Writing hones the senses

Writing hones the senses into deeper thinking and analysis, catalyzes understanding and comprehension, and keeps memory longer.

Dr 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
By Abe V Rotor

1. To Jose Rizal: (PHOTO)

Your enemies tried to silence you,

and curtailed 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 screech, crow and bleat;

yet by moral and sanity, speak
not the language on the street.

3. To Ernest 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 Charles 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 (penname of Severino Reyes (PHOTO, right)
You touched a million-and-one lives,
around campfires in their prime;
like Grimm and Anderson and Homer,
storytellers of all time. 

6. To Boris Pasternak
Zhivago, to the end walked away alone,
from  love neither in winter nor fallow;
what romance away from the war zone  
wrapped him in doubt and sorrow.

7. To Mark Twain  (PHOTO) 

I am a boy forever, Tom or Huck,
down the Mississippi loafing;
and let the world go on sans care
what grownups are missing.  

8. To Robert Louis Stevenson 
"Kidnapped" made a boy into a man
too soon to faced a cruel world;
learning quickly the art of war 
deceit and conceit, gun and sword.

9. To Oscar Wilde (PHOTO)
You're a creator of characters and events,
in novels, stories, and plays 
children and adults alike on the armchair
live in those times and places. 

10. To Arthur Conan Doyle
"Sherlock Holmes" lives to this day,
idol of any detective;
"The Lost World" remains of the past,
is back in our midst to live.