On Distant Shores
I write stories and essays rooted in history, travel, and lived experience. Much of my work explores places before they were named, mapped, or explained, and the quiet pressures that shape people long before events do.
Recent posts
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Beyond Monogamy and Myth
Author’s Introduction: Why This Question Refuses to Go Away Few subjects sit as uncomfortably at the intersection of biology, culture, morality, and identity as sexuality. It is where instinct meets narrative, where private desire collides with public expectation. We are told, often with great certainty, what is “natural,” what is “healthy,” what is “normal.” And yet, for something supposedly so s…
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Two Worlds Colliding · Part 4 · Two Ways of Hearing the World
Author’s Notes: This episode listens rather than moves. It sets belief beside belief and lets them fail to coincide. Words do not carry the same weight in every world. Some bind. Some observe. Some pierce. When translation assumes equivalence, meaning becomes asymmetric, and the wound opens quietly. The babaylan did not speak first. The babaylan’s authority was not announced. It accumulated. Peopl…
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Rethinking the Primitive
Author’s Note: This essay arose from a long-standing discomfort with the term “primitive”. It is a term that says more about the observer than the observed. My first encounter with Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics gave that discomfort intellectual grounding. Shortly after, time spent among the Mentawai people of Siberut gave it flesh, laughter, and memory. What follows is not nostalgia, nor a…
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Two Worlds Colliding · Part 5 · Protection and Its Price
Author’s Note: This episode turns on an old confusion: protection offered as generosity, and generosity framed as obligation. By now, land is no longer a revelation. The ships have already touched shore, already taken in water, already learned the basic grammar of these islands. What changes here is not geography, but consequence. Sugbo is the first place that answers back with power. What looks l…
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Two Worlds Colliding · Part 3 · What Alliance Means
Author’s Notes: This episode clarifies the grammar of Sugbo. Alliance here is not sentiment, nor oath. It is calibration. Trade precedes trust. Hospitality precedes obligation. Nothing is given without being counted, and nothing is refused outright if delay can do the work instead. What looks generous is precise. What looks open is bounded. Sugbo did not rush. Rush belonged to those who needed an…
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Two Worlds Colliding · Part 2 · Strangers Who Carry Thunder
Author’s Notes: This episode shifts the lens away from the island and toward the men approaching it. The fleet does not arrive violently. It arrives confidently. Meaning, in their minds, is portable. It can be carried across water, translated, and applied. The misunderstanding that closes this episode is not dramatic, and that is its danger. Nothing breaks. Nothing is refused. Something simply fa…
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Dante Alighieri: The Poet Who Walked Through Hell to Find Heaven
Jaap Verbeke Author’s Note: Few writers have explored the human condition with such depth and clarity as Dante Alighieri. Exiled from his homeland and haunted by the death of the woman he loved, he turned his suffering into one of the most enduring works ever written. The Divine Comedy is not only a journey through the afterlife; it is a journey through the soul, through loss, pride, hope, and the…
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James Brooke: The Adventurer Who Became the White Rajah of Sarawak
Author’s Note: “A man may shape his own destiny, but he must first have the courage to set sail.” - Anonymous In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire’s reach stretched across oceans and the map of Southeast Asia was still a patchwork of sultanates, tribal territories, and pirate-haunted seas, one man carved out a kingdom of his own. James Brooke, an Englishman born …
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Two Worlds Colliding · Part 1 · The Shore Before Names
Author’s Notes: Before ships carried flags and crosses, before maps pinned names onto water and shore, there were places that answered only to tide, reef, and memory. The island of Mactan, or as it was called back then, Mangatang, was one of them. Positioned opposite Sugbo, present-day Cebu, is where this story begins. Here, power did not announce itself. It revealed itself slowly, through silence…
