Outskirts Press, INC.

The essays in this book are mostly about the political and social malaise in the Philippines, the author's county, the plight of many Filipinos who are forced to look for greener pastures in other countries and the author's spiritual struggles in a search for meaning in our worldly existence which he hopes will find echoes in the hearts of other people.

Most of the 33 essays, largely written in literary prose, are haunting, starting with ”Remembering Ginablan,” his recollection of a small farming village in Romblon where he grew up. Remembering, he says, was “like walking into a time machine where I found myself retracing faded footprints of a lost past,” The book bares his deep-seated disdain for the local politicians he blames for the country’s tight economic situation that forced millions of Filipinos to look for greener pastures in foreign lands.

He says that the “thievery” of politicians back home and their endless bickering to stay in power have given many Filipinos a sense of hopelessness. “The tragedy that befalls our country is that our politicians, who are supposed to lead us in solving our problems, have become our biggest problem,” he writes in his essay, "The Tragedy that Befalls Us."

He takes a dig at the government for its empty platitude for the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as modern-day heroes for their remittances that have been propping up the ailing economy. “I’m an OFW but I’m not a hero. I did not come here out of my sense of patriotism, but as a husband and a father who wants to see a new dawn for my family, no matter if that dawn unfolds in another country,” he says in “Strangers in Our Own Country.”

 “I have come to terms with reality. Like millions of other Filipinos who sought greener pastures in foreign lands, I have hitched the family wagon to a caravan of Filipino migrant workers who have become strangers in our own country.”

Bits and pieces in the book open windows to a past when he “strayed to atheism” after enrolling in anthropology, which taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, and later went back to the Faith - after he felt a lingering “sense of emptiness” deep within him. That experience gave him the material to write the main essay, “The Gypsy Soul." in which he writes,"In my wanderings ... I have come to believe that man has a soul longing for home. The soul keeps on driving us in search for meaning in our lives … probably to remind us that life is empty without Him.”

 He followed it up in “Pilgrims to the Life Beyond.” “There is an empty space in our being that we may never understand, much less manage, if we do not pause for a while to take a closer look at life until we realize that we are not pursuing life itself but its palavers, until we realize that we are not lost gypsies but homing pilgrims whose dreams ought to be lofty enough to rise beyond our graves.”

His fascination with science leads him to write "Love in the Age of Neuroscience" in which he pokes fun at the findings of neuroscience that emotion is not an activity of the heart but neural firings in the brain. "In the age of neuroscience," he says, "can we still say, I love you from the bottom of my heart?"