One is gone forever, another embedded in eternity

BIMBO CABIDOG

  Writing has its share of doubts and hesitation vacillation can stop it on its tracks. But like a bug, it keeps disturbing, gnawing to hold the pen. It itches to etch on the blank page. It urges to start drawing lines, and forming them into words. Soon, the blank page is filled. Writers cannot help but write all the time. It is a mode of existence hard to buck.

To write is to try to reflect what’s out there, what are going on, rhyme and reason, often unable to give birth to anything. The business-oriented pragmatists say, engage in it then you kill time. They don’t have that luxury. It makes you feel guilty to write, because you tend to agree that time is too expensive a commodity to spend just languishing on the unsaid word.

Peter Drucker teaches that time is the limiting factor. So, should you indulge on the pen? Trying to scribble a sentence, but not succeeding, how much hours in my youth I saw seemingly going to nothing. I was so bad at it that getting to say something coherently via the written word took great pains. Hopeless, helpless and going nowhere, as the clock ticked and sweat moistened my hands and forehead, I would just doze. And thought froze.

But still young to be under my parents’ care, worry or tension was out. I lived for the present. I did not have to finish something or work at something on time. My stint with the here and now was timeless. I did not pay attention to the idea, but presumably wasting time on fruitless writing was priceless, simply because it was not concerned with any monetary equivalent. To do so just for the love of doing so was happy hour.

The labor or play somehow paid off. Now, I can finish composing a sentence, or most effectively say something even without composing a sentence. I can string thoughts into an article and be confident enough to see it on newsprint. There is that high sense of achievement reading my piece on a newspaper’s page. It has also given me confidence to write.

Passion fuels the craft with a continuous surge of energy. For writing is not just about expression, but feeling. The writer does not just tell what’s happening. He/she plumb the depth of the human experience. What is being written engages him/her as if he/she is part of it, living the drama, lending an invaluable perspective.

Telling as the writer does plugs into a connection. In the same manner that an electrical outlet does, it immediately conducts volts of trembling current to the soul. It strikes a sensitive spot there, like plucking the chords of a guitar and producing melody. Many of those harmonious chords in varying voices, tones and sounds produce the music of a symphony orchestra – the piece the writer finally achieves on his/her readers. Writing, thus, does not only need skill, but skill smelted into golden  prose or poetry by talent.

But if as an art a piece of writing is timeless, it still cannot afford to lose relevance. It must take up stuff that the people go through in their daily lives in real time. A good read does not confine itself to swooning about the birds and the bees, or how lovable a piece of eternity is, like a cascading waterfall down a moss-covered limestone cliff in a deep forest. It disturbs the stagnancy of matter and the inertia of force by putting each back into the current of time.

I have attempted at great work self-consciously striving to infuse drama and oratory to what is thought as an otherwise boring narrative. I did not begin with a humble opening. I assaulted the blank paper at once with clichés and stereotypes that have had their day, but already wore out a past glory. This set me into heaping the stint with self-praise and vainglory. It becomes an exercise in storytelling made discordant by high-falutin and presumptuous language.

Did I say things hard to get a handle on? Or did I make them clear enough, like a cool spring under a sweltering day? In the end, what matters is not that I simply love writing, but that people love what I write. What matters is that I connected the words, like electric pulses, into the hearts of those who care to read it, and that the message nested in their head to give birth to countless offspring. For every event that breaks, every reality that shows, one aspect leaves to be gone forever. But still, another remains, stuck in the bulletin board of eternity. 

Footloose In My Native Land

BIMBO CABIDOG

Travel can be a gift. It is now being given to me by the Almighty. After all, He has carved destinations worthy to be goals of a lifetime.

I am thankful to be gifted with means to embark on those choice trips along the various lanes and byways crisscrossing my native land. Though quite late at my age, I am raring to explore its interesting sites, or wherever wanderlust takes me.

My journey kicks off on January 18 this year with a passenger-van commute to Ormoc, where I will saunter to some last-minute buys at the mall, and an abbreviated sight-seeing around the city’s core, after which I will check in for overnight stay at a hotel.

Ormoc harbour, west of the island of Leyte, is a busy concourse and gateway to the rest of the Visayas. I’ve been to the city many times before. It is just more than a hundred kilometers away from my hometown. Every visit to it would be a rediscovery of a place that never ceases to excite.

Early next morning, I will be taking a fast ferry to Cebu. Alighting at the port of call, I must immediately transfer to Mactan airport to catch an afternoon flight to Kalibo, Aklan. The town is the scene of the historic Ati Atihan Festival this time of the year. I am billeted for a two-night stay at a port town nearby for the bash.

Why Kalibo for starter? I cannot wait for more years to be added to my age (if they are still actually available) to revel in an 800-year old tradition. Filipinos somehow trace some strains in their genetic line to the Atis who started the joyous revelry in the 13th century.

Post-festivities, next hop is Caticlan to take a boat to Boracay. The resort sojourn over a couple of days is my first and maybe last time to be here. I have read quite a wealth of travel literature on the beach haven for tourists with finely grounded white sands and azure blue offshore waters.

My eye-witness affirmation or denial of the accolades heaped on the adventure and leisure destination of Boracay concludes the first leg of a journey that has yet to take me to more island gems in Western and Central Visayas, from Panay to Negros, Siquijor, Cebu and Bohol, onto sorties to treasured nooks up north in Luzon, followed by excursions back south to the scenic ecological frontiers of Palawan.

Right now, I am too awed to say a lot on this providence that certainly no other than God can bestow. I shall use the gift to be my way of seeing in full splendor the magnificent works that He has done. I take it as a pilgrimage over roads least and most traveled, to pay homage to Him sitting at the throne over all of creation. Glory be to the Father.

I know the journey is physically challenging. That only makes me more daring. The amount of energy, reserves of stamina, brain juices and vigour to spend may be forbidding, especially to a sexagenarian like me. But resolve and sheer will may just see me through.

Added to the feat of going places, finding accommodations for stay, and getting to settle in some modicum of comfort is the imperative of justifiably recording or journalizing almost every bit of the experience. But with the Force up there with me all the way, there is probably nothing I can’t afford.

Minus yet the gold medal at the finish line (of course I don’t know what sort awaits), measuring up to the requirements of the tour marathon – materially, physically and mentally, is for me already a lifetime achievement. I offer any triumph here and there as testimony to God’s greatness, even as the canvass of breath-taking natural wonders, and awesome human-cultural narratives expected to unfold down the road speak for themselves. They hail the Great One.

For God and country, I am venturing into the rediscovery of a homeland that countless generations of people with my human features have come to dwell on, live on and die on over millennia. I shall look anew at the priceless possessions of an archipelago to which national hero Dr. Jose Rizal attached the tagline “Pearl of the orient Seas.”

Truly, its allure renews and renews year after year. Its colorful vistas, island to island, do not fade. It is worth dying for. It is worthier living for. And it is worthiest traveling for, to see even for the hundredth time, every instance in a different light.

Is it the fault of my country to be so captivating to entice the foreigner to grab it? My excursions all over the Philippine Archipelago will find answers in the stories of folks of different ethno-linguistic affiliations. One reason may be that our ancestors dating back to the era of western colonial expansion were so unmindfully generous they did not mind sharing their riches. They did not care to be formidably fortified to shut out intruders, or dangerously armed to drive away aggressors.

For what did they actually have in that critical age of annexations by colonizers? They had jars, artistic bamboo huts, dugout kayaks, gold ornaments, pearls, pottery, metal works, grains and a hospitable nature that invited strangers to their food – notwithstanding if those have evil intents. They did not have massive fortifications, towers to watch the sea, bastions to hurl powerful counterattacks, canons, and the latest in military strategy.

That state of unpreparedness to fight out any invaders that loom on their shores – not yet the land’s allure, is perhaps the one that temptingly gave them away to the alien predators’ captivity: 350 years of monastery, 8 years of Hollywood, as a writer would put it.

Foreign conquest only proved the country to be a land of beautiful people, easy to make friends, fine and safe to be with. Hence, the precious gems are not only to be found in its 7,641 islands and islets. They are also in the gentle ways and warmth of local folks, not letting go of an enviable culture of embracing despite harsh outcomes, punishing trials and tribulations.

Throughout my younger years, I have been engrossed in narrow struggles to take note of them. Now is the time to underscore such traits in a journal of my wanderings that I vow to pen.

From my home province’s stretch of the Maharlika Highway in Leyte, I shall soon hit the road that detours to the cross-country corridor of Tacloban and Ormoc. There, ocean cruise and air flight will whisk me to the marvelous sea-and-land concertos of the Visayas. I will dip into my human roots that trace to the squat dark-skinned aborigines who crossed the land bridges of the geologic ice age from the Asian mainland to the southeast bulge of the continent, where they would remain when rising seas cut it off.

Then I go back to starting point to follow the road lacing northward into the rugged hills and shorelines of Samar, across the strait further north to the tiresome stretches of the Pan-Philippine road network throughout the Bicol Peninsula, up to the branching links of the Central Plain, the perilous coiling passes of the Sierra Madre range to Isabela and Cagayan, the dizzying Kennon Road climb to Baguio, out to the mountain-hewn Halsema Highway along the steppes of the Cordillera, the chilly heights of Sagada, and the monumental rice terraces of the Ifugaos in the sights of Bontoc and Banawe.

Stopping at the doorsteps of Kalinga along the Chico River, I will retrace down to the northwest strip of the Ilocoses, the coastal skirts of La Union and Pangasinan, and the Hundred Islands. The long and winding Luzon leg cuts off, where I fly southward to Palawan.

The following leg is crowned by a meaningful trip to the lately paved dirt roads of the Kris-shaped island that link the southern anthropological Tabon Caves, the picturesque entry at Sabang to the massive underground river – cited in 2011 as the Seventh Wonder of the World, the quaint laid-back city of Puerto Princesa, Honda Bay, the still lagoons of Coron, Nido and the Bacuit Peninsula.

Hereon the long journey nears its end. Though Palawan crowns it, last is yet the anticlimactic extension to the Mindanao leg. God willing, I pray that my strength doesn’t leave me yet up to here. One reason why I do this is to know my country more, and help my fellow countrymen know it more, for us to love it more.