through the Jojoscope

In recent memory, I remember clearly crying deeply twice. One was an extraordinary sunset that showed me a world that had fallen to climate change. The other was a recent revelation about the impact of inimitable forces that just are, despite man's kindest intentions. Eerie if connected, in hindsight.

So what a joy it would be, to find your people through this kind of journey. Mine would be fair and kind, frustratedly unsettled by injustice that it becomes a wedge in their heart and a perpetual chip on their shoulder. They believe in trying – not even doing – rather than just thinking, to improve what is. They treat stateroom keepers and heads of state with equal magnanimity; granted of course, the former may be more deserving than the latter. They respect all human beings in whatever form they come, understanding that there are eviler events that have affected their fitness for public consumption. They love children for all their innocence and the hope they bring for all generations before them, and they know that being there for them every step of the way is of utmost, paramount importance. They care for the earth in all its majesty, and would keep oceans and mountains as if they were secret rooms of great privilege inside their home. They may not know all things now, but they never stop seeking knowing new things. They find no greater satisfaction from a Michelin dinner than they do from a friend's failed lasagne where the sheets hadn't been boiled, or even that from a simple fruit from harvest. They celebrate beautiful afternoons with as much fanfare as they would their wedding day. For them time is relative, and that good friends are like islands; once found, one can seek unequivocal refuge in them, no matter what time of day, or century. They accept everything fully, the good and the bad, and they tread as best and as lightly as they can afterwards. Their thoughts, larger than themselves, rumble about worrisomely inside their head, but all you can see on their face is peace.

They are not perfect, but they try to be their best selves and keep at it everyday.

Above all, they know you and all of this, and despite this, they stick around. So, I thank you for that. We are saved seats next to each other, headed for the other side (wherever that is).

Eight dead handsome young men, a runaway Manileña, six lobsters, a totaled motorcycle, five progressively incandescent sunrises and blissful sunset massages, and beer bottles, reef cuts and gashes, stormchaser stories, and heart-pumping swells too many to count.

The Land of Howling Winds is borne on the back of the country, one of the worst- and formerly often-struck by Pacific typhoons. None of the lodging available in this cove are made of stronger stuff than traditional Filipino building materials: bamboo, nipa, and smiling spirits.

Part of life is knowing where to build things, when to start over, and why the [im]permanence of things is. Wabi-sabi has no direct translation in Filipino.

Here you paddle against crests that relentlessly push you back as you try to reach the point where they just begin to form, you cannot stand or the undertow will sweep you off your feet faster than a summer fling, and you cannot be in stasis lest you end up at the shore. For all the stroking and the relentless force of tides and storms that you chose to face and that keep you from your prize, you do your damnedest to stay there, and to wait for the perfect one.

It’s frightening, to look down and see / not see the fathoms under the matchstick that is your board. And its unbelievable power is seen: a slow, then sudden upheaval as the sea breathes.  

And then, you feel it.

It carries with it power to light a hundred homes, and to send humans into a state of oneness with all the good things in life. It can hurt like hell, take lives without regard for the count.

With flesh, you do not know for whom the blood pulses and throbs, that the graze of it on yours is truthful; the grandest trickery of it is you believe it wholly your own, just because you hold on to it, rendering it incapable of being withdrawn, to keep it from where it seeks to be.

But with sunlight, alas you know. Its pinkish-golds can color your palm in hues you never thought possible, it travelled a million miles before your erstwhile encounter with it, and it surely will travel a billion more after you. Know that you can never own nor possess a ray of sunlight when you let it play in your hand and teach you the ways of the universe. Be glad it chose your palm (just one, not both; how tenuous our grasp of such things!) out of 12 billion others, and that it warmed you albeit briefly, truthfully and without restraint, for a ray of sunlight does not know how to keep from being warm.

It happens all the time: in an erstwhile travel on a busy terminal, or some transient place in which to lay a tired body at night, or at this instance, after the sun had set on a pretty blue and white boat, that I look at the people I had been with for this brief period in time, through the planes of heaven, a soporific sun and a sky so cerulean that it makes you think there could not be a single beautiful thing impossible in the entire span of the universe, and I saw nothing but good people, good friends. And it was time to say goodbye.

You quarrel with the Fates that the disarming Cuban haciendero’s provocative but diminutive logic in solving the night’s existential questions after having fallen absentmindedly into a well, that the deft and easy charm of the grave German scientist in cajoling a child and physics with a soccer ball on a beach, that the vast light the American animator has trained onto your imagination, that the laughingly persuasive manner by which the winsome Aussie filmmaker had convinced you that a trick of color could end wars, and that the incisive and insightful sensibilities of the Filipino academic who quickly saw through your spirit and found a way into your heart are all still going to be there at the next sunrise, ready to pick through another problem, another game, another magic. But as the dinghies going ashore were being loaded and as time began to run out, tiny details of that last moment burned in my mind’s eye: the sad, velvety deep blue hue of even the reddest sarong drying on the clothesline, and the silhouettes of travelers against the weeping eye of a sunset spilling its last few brave crimson tears on the sea.

You can spend 5 minutes beside a stranger on a bus or 5 beautiful days exploring desert islands in a quiet corner of the world, but each difficult time of parting is gracefully accepted as you learn that the warm mornings and the laughter you shared will lead you on to the next sun, the next friendship, and a love and unslakable thirst for it all, deep and wide as the ocean.

Today was a bit like last Christmas, when I was barefoot and with nary a clean shirt, my pack wet, my heart heavy and yet at the same time, light. Being marooned on a desert island should not be the end of the world, save for non-durable electronic things. I spent it with a family that gave me shelter, and hot food, and dry clothes. And what I lacked for was not spirit, because it was vivid in the hardy people I communed with that Christmas, nor kindness, because when I sought help it was given generously, nor care, as I remember wryly the histrionics of my return.

I had lost something I could not place. I wonder how one could feel so helplessly, ineffably lost, when one had never possessed what is missed. I could not find it in the mesmerizing aquaria of jewels bound for a Hong Kong plate, afloat the quiet cove where the priest would fish, underneath the solitary tree in the sandy cemetery, interspersed in the phosphorescence where the children danced. I thought they were both relentless, savage, and indefeasible, like the sea. Unfortunately I have neither a bad memory nor a good conscience, so happiness is a conscious effort. But even many waters will not quench my thirst for it.

I wish you this simple happiness, dear reader. It has been splendid, because I loved to write. It was painful, as now is painful, as truly I have grown old in the manner I’ve always feared because I no longer seek for posterity. Not when the tiresome constructs of fiction, so carelessly and ingeniously devised, have irreparably overcast the wild and the beautiful, silent spaces. The hand tires from laboring over many things, and now I choose one. The others I carry in my heart.