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Raine

@rainenakpil

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Every side quest deserves the right gear 🏔️🧡

Thank you, @salomonph! 🌞

#salomon by @rainenakpil

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3 days ago

I do not love anyone unconditionally, and also, I am a liar.

I lie by omission. My falsehoods have never left my teeth — the gaps between them closed when I was eight. Equivocations are calcified into who I am. They live in withheld sentences, expurgated opinions, in the indiscernible hesitation before I can even say, this hurt me. They are vestiges: mementos of every moment I chose to cut myself into pieces that were more digestible; of every moment I chose to sand down the sharp corners of veracity, lie, and call myself kind. They have long since fossilised into temperament.

The world knows a remarkable amount of me. But I don’t think it knows anything about me.

That is why I do not trust the declaration of unconditional love. It is a vow made before the evidence has arrived. “Nothing you could become would change how I feel about you” is a beautiful sentiment, but that is a verdict delivered before testimony. It assumes love is already complete — that knowing more could neither diminish nor deepen it.

How can I promise permanence before I have finished the introduction? I do not want to pledge myself to a silhouette, filling in missing information with optimism, imagination. That is not love. That is fiction.

So I will not love anyone unconditionally. I will love radically. I will love knowing all this and be prepared to discover more. I will arrive with an open mind, an open hand, and an open heart.

I will arrive at affection after the ruins have been unearthed instead of promulgating it before the ground has even been broken.

I will keep returning to the site with better questions and less certainty than I had in April. I will keep risking it all for the truth. And if, after every layer has been stripped away, in an act of epistemic violence and radical love, I find that my affection has become denser, stranger, and more articulate than it is today,

it will not be because my love was ever unconditional.

Unconditional love asks too little of me. Radical love demands observation. It asks you to show me the wound so I can show you mine too. This mercy is all we have; and truth, no matter how ugly, is the most powerful argument in love’s favour. by @rainenakpil

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7 days ago

All the way up to Everest Base Camp, you can buy twenty-four hours of satellite WiFi for about ten dollars.

Thousands of kilometres from home, I kept those small paper vouchers inside my pocket, scratching away their silver strips with a ₱5 coin I had carried from the Philippines, just so I could speak to someone every day. Someone worth remembering.

What did you eat?
Are you warm enough?
How was the road trip with the boys?
Did you make it back safely?

The conversations were, most days, utterly unremarkable. Nothing that would survive in a novel; but everything that sustains a life.

I think many of us misunderstand what love can and does look like in its many, many forms. We search for swells while overlooking the discipline of remaining interested in another person’s ordinary Sunday, because the political economy of affection seems to reward a different kind of person: someone who never needs too much, never asks what anything meant, never expects to be chosen twice. Someone infinitely available, infinitely replaceable. Someone who can exit without leaving an absence.

“You don’t owe anyone anything” is not a sustainable philosophy for life, or for love, because we do owe each other. A lot, actually. The obstreperous generosity of allowing our lives to become entangled enough that we learn to give and receive rather than take and be taken from. Presence that refuses to ration itself in hopes of appearing valuable.

English hides a beautiful secret in its grammar. We say, “I wish that were true.” Not was. Were.

Were belongs to the irrealis subjunctive. The mood reserved for imagined worlds and realities that have not yet come to pass. Was belongs to the past indicative, content only to describe what already is.

Love lives in the irrealis: not only inhabiting the world as we found it, but conjugating the one we are willing into existence together. And I cannot imagine a greater expression of being human than this.

Margins full of annotations.
The turning of the tide.
Flowers in flight.
Hopeless, summer nights.

The oldest laws of the universe have always been the most gentle. The moon has never touched the sea, and still, she moves it. taken in Gokyo Himalayas by @rainenakpil

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18 days ago

mini vlog from Everest Base Camp via Gokyo Valley Day 5 :) taken in Everest Base Camp 5364M by @rainenakpil

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a month ago

Finally got to distill a small sliver of the Everest Base Camp Trek via Gokyo Valley experience into words — a task that felt, at times, inconceivable. This piece is featured as the cover story of @malaya_businessinsight’s June 13-14 Weekender issue.

Language has always been my chosen vocation. My discipline, my devotion, my nearest approximation of faith. It is the impedimenta through which I have made sense of the universe and my place within it. Yet even language, for all its precision and permeability, proved inadequate before the Himalayas. There are immensities that resist transcription; certain truths that lose altitude the moment they are named. To define is to limit.

What I wrote is, at best, a translation of a translation of a translation, like scripture through the centuries — an impalpable resounding of gaunt air, glacial lakes, prayer flags, tender limbs, and impossible joy.

So you’ll just have to trust me when I say I came home with fewer answers, but better questions.

I hope my writing carries enough of the feeling. I hope that one day, whether you find yourself wandering through Nepal, along the ridgelines of our own radiant mountains, beneath the weight of a daunting summit push, or simply under the vast and democratic blue of the sky, on an ordinary afternoon, you’ll encounter that feeling yourself — how beautiful it is to belong to something larger.

My deepest gratitude, always, to my editor @dafortdimension, for believing in this story and helping shepherd it into the world.

Despite being a few days late — a salute to my beloved home, the country that taught me to love mountains in the first place.

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

“I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” — Psalm 121:1–2

You can check out the full story here: https://malaya.com.ph/weekender/independence-5364-meters-above-sea-level/

🩵 taken in Everest Base Camp 5364M by @rainenakpil

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a month ago

I’m scared that nothing will change my life. I’m scared that I could traverse entire continents in search of transformation and still arrive just as myself. That even a month in the Himalayas, with their glacial intensities and thin sacred air, could leave untouched the sediment in my chest. That a pilgrimage stretching between Kyoto and Tokyo, all lantern-light and cedar hush, might only teach my feet endurance, and fail to rearrange whatever is dimming within me. That — hypothetically — even three months in the quiet austerity of a monastery in Sri Lanka could not cauterise the ache of private winters inside my mind.

And perhaps what terrifies me most is not waiting, but the possibility that I have mistaken walking forward for reclamation. That I keep searching for some cataclysmic geography to redeem me, when change may be far more ordinary, far more vegetal than volcanic. Slow as lichen. Tidal as sap.

Still, that evening, the world felt merciful. Briefly and beautifully.

The horizon unfurled itself in contused gold and indigo. My best friend was smiling beside me. The air hung warm and heavy against our skin, fragrant with mango sago and the sweetness of summer dusk, filigreed through with laughter that rose effortlessly into the microclimate. And later, almost shyly, the stars emerged one by one.

Maybe that is what I am trying to come to terms with: change is not always an avalanche. Sometimes it is merely the continued willingness to remain beneath the sky long enough to witness it bleeding. Blue, then orange. Pink, then purple. Then kind.

“I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” (Genesis 9:13)

The world will continue offering us small resurrections anyway. The warmth of evening air. The sweetness of fruit. The face of someone we love, illuminated beneath a bruised and holy sky. taken in Mt. Mabilog by @rainenakpil

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2 months ago

Couldn’t catch my breath in Manila, but I found it on top of the world :) taken in Everest Base Camp 5364M by @rainenakpil

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3 months ago

When I write, I hear my father’s voice asking:
What does this offer your reader?

It arrests anything ornamental. I glance at the Chantilly lace trimming my sentences and decide I can do without it. I unspool the parts of me that want to sound impressive — hurt lacquered into philosophy, grief made toothsome with enameled smoothness, perfectly sterile. What remains is less agreeable: half-formed thoughts, annotations scribbled mid-shower, footnotes that don’t form a full story yet.

There is, in the traditional sense, little to admire about me. No clean arc, no triumphant cadence. I am not writing from the finish line — I never have. I am 8 days into a 17-day expedition, already weary of toast. I am writing from the middle of things — from the exact contour where I want to stop; go home; hug Michelle.

A few months ago, I could not do this. Legs taut, the indignity of stopping before anything had begun. There was seduction in nihilism, in saying there is no point — because hope is disorderly, and if things do come to fruition, then I am implicated. Then I must show up. Then I must endure the precarious weight of possibility, of happiness.

There is no glory in that version of the story. And yet it is the only one I trust. It is the only reason this one exists.

We are obsessed with precedence — being first, being the narrative that survives and gets told because it outruns the others, because it is sleeker, more articulate, with longer eyelashes and bigger lips.

But comparison is a rigged apparatus. It pairs the incommensurable and calls it fair. My punctured butterfly wings calibrated against your bruised bat wings — homologous, analogous, it doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same because it asks us to distrust the scale by which we might otherwise come to understand ourselves.

I want to refuse this skeleton. I want to claim the absurdly specific, the privately momentous titles that collapse under public scrutiny but hold, with exactness, in the body that earned them:
the first from my street.

Because this is not a lesser distinction. It is precise.

Everything mediocre, everything ostensibly forgettable about me is mine, and is enough to be named. taken in Himalayas, Nepal by @rainenakpil

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3 months ago

We up (4000m)

#deuterph
#takingcomforttoextremes taken in Mt. Everest Region by @rainenakpil

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3 months ago

December 2024, I said yes to something that didn’t care if I was ready. The trek to Everest Base Camp starts tomorrow.

Deuter has my back. Carrying the Futura Air Trek 45+10 SL Pack and AC Lite 21 SL.
@deuter_ph
#takingcomforttoextremes
#deuterph taken in Kathmandu, Nepal by @rainenakpil

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3 months ago

My @upmountaineers_official batch likes to joke that one of us is so ill-fated she drags the rain behind her,
as if the sky has memorised her name and follows.

My first climb unraveled into a storm on descent,
the mountain rinsing us of whatever conviction we thought we had brought.
The second: a dawn of canvas shuddering,
wind hammering our tents like a language we had not yet learned to hear,
and again, we went down soaked and small.
At the farm, the earth gave way— trucks swallowed by mud made patient by a relentless downpour.
Even the test runs— slick moss underfoot,
each step an obstinate negotiation with gravity.

I used to lift my face to the clouds like an accusation.
Why now? Why me?
As if the sky were a thing that could be reasoned with,
and timing was a kindness owed.

But then the light arrives,
not benign, but insistent.
It leans its full weight against my back,
dries the trail into dust, loosens the soil until it forgets how to hold me—
and I find myself asking the rain, almost tenderly,
where have you gone?

It turns out there is no benevolent arrangement of weather.
Only our endless apprenticeship to what is withheld.
We crave the missing element with a devotion that borders on prayer;
a farmer kneeling into drought, kissing the ground,
palms open to an empyrean that has not answered in months.

So maybe nothing is mistimed.
Maybe we are the ones who insist on arriving early or late.
To move anyway is not certainty— it is consent.
A reluctant agreement to proceed without the guarantee we keep bargaining for,
because learning deepens in the intervals between seasons.

“There are some things you cannot be sure of. You must take a chance. If you wait for perfect weather, you will never plant your seeds. If you are afraid that every cloud will bring rain, you will never harvest your crops.” (Ecclesiastes 11:4)

So I am learning— slowly, honestly—
to walk into whatever forecast is given,
to plant with rain in mind and without it,
to carry both storm and aridness
as if they were never opposites,
only different ways the world asks to be trusted.

It asks nothing of me— except that I endure long enough to see it.
and the climb has always been worth it. taken in Mt. Mabilog by @rainenakpil

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4 months ago

Lian Trail Run 2026 🌞
@wildspaces.ph

This run carries more than just distance— it carries the hands that steadied me along the way. To @theprojectsne, @kyle.drogo, @cristellecorpuz — thank you!!! More than orgmates, they were my anchors throughout my application journey to @upmountaineers_official. They held me to a standard I didn’t know how to meet yet, and stayed anyway while I grew into it.

From my first 6.6km, to a 10km I never thought I could hold (with Shelby the dog keeping me honest as my unexpected pacer haha), to finally making cutoff on my 12km induction trail run— they showed me the things that are possible if your “why” burns brighter than your doubt. More importantly, they showed me that consistency compounds— how even on the days I’d curse my calves and shins for falling short, something worthwhile was still being developed.

From building, to breaking, to rebuilding again— through every deload, every peak, and every taper, Kyle and CC reshaped me from someone who couldn’t run 200 metres without losing her breath into someone who said “YES!” to her first trail race… and somehow loved every step of it. Yes, even the surprise kilometre. 😆

They also brought @lecka.ph into my life— fuel that feels less like obligation and more like something I look forward to (the Coffee Cacao gel has my whole heart!)

Now I find myself standing at the edge of new questions:
What’s the next?
Ahon Leg 2?
TBR Marathon?
Cordillera Mountain Ultra?
Hyrox Southeast Asia?

There’s a long way to go before I even dare to call myself an athlete.
But if I am anything now, I hope I am proof of concept that the Project SNE’s insistence on the “full send” mindset truly changes people for the better.

And more than that,
thank you for showing me that strength isn’t just something we train for and being “ready” isn’t so much a feeling as it is a decision—
it’s something we’re lucky to be able to choose, again and again, in the way we live and the way we endure.

See you at the next start line! 🩵 taken in Lian, Batangas by @rainenakpil

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4 months ago