The year announced itself with fire in the sky. Booked into a hotel rooftop for New Year's Eve, the city spread below in a canvas of light and smoke — the fireworks were less a celebration than a declaration. January had barely begun and already it felt consequential.
Days later came the Black Nazarene procession in Quiapo — that ancient, sweat-soaked, barefoot act of devotion that no photograph fully captures, though the Leica tried. The sheer press of faith, a million bodies moving as one slow tide down Quezon Boulevard, puts private ambitions in their proper proportion.
The social rhythms were equally rich. Engineers met at the UP Lantern Parade the previous December came together over wine and steak — the kind of gathering where conversation runs long past the last pour. Thursday nights found a favourite table at JM Manukan, where a live acoustic band made the week's work feel like a reasonable price for evenings like these.
Faith moved on foot in Quiapo. Later it moved by plane and van through mountain roads to Cagayan, then by grace to Tabuk — places that remind you why the journey matters more than the destination.
The Cagayan pilgrimage to Our Lady of Piat was the month's crowning act — a journey north into the cordillera, with a side venture into Tabuk, Kalinga Apayao. Mountains, river valleys, the kind of air that clears the mind. The camera roll from that trip alone could fill a gallery wall.
January closed with an Ace Compton reunion in Pasig — intimate, warm, the particular pleasure of old friendships that pick up without effort — and the hosting of a visiting American relative at the Manila Pen, where afternoon light through tall windows makes everything feel properly civilised.
February — momentum builds
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February opened with the Manaoag pilgrimage, the second act of a devotional triptych that would define the quarter's spiritual undertow. Our Lady of Manaoag in Pangasinan: the cool stone floors, the smell of candle wax, the quietly ferocious faith of the people kneeling beside you.
Then the quarter went national. Cagayan de Oro received a visit — Maria Cristina Falls in full roar, the Del Monte pineapple farms of Bukidnon unrolling in geometric green rows, and the Trappist Monastery at Malaybalay offering the kind of silence that cities owe you and never deliver. Night cocktails on a CDO hotel rooftop rounded the southern chapter well.
Back in Luzon, the work and the culture wove together: Mexico, Pampanga — colonial churches and local cuisine in the same afternoon. Binondo food trip, that annual reminder that the oldest Chinatown in the world still sets the standard. A Bulacan stations of the cross. Project work drawing threads through Tarlac and Bulacan. A Shangrila birthday bash for a relative. The Dulaang UP season — plays watched, artists interviewed, reviews filed.
Over thirty Catholic churches visited across three island groups. Not tourism. Something closer to listening — each nave a different frequency, each altar a different answer to the same question.
The quarter also carried the particular pleasure of a job mentor reunion at a Shangrila hotel — the continuity of professional kinship across years. A Sisa film viewing. Luncheons scattered across Makati's business district, where the food is reliably good and the conversation reliably sharper.
Tokyo — and the gear upgrades
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The Tokyo trip deserves its own paragraph. The city was as it always is — disciplined, beautiful, quietly astonishing — and it also became a hardware expedition. A Fujitsu laptop, featherlight, the kind of machine that makes you want to write more. An android 15 edition. And the Insta360 X2 brought to use, its spherical frame capturing angles that the Leica and Fujifilm leave to the imagination. The Dell Latitude 5591 upgrade completed the arsenal back home.
The feeling of it all
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There is a quality to a quarter like this that resists simple summary. It was full — genuinely, not performatively full. Faith and food and friendship. Mountains and monasteries and Manila rooftops. Old colleagues and new cities. The horoscope said obstacles would lift, and whether by prophecy or by will, the calendar seemed to conspire in agreement.
The camera was rarely put down. The Leica caught the faces. The Fujifilm caught the light. The Insta360 caught the everything-at-once moments that memory tends to flatten. When these three months are assembled into an album, it will be a thick one.
What the photographs cannot hold is the feeling of a life moving forward on multiple fronts simultaneously — spiritually, professionally, socially — without any of those fronts demanding the sacrifice of the others. That balance, when it appears, is the real milestone.
Looking ahead — Q2 2026
If Q1 was the clearing, Q2 is the building. The Tarlac and Bulacan projects continue; momentum on those fronts should convert into visible deliverables by mid-year. The church visits across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao have built a kind of devotional atlas — there are parishes still unvisited, routes still unwalked.
The new gear — laptop, phone, cameras, apparel, water flasks, bags, luggage — awaits its proper field deployment. A quarter this well-documented deserves careful editing; the archive from Q1 alone is a project in itself. And the social calendar, once seeded, tends to compound: the engineers, the mentors, the theatre crowd, the pilgrimage companions, relatives, lost friends — these connections will find new occasions.
The horoscope promised a year like no other. Q1 made the case convincingly. Q2 has every reason to continue the argument.
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