I was re-reading Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing, and tangina, so much of it comes back to one brutal, e...
13/05/2026

I was re-reading Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing, and tangina, so much of it comes back to one brutal, enraging truth: if you are poor, they can enter your home while you are asleep, wave a warrant in your face, and sometimes the first thing that knocks is not the police but a bullet, and after your body is already on the floor, the report will write the ending they needed all along: “nanlaban.”

But if you are a senator, suddenly the law needs a seminar, surrender becomes “procedural,” arrest becomes “political,” accountability becomes “complicated,” and the Senate, funded by the very people whose doors were kicked open in the name of the drug war, can somehow be treated like a taxpayer-funded hiding place.

And the fu***ng irony is that “nanlaban” became the most convenient national script under his watch in the PNP, a ready-made ending for the poor, yet now that accountability is walking toward the powerful, the same people who normalized death as paperwork suddenly want every comma, courtesy, privilege, and procedural cushion in the book.

And the deeper irony is that the Rome Statute was not some foreign rumor we accidentally overheard; it was a treaty ratified by the Philippine Senate itself, which means it became part of the law of the land, so all these mental and legal gymnastics about sovereignty, jurisdiction, and “foreign interference” are just smoke machines for people who loved the law when it was hunting the poor but suddenly discovered “due process” when it started walking toward the powerful.

The poor get doors kicked open while the powerful get mental and legal gymnastics, and it is fu***ng infuriating because that is not justice, that is a country teaching us again and again that the law walks barefoot into the slums with bullets in its hands, but removes its shoes before entering the halls of power.

So yes, from every door kicked open, every mother left screaming, every body tagged “nanlaban,” and every law they remembered only when it was finally their turn: f**k you, matigas, solid, at ratified.

- text and photo credit to the owner

2,500 years ago, a Persian wouldn't trust any decision until it had survived two completely opposite versions of his own...
27/04/2026

2,500 years ago, a Persian wouldn't trust any decision until it had survived two completely opposite versions of his own mind.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who chronicled the customs of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in his Histories around 430 BC, the most powerful empire of the ancient world made its biggest decisions in a way that still feels strange — and oddly brilliant — today.
When the Persians faced a serious matter — a war, a law, a question of state — they didn't decide it once. They decided it twice.
Once drunk.
Once sober.
At a long banquet table, surrounded by candlelight and flowing wine, the nobles would debate the matter freely. Hours into the evening, with cups refilled and tongues loosened, they would reach a conclusion. Then, the host of the gathering would carefully record what they had agreed upon — and the men would stumble home to sleep.
The next morning, with clear minds and pounding heads, they would gather again. The decision from the night before would be placed before them. If they still agreed with it now, sober, it became official.
If sober reasoning rejected it, the decision was thrown out. No matter how passionately they had argued for it the night before.
But here's the part most people don't know — and the part that makes this ritual so much more sophisticated than it sounds at first:
It also worked the other way around.
Any decision the Persians reached while sober, in the calm light of day, would be brought back later that night, over wine — to see if it still felt true when their guards were down. If it didn't survive the warmth of honest, unfiltered conversation, that decision was also discarded.
In Herodotus's words, "They consult when they cannot lie. They decide when they cannot err."
The philosophy behind it was elegant: truth lives in two places.
Sober reasoning is careful, but it can be cowardly. It avoids hard conversations, hides behind politeness, and approves things people would never say aloud at a dinner table.
Drunken honesty, on the other hand, is bold but reckless. It says what it really feels — but it can also be foolish, impulsive, and emotionally lopsided.
So the Persians built a system to use both. Logic to keep them safe. Honesty to keep them real. Neither one alone was trusted to govern an empire.
A small footnote worth mentioning: Herodotus is the only ancient source for this practice, and modern historians are divided on whether the Persians literally did this every time — or whether it was an idealized cultural memory of how they made decisions over feasts. Either way, the philosophy survived for a reason.
Centuries later, the Romans had a phrase that captured it in just three words:
In vino veritas.
"In wine, truth."
In Persia, in Rome, and in nearly every culture across history, humans seem to have stumbled onto the same quiet wisdom: a good decision must satisfy both halves of you — the careful mind and the honest heart.
In an age of impulsive tweets and overcautious press releases, maybe the Persians knew something we've forgotten.
The best decisions aren't the ones that survive only in the boardroom.
They're the ones that still make sense after dinner — when nobody is performing anymore.

APPLES and I:Of Eve, and Adam’s Apple in Cranach’s Luminous Courtauld painting “riverun, past Eve and Adam’s, fr...
27/04/2026

APPLES and I:
Of Eve, and Adam’s Apple in Cranach’s Luminous Courtauld painting

“riverun, past Eve and Adam’s, from
swerve of shore to bend of bay...”
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

I really really like honeycrisp apples. They are exactly as advertised: crisp, sweet and delicious. They are my absolute favorite apple cultivar.

The Honeycrisp is one of thousands of apple cultivars now growing globally, all of which derive from the ancient wild apple (Malus sieversii) of the steppes of Central Asia in the mountains of modern-day Kazakhstan, the common root stock of all the world’s apples.

The honeycrisp itself was developed at the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center in 1974, whereas I have been munching on them only since about 2010 🙂

When we think of apples in Renaissance Art, we often think of Adam and Eve.

This post is a pendant to my earlier post today of the Memling Chicago Virgin and Child with an Apple.

Of the myriad paintings and drawings of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the expulsion, this splendid, colorful, humorous and brilliantly conceived painting by the great Lucas Cranach the Elder, is my favorite.

From my published article on apples in history, theology and nutrition:

“..... In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve pluck a forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, which leads to their expulsion from the Garden. It has been debated as to what kind of fruit or vegetable was on that tree: apples, figs, grapes, citrons, olives, apricots, and pomegranates have all been proposed, and ambiguity remained as late as 1611 in the King James version of the Bible, where it was still referred to simply as a "fruit."

However, by the late 1400s, the apple had begun to appear in devotional art of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, where the apple represented the fruit of the resurrection
After Dürer's 1504 engraving depicting the First Couple standing beside an apple tree, the apple dominated artworks recounting the Fall of Man and Woman. (See comments for Durer’s engraving).
The apple tree became a template for later artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose luminous 1526 Adam and Eve painting (shown here in the post) displays a tree hung with apples that glow like rubies.”

The Courtauld website tells us that the Vine refers to the Redemption, so that the picture has some didactic function. While the pairing of the sheep with the lion may have a moral meaning, the association of Adam with the sheep is perhaps intended as a wry comment on his behavior.”

“Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther and worked at the court of Saxony. Cranach was famous for his landscapes and representations of animals and nudes, and found Adam and Eve a subject which was ideally suited to his gifts and to which the Lutherans did not object. He and his workshop treated it a dozen times in paintings and prints.”

Ya gotta love Adam scratching his head and the quizzical look on his perplexed face, as if to say: “hmmm, do I eat it or chuck it?”

References:

1) An article I wrote on apples in Art history, linguistics, theology and nutrition:
Does an Apple a Day keep the Doctor Away?
Vincent P. de Luise MD

https://hekint.org/2018/10/10/does-an-apple-a-day-keep-the-doctor-away/

2) Courtauld website description of the painting
https://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/renaissance/lucas-cranach-the-elder-adam-and-eve

Adam and Eve
Lucas Cranach the Elder
1526
Courtauld Institute
London

- Vincent DeLuise

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