Blue and black are kind colors

Nameless-Beach-Somewhere-In-San-Antonio-Zambales

The sand in Zambales has always been black. The only time that the beaches had been washed white was in 1991, when Mt. Pinatubo awoke. Further inland however, there is sand instead of soil, and this sand is white as ash. The land is white with the memory of Pinatubo wherever the sea could not reach.

Before the surfing boom, everyone went into the water with their clothes on. Children learned how to walk and how to swim almost at the same time, and in the same vicinity, and that there were two kinds of blue: the blue of the sky, and the blue of the water.

My fondest memory of Zambales is of the sea: as a child, falling asleep dreaming of the movement and murmur of waves, and that if you were to lay still enough, you could feel the sea beween your fingers. People choose their memories of the sea, over the beautiful, giant flower of a cloud, and the mad descent of ash and rain and terror. It's because the sea always changes back, they explain, when everything else does not, and would not, the sea always will.

Undas Report: Panag-Apoy Festival 2013

Dusk begins early on November 1, the famous Sagada sunset neglected as locals light pyres for their dead.

 
     "It's hell on Earth," locals like to joke, my host's 12 year old nephew Osong among them. As early as finishing lunch, the Isagada head on to church, submitting the names of their deceased to a list, later to be read aloud before the Panag-apoy (to light a fire). The reading of names take hours, readers replacing one another, a calm, monotonous drone. People stack pinewood atop graves and may choose to light them early. 5pm: stray lines of smoke; 5:15pm: isolated bursts of flame; 5:30pm: the air turns grey, then black; 5:45pm: Inferno.
    "It's a specific kind of Pine," says Blue, a man I met on the bus, and I can't remember if he said Saeng or Saleng, only that the sap catches flame easily. Back at home, we are told, "agtukkeltayo," set up [candles]. Nobody uses candles in Sagada for that, I am told.

    At some point, the padi (priest) comes to bless the graves, after which the people put out the flames and return home for dinner, saying that the dead can join them if they wanted to.