12 | the sowing, tending, and reaping
back from a 2-year hiatus: a mid-october 2023 journal entry, reflections on moving abroad from the philippines to spain, & notes on life's seasons
Hi, you. It’s been a while. Surprisingly, my subscriber base has grown during my two-year hiatus, so if this is the first newsletter you’ve received from me, welcome!
Apart from occasional essays on culture, I write about living a creative life, romanticizing (or scrutinizing) the mundane, ruminations on the human condition, and media that catches my attention.
✦ introduction after a two-year (!) hiatus
After booking a one-way ticket from the Philippines to Spain, finishing my Master’s degree in Barcelona, navigating complex visa procedures as one does, and spending majority of my time offline, I’m back with a clearer headspace and a renewed sense of creating.
By creating, I don’t necessarily mean solely producing content.
But rather, also, creating a life that feels meaningful and rich.
Creating could mean cooking a new recipe you’ve been wanting to try, curating a Pinterest board, piecing together an unlikely outfit and wearing jewelry that makes you feel good, or organizing an idyllic picnic at the park. It could be about making an itinerary for places you’ve been putting off from visiting for too long, revamping your living spaces, or learning new words for a more expansive worldview.
Creation isn’t only about producing something tangible. Apart from photos, written works, and other forms of craft, moments, experiences, and environments are also achieved through creation, nevertheless the fleeting nature of these.
A mood. An ambiance. A life in which personal touches, intentional choices, and deliberate actions are honored and pursued.
What is your intuition telling you to create?
✦ throwback to october 2023: a journal entry written two years ago from barcelona, as a freshly minted master’s student splitting herself into multiple halves
It’s October 2023. I wake up on a mild-tempered Saturday morning in my humble shared apartment in Las Tres Torres, Barcelona. It’s autumn, a season when crunchy multi-colored leaves have fallen on the pavements, and yet, walking through the city’s streets under the glaring sun signals that summer is latching on stubbornly.
Compared to the chillier autumns in Tokyo and Sydney, cities I’ve shed my skin in during transitory week-long stays, the season here is the mildest I’ve yet to experience.
My headspace is brimming with a to-do list that keeps getting outdated by the second: what topic to choose for my thesis, group projects with overlapping timelines, the work I need to accomplish for my clients abroad, catching up with my family back home in Manila—what time am I meeting friends again later?
Speaking of heading out in the evening, will folks even show up on time? If we’re following Spanish time, which is more or less the same as Filipino time (see: no one will crucify you for arriving thirty minutes to an hour late for a hangout), then that means I can take my sweet time cooking and eating dinner past nine, yes?
Which combination of clothes do I wear in this mercurial weather? Do I have to take the ever-unpredictable night buses if I head out at around 11:30 pm, a time that’s considered too early to start partying here in Spain? Meanwhile, I’d already be halfway through my social battery by that time on a Saturday night out in Manila.
What groceries do I need to buy? If the packaging of products are labeled completely in Catalan or Spanish, two languages I have yet to master, which items do I need to translate from English and jot down on my grocery list, in case the supermarket’s signal is too weak and I won’t be able to use my translator app on the spot?
There’s laundry I need to do, readings I need to finish, dust I need to sweep.
I’m still reeling from the first two weeks of university, all its demands, the wealth of information we’re learning, the emotional baggage that one carries while studying sustainability. I’m studying sustainability even though scientists have claimed decades ago that we’re (mostly) doomed if we continue to move at such a glacial pace.
It feels a tad too late to choose this field of study, a tad too idealistic considering the state of this increasingly hyper-consumerist and exploitative society, but it feels like the right thing to do.
Sometimes, you’ve got to do just that: to do what feels right.
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. A change in environment is good. A new way of living is good. While I had predicted feeling discomfort, actually living it and being in a constant state of flux is overwhelming to say the least. The uncertainty of it, the messy and haphazard quality of it—like I’m grasping at straws trying to build a foundation, one that feels too precarious and fragile for someone who likes stability and structure—is immense. I’m not complaining, I’m merely describing.
We keep on keeping on, anyhow.
I wake up late on weekends and don’t beat myself up for it. The sun here rises much later, beckons me to stay in bed longer than usual. I acquiesce. I say yes to attending events when my body wants to rest. I yield to the divine timing of stepping into new situations. We’re all strangers trying to find a connection with each other, aren’t we?
One missed encounter, one chance opportunity, can change the course of your life.
Where Manila’s society is relatively homogenous, one of Barcelona’s defining characteristics is its national diversity. Meeting new people from different cultures has been eye-opening.
Uncomfortable at times, but at most times a joy.
It can be uncomfortable in a way that reminds you how your values and culture are totally unrelatable to another, and vice versa. But largely it’s been a joy, because you’re exposed to people who think and behave differently, and therefore, you realize that the world is so much larger than it is, how life offers so many possibilities you wouldn’t have imagined yourself living.
When meeting new people, I’m most curious to learn how they got here, what fuels them, and how they think. The way their upbringing and environment inform the way they react, speak, and navigate the world. I’m learning so much about myself by learning about them—us human beings, as a collective—and how different we all are yet somehow still the same.
All of us have similar desires regardless of our differences. All of us have differences despite having similar desires.
Two things can exist at once.
I remember a quote I came across that went something like, “each of us is made of bits and parts of other people we have met in our lives.” In a way, that means no one person is ever isolated.
They don’t know it, but they’re changing me, just as I am changing them.
In a Vogue interview, Emma Watson says, “You can’t always be in the reaping stage or harvest stage of life. Life has seasons.”
Lately, it feels like life is telling me to let go and enjoy the present. I consistently wrote in my journal when I arrived in September 2023, but that habit has fallen away.
Living can mean forgetting to write. To allow events to happen without giving them a second life on paper or on screens.
Writing, which has largely been my vice and oftentimes my profession, is an act of retrospection. To piece together what has happened, to articulate memory, to live in imagination. Life here has been so vivid and tangible, a stark cry from my more reclusive self in Manila—I had left in late 2023, a time where folks like myself were still latching onto the paranoia from a post-pandemic life—that it feels too overwhelming to jot down my days in a journal, to live through moments a second time around, because the first time had been more than enough.
Sometimes I forget to write or take pictures, and it’s okay.
I haven’t even touched my beloved film camera.
But let it be known, to my future self and whoever else is reading this, that I am enjoying my time.
✦ notes on taking up space and letting go of perfection
We put ridiculous pressure on ourselves to have our stories perfectly wrapped up before we dare share them, to have learned all the lessons, healed all the wounds, and arrived at some gleaming destination of wisdom before we’re “qualified” to speak our truth.
What if the most powerful stories—the ones that actually change lives—are the ones still being written? The messy, unfinished, gloriously imperfect narratives that say, “I’m still figuring this out, and that’s precisely why it matters”?
—Dale Darly, Mentor for Women With A Story to Share
✦ present day: october 2025
I’ve been living in Barcelona for two years now. I’ve grown so accustomed to saying this that I forget how much of a big deal it is—especially to my younger self in her mid-20s, who had no desire whatsoever to pursue a life abroad. That is, until the pandemic completely changed my viewpoint of the world and made me realize what type of city I’d prefer to spend my 30s in, especially in the event of another pandemic or the rise of climate disasters.
I love Manila with all my heart, but Barcelona has stolen it.
Two things can exist at once.
What I gather from all this is: If a better opportunity presents itself to you, take it. And if it doesn’t present itself to you, get creative and chase multiple pathways towards it. Whether or not you’ll receive the opportunity in the end, at least you’ll have the peace of mind knowing that you tried. You would have grown thicker skin, an expanded mindset, and brandished wings by the end of it, too.
There are things in life that one achieves, many of which are gained through a mix of luck, timing, and hard work—the first two aren’t in our control, so might as well do your best with the third and see where life takes you from there.
✦ moodboard: latching onto a moment, a feeling, a state
“The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri
✧˚ · .
To being in that wonderful state,
Danna
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🕯️ other related posts you might like: my life is my art, on living gently, & coming back home to yourself
This was worth the 2-year wait! Thank you for capturing this season in your life so fearlessly but delicately (two things can exist at once) 🤍
This voice 🤌