an enchanted place where colors are brighter,
the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again".
The Sugarcane Fields, San Carlos City
"But there is a spirituality that is more like a lowly emanation from
the most humble and earthbound things; that of a particular house,
a garden, a neighborhood, a grove of trees, a pristine beach, a holy
well, a field of wheat. Here spirituality is indistinguishable from
enchantment, for in an enchanted world the things of nature and
even of culture reek of holiness. Enchantment is nothing more
than spirituality deeply rooted in the earth."
~ Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, p. 340
Welcome to the land of my birth...
beautiful island country...
a boat ride in the Philippines
Bacolod City Capitol, Capital of Negros Occidental
Bacolod City at Night
A Catholic Church in Negros Occidental
and enter the 'Garden of my Childhood'...
Happy is she who still loves something in the nursery:
She has not been broken in two by time; she is not two women,
but one, and she has saved not only her soul but her life.
~ G.K. Chesterton
The original name of San Carlos was “Nabingkalan”, which referred to the Negrito settlement of inhabitants from towns of the Western Coast of Cebu Island who came to Negros. The settlers were led by an enterprising Cebuano from Badian, Carlos Apurado, who developed the area into a thriving Christian village with the help of his fellow pioneers.
“Nabingkalan” is also derived from the name of “Nabingka”, a beautiful princess who ruled the territory for many years that when she died, the inhabitants of this Negrito region mourned the death of their beautiful princess for two years. In order to perpetuate her soul, the people gave the name of “Nabingakalan” to the place where their beautiful princess ruled for a long period.
In 1856, the first politico Military Governor of Negros Island, Don Emilio Saravia, renamed the place “San Carlos” and established it as “pueblo” status in 1890 when Negros Island was divided into two provinces Occidental and Oriental Negros. San Carlos was recorded as an “arrabal” or barrio of Calatrava, then known as “Hilub-ang.”
In January 1892, the Bishop of Diocese of Jaro in Iloilo appointed a recollect as the first parish priest of San Carlos and three years later, the place regained its momentum for progress with 16 well-equipped “haciendas’ in operation.
In 1898, San Carlos acquired its township status when Gen. Juan Araneta of the Revolutionary Negros Republic officially proclaimed as a municipality. This was confirmed by the American Military Administration in 1901.
Five years later, in 1906, a constraint of the new administration from of local government implemented by the American Administration made Calatrava an “arrabal” or barrio of San Carlos.
San Carlos became a city on July 1, 1960. Each year, the city celebrates the Pintaflores festival on November 3-5 that culminates in a fascinating street dancing competition participated in by floral-painted dancers donned in colorful, ethnic-inspired costumes.
How to get there
San Carlos City can be reached in four-hours through the coastal highway and about two-and-half-hours through the Negros Translink Highway. With its natural harbor, San Carlos is also the province take-off point to Cebu with fast crafts reaching Toledo in an hour.
Mom
Too shy to face the world perhaps,
Thus, Cebu City was the unintended place of her birth!
(Richard, stealing a break in San Carlos, time off from the maddening crowd of Manila)
“He lacks much who has no aptitude for idleness.”
~ Louise Beebe Wilder
Home is San Carlos City, Negros Occidental, a sleepy coastal town in "Sugarlandia".
“Childhood is the sleep of reason.”
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Sipaway Is., San Carlos City)
Childhood is
when life was timeless, & the sea breeze's calm, & the child is lulled to sleep and dream...
O men, grown sick with toil and care,
Leave for awhile the crowded mart;
O women, sinking with despair,
Weary of limb and faint of heart,
Forget your years to-day and come
As children back to childhood's house.
~Phoebe Cary
“It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence
for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum
personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture
and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that
the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a
certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety
about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present
and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.”
~ Countryside Magazine and Small Stock Journal - Philosophy
Sipaway Is., San Carlos City
Childhood is
watching with awe, anticipation, & excitement every new sunrise...
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.
Most persons do not see the sun.
At least they have a very superficial seeing.
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Richard, Beatrice, Marianne on the runway to life
“The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day”
~ John Milton
A falls in San Carlos City
Childhood is
an ear plug stuck to the sounds of nature...
“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,
before the dark hour of reason grows.”
~ John Betjeman
Mt. Kanlaon, San Carlos City
Childhood is
a wide tv screen featuring the only nature channel in natural colors...
“Everything is complex and everything is simple. The rose has
no why attached to it, it blooms because it blooms, how no
thought of itself, or desire to be seen. What could be more
complicated than a rose for someone who wants to understand
it? What could be simpler for someone who wants nothing?”
The complexity of thinking, the simplicity of beholding.
~ Andre Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, p. 150
The Chocolate Hills version of San Carlos City
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of
strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something
infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature— the assurance
that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
~ Rachel Carson
A park in San Carlos City
Childhood is
kneeling & kissing the earth with the smell of grass stuck forever on one's nostrils...
We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass,
and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.
We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and
have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.
It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.
Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.
~Friedrich Nietzsche
With Father
Again, with our wonderful Dad
San Carlos Milling Company, the center of economic activity of San Carlos City
Childhood is
the memory of the sweet heavy smell of molasses
intoxicating the dreamy town during milling season...
Nothing is more memorable than a smell.
One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting,
yet conjure up a childhood summer...
~ Diane Ackerman
Best Grandparents in the World
The one & only Mother in the World
Sunday afternoon with Lola
As a Substitute of the Real Princess in Distress,
A San Carlos City Princess Story
I believe that everyone is the keeper of a dream - and by tuning into one another's secret hopes, we can become better friends, better partners, better parents, and better lovers.
~Ophrah Winfrey
Youngest Sister Karen & Brother-in-Law Maxie
Sister Sandy & Brother-in-Law Marlon
Sandy & Marlon's Family: one big happy facesFlowers anyone?
amidst the hustle & bustle of the small city
The old San Carlos City Bandstand
La Fortuna's nature sanctuary
A picture perfect view of childhood's window in San Carlos City
Childhood is
running around freely tromping on a neat green carpet of sugarcane fields
When you're green you're growing,
and when you're ripe you start to rot.
~Ray Kroc
Train in San Carlos, a nostalgic sound & sight
Childhood is
punctuated by the familiar 'tooting' of the busy hauling trains traversing
A Burning Sugarcane Field in San Carlos
Childhood is
So, like a forgotten fire,
a childhood can always flare up again within us.
~Gaston Bachelard
The San Carlos Borromeo Parish Church, San Carlos City
Childhood is
devotion to one's adored 'childhood saints'
in simple purity, innocence, peace, joy, faith & obedience...
The dutifulness of children is the foundation of all virtues.
- Cicero
Augustinian Sisters of Colegio de Sta. Rita, San Carlos City,
an all girl's school & ArtsyGutsy's High School Alma Mater
Childhood is
a shy, conformist & obedient little girl...
Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
- Bible, Proverbs
(The Family with the 6 Siblings...2 more coming up!)
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family”
~Anthony Brandt
“When I was a child there were many witches, and they bewitched both cattle and men, especially children”
~ Martin Luther
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing Material place."
~ Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"
“The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age.
The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remaining
over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves”
~Tors
“The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends
and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.”
~ Bill Cosby
“... time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and
future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events
are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of
supernormal or extra-sensory perception, and glimpse of something
that happened long ago in our linear time.”
-~ Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues, 1981
“When you finally go back to your old hometown,
you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood”
~Sam Ewing
Sipaway Island is geographically known as Refugio Island.
A favorite rendezvous of local and foreign guests.
It has beautiful century-old Balete tree,
white sand beach resorts and natural reefs for snorkeling and scuba diving.
“Because we don't think about future generations,
they will never forget us.”
~ Henrik Tikkanen
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862
Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~Pablo Picasso
“Arguably, no artist grows up:
If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.”
~ Ned Rorem
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.
~Robert Fulghum
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves,
and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
~Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
Children have neither past nor future;
they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
~Jean de la Bruyere
He who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead;
his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein
cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with
little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary
ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly
with the novice”.
~ Libery Hyde Bailey
La Fortuna Nature and Wildlife Lagoon is a ten-hectare paradise with man-made lagoon. It beckons nature enthusiast to explore this peaceful haven.
(People's Park, San Carlos City)
"The charm, one might say, the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
-- Elizabeth Bowen
“ A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful,
full of wonder and excitement.
It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision,
that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring,
is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”
~ Rachel Carson
St. Theresa's College (STC-Cebu), an academic all-girls Catholic institution
where ArtsyGutsy obtained her Bachelor of Arts, and
her strong training not only in social graces but also in social consciousness...
STC-Cebu's Mission
Participating in God's mission, St. Theresa's College, Cebu, conscious of present-day realities, commits itself to education that creates a culture of goodness, excellence, empowerment and equality, thus, nurturing young women to become transformational leaders in the service of gathering all in God's heart. History Patron Saint
Teresa de Avila, the first woman doctor of the Church, is the patron saint of St. Theresa’s College. Her life and writings are eloquent proofs of the courage, wisdom and virtue which the institution desires to achieve in her students.
STC's Official Seal
The official seal of St. Theresa's College is a round white shield dominated by the Latin cross, the base which spreads out like two wings encompassing its whole width. The cross stands for the Catholic Church whose doctrines, ideals, and principles permeate the school educational program of the Institution. The three stars stand for the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. The inscription around the shield “VIRTUTE, SCIENTIA, ARTIBUS FLOREAT”, expresses the wish that under the aegis of Catholic education, virtue, science, and art may flourish in St. Theresa's College.
Breathe. Let go.
And remind yourself that this very moment
is the only one you know you have for sure.
~ Oprah Winfrey
still in progress...
(all pictures featured here are taken from all the places cited above)
1 comment:
Very nice blog.
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