Umán 024 — January 2025

In the middle of January, my partner and I traveled to Tagaytay for a three-day retreat. During that retreat, I was able to look back at 2024, celebrate its highlights, and write a few intentions for 2025. This reflection led me to publish my 2024 annual review, the eleventh since I started my website in 2014. In that retreat, it became clear to me that my most important goal for 2025 is to write a manuscript for the book about walking Los Baños, which has been in my mind since 2023 and which, until today, has never really found a concrete form. The progress I’ve made in integrating my religious past with the creative, inquiring, free, and liberative spirituality I’m exploring at the present helped me make more sense of the direction of this project, and I feel like I’ve never been more prepared and confident to take it on. The reason why the project never took off in 2023 was because I just wasn’t ready.

To move toward the direction of writing a manuscript, I knew I had to perform a second week-long walk of Los Baños. The photos and realizations that would come from this rewalk, I hoped, would add to the existing materials for the manuscript. I’m glad to report that that rewalk, which I called but Overall is beyond me has happened from January 25 to 31, and its archives can now be accessed here. The rewalk made me realize that slower and shorter walks with a pilgrimage nature work better for my taste and the general trajectory of the book project. Slower and shorter walks are quieter, easier to perform and document, and focus more on the experience rather than the narrative that comes out of the walk. While I still think the anthropological nature of my first weeklong walk of Los Baños ( Roots x Gravel) is important and useful for my book project, having an alternative walking experience of the same place helps. I now have two walk experiences to compare to each other that would help me write the book better and design future walks. In the middle of bOibm, I hopped on a two-hour call with a friend who generously offered her expertise in biography and photography work to conduct a full review of my 33 years of life (I’m turning 33 on February 9!). We’re hoping that this project could help me better write the book, among other possible benefits. This project will take a significant part of my February, and I’m very excited to start.

In other writing-related news, I’ve decided to separate my website from my talahardin (garden of notes). My main website is still at vinceimbat.com. However, my talahardin is now located at a subdomain talahardin.vinceimbat.com. A main motivation for the decision is to have more freedom in the general design and feel of my website, one that isn’t easily achieved using Quartz, the software that I use to host my public notes.

Still writing-related, my friend and UPLB professor Ivan Labayne, whose book Beckoning Baguio was one of the most important books I read last year, has very kindly included my and Jesa Suganob’s zine so we must meet apart in the required reading materials of his new course offering “Uncreative Writing.” Another friend, Amanda Dela Cruz, who teaches creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University, has also added my hybrid poetry collection and essay Mapa ng Los Baños Patungo Sa’yo to the course materials of a creative nonfiction (CNF) subject she’s teaching. The reason I’m sharing this is that as a writer who often works solitarily on my walks and my desks, it isn’t always clear how my words could find practical use in the real world or someone else’s life. To know that they will be read by students, at least for this semester, is something worth celebrating. Both of Amanda and Ivan’s courses delve into critical and alternative approaches to literature—a subject and process that has helped me tremendously in and complements my nonconventional spiritual point of view. So to have my works included in attempts to encourage more conversation in this discourse is something I’m very excited about.

I end this issue of Uman with a pitch. My friend Andrew James Brown is leading one of the inaugural events offered by the newly started Free Religion Institute of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF). The first session, which he facilitated on January 29, 2025, and which I was fortunate to attend, delved into the life and ideas of Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988), an important Japanese religious thinker that I’ve mentioned several times in this website. Imaoka articulated tentative statements about what he called jiyū shūkyō, a creative, inquiring, free, and liberative spirituality, which I’ve been exploring in my walks, photography, and writing. The second session, which will delve into Imaoka’s ideas on holding spaces for people who resonate with and are interested in practicing jiyū shūkyō, will be held on February 26, 2025, via Zoom. If any of these interests you, please check this page for the time, Zoom links, and other related information.