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The Redbud Hyphen // Surrendering to Possibility (August 2025)
The Redbud Hyphen // The Glow of Connection (January 2025)
The Redbud Hyphen // Believing (December 2024)
The Redbud Hyphen // Ghosts of Summer (June 2024)
Awake Our Hearts // Remembering Life (September 2023)
(in)courage // The Gift of a Grilled Cheese (June 2023)
Posts
learning to love
Twenty-some years ago, I made an inspiration scrapbook filled with quotes and pictures cut out of magazines. It was also home to my first bucket list. On that list at number 13 was to fall deeply in love. I remember adding that to the list in part because of a quote...
words of hope
Last year around this time, I had COVID-19. Thankfully, I did not require hospitalization, but for a week my body burned with high fevers and froze with chills. I experienced weakness, lethargy, and shortness of breath. I lost my sense of taste and smell. Sleep seemed...
thankful for our stories
Thanksgiving Day is the only day of the year that my mom shared her sacred kitchen with my dad. One of my favorite memories is waking up to the smell of turkey roasting in the oven, and the sound of the radio as people called into the Turkey Hotline. Weeks before the...
seeing our connections
We visited the Philippines for the summer every five years starting when I was three years old. I didn’t have any cousins in the U.S. (until about age 10), while I had dozens of cousins in the Philippines. To give you an idea, my mom’s two sisters had 20 children...
traveling through doubt
Along with singing songs like “I Have Two Hands,” and teaching me colors and how to count, when I was little my mom would ask me, “Where is God?” I would look at her expectantly awaiting the answer. She would say, “He’s here!” pointing to her heart... “There!”...
being a bridge
In the summer of 2020, as we sat in quarantine with COVID uncertainty at its height, like many of you, I watched the video of George Floyd’s murder and witnessed the protests that broke open the conversation about racism in a way that I have never seen before. My...
saints and souls
Pre-Covid my brothers and I alternated taking my mom to church on Sunday. The cemetery where my dad has been buried for eight years is on the drive home. After mass, my mom likes to stop there, clean off his gravestone, change the flowers, and greet him. “Hello...
magic in the mix
Two new books sit on my nightstand. They cover very different topics - one faith, one interior design - yet they resonate with me for a similar reason. Both authors talk about how their cross-cultural upbringings have influenced their life and work. When...
island spirit
Even though I’m half-Filipina and the Philippines is a nation made up of over 7,000 islands, I was born and raised in Indiana, a landlocked state that is 629 miles from the nearest ocean. During the pandemic, on a rare night out in the suburbs of Indianapolis, I...
“We do not write in order to be understood;
we write in order to understand.”
– C.S. Lewis