Love is a Responsibility.

Last night, I watched Atom Araullo's Philippine Seas documentary and I felt a mix of delight and heartbreak. Delight - that our country is blessed with marine biodiversity and heartbreak - that people failed to take care of them. Now, travel is a must have thing. We have lots of places to check in our bucketlist. Now, food is a must try thing. We have lots of restaurants and hidden gems that we must visit, lots of bookmarked recipes we need to cook. Food and travel. A millenial's lifestyle.

We often describe ourselves or post these words to social media pages - "I love food", "YOLO - Travel", "Foodgasm", "Travel is the best learning experience". We love foods. We love travel. But then our love is a selfish type. Our love only fills our need, our greed, our boredom and at the other side of the rainbow, we irresponsibly eat and travel. We eat greedily without knowing bees are losing their habitats, seafoods are caught in an unimaginable amount sometimes illegally, livestocks leave tons of carbon footprints. All of these just to satisfy our hunger. We travel and sees the the world has to offer but we fail to reciprocate and offer the world our mind to preserve its beauty. We just travel. Take pictures of it. Post it to social media, felt happy, blessed. And then we never took notice of the garbage we dispose and where they go, the carbon footprints we produce by using cars, fuels, etc.   

We failed to take responsibility to our love. We take away the beauty of this world and never offered it our mind to preserve it. Let us be reminded that we are only a part of this world. We may be the smartest race to have evolved but great power comes with great responsibility. Let us never forget that we are a community and it is our responsibility to take care of nature. Just like how a car enthusiast loves his car - taking care of it day and night, let's love responsibly - dig deeper and know more of nature, eat and travel that balances what is took and what is produced.

Start small.

"Big things often have small beginnings."

One of my end goals in life is to have a small house with a big farm. I have always dreamt of planting vegetables I would cook and imagined eating with a bunch of flowers decorating my table. It was my end goal. I am thinking it will happen sometime in the future and for now, I would just live in a bedspace in Manila, with little greens around me.

One night, I cooked a dish with a green onion on it. With the influence of YouTube, it hit my head that we can put the roots in a jar of water and let it grow. I did it out of whim and few days later, I got home to my province and forget that I put the green onion roots on the water. When I came back after two weeks, I was surprised to see that my green onion was moved to a pot by our landlady and that it has two new green sprouts on it! Gleeful, I took a photo of it (the one above).

What I realized is that we may have big dreams, big aspirations in our mind that we think we can only do in the future because we are not yet capable now. But, we can start small, like my farm, I can start planting little garnish greens (green onions, basil) and invest in what I only have now. The important thing is we started, we began to do something with our dream and little by little it is coming true.