On the San Mateo Bridge

The San Mateo Bridge rides green waves in the sunlight, teasing splashes of sea foam with its unwavering path.   When I travel the causeway, I am walking on water;  a god to the fishes, a child of the sea.  Salt water is my make up, is my life force, is my being.  The Pacific writes on my remaining breath; another sixty years, more maybe less.  Who counts these things, who answers to the ocean?  We all will return there and wash up on the shore.  On the bridge I am brave, unafraid of the water, of a lonely death, of my own mortality.

Eroding the bridge is the bay of Saint Francis, who believed without seeing the feet of his Christ.  See my feet, Francis.  Believe in me.   My soles are cracked and callused with a journey too long and I know where you’ve been, cloistered and faithful.  I have trouble believing in what I know to exist but I’ve hung onto these dreams, held fast to the truth.  It changes, refracts like light off the water.  It breaks, it is repaired.  It gives birth to itself.

Fog and reflection

The fog off the bay has kept me from reaching the keys of a dying computer, has clouded my mind with new concepts of color and family and home.  Berkely is my weigh station, testing the depth of where I have been and what I’ve learned; keeping me from moving.  I mean no ill to Berkeley.  The art of standing still is something I should practice anyway.

I read somewhere that an American should leave New York before she grows jaded and leave California before she gets soft.  When I strolled down the streets of the Upper West Side two years ago this July, I said to city, “I’ve escaped my darkness.”  My sandals smacked the bottom of my feet, fleeing from the scorching asphalt with each lift of the knee.  I prayed I would be returned to the Apple of the east, to moments of understanding that were highlighted by blissful affection.

In San Francisco last night,  when I hugged my self over a jacket and scarf, a woman said to me, “The fog won’t leave the city until September.”  My toes clung to the inside of my loafer, pulling back from the dampness that threatened through the tear in my sole.  A month is an eternity, while the years flee with a cold wind when no one is keeping track.

I pray to be returned to a citrus-saturated Orient, a time when I was stretched and broken and overwhelmed by a feeling of being alive.  I found a new darkness in Mindanao.  It fooled me into thinking that things would be easier if I could find a home.  It fooled me into believing home is where you live. 

I tried to leave the dark at a snow covered grave in Pittsburgh and then on a baggage carosel at SFO.  When I’m standing still it has an easier time finding me, but to move means I have to carry it along.  Do I even exist in a place where I am unkwown?  This new darkness tells me, “You can’t understand a world that happens outside of you.”  And yet everyone in America has answers. 

The gospel I evangelize places wisdom in the hands of people we do not see, the people whose gaze we avoid by crossing to the other side of the street.  The message puts me at bay.  The heaviness pulls me down.  The fog keeps my eyes from surveying the breadth of the Pacific.

Snow fall, wailing wall

The wall was wailing when we walked past the newspaper stands by Howard.  March surprised me as it often does, with its reserved sense of atonement and its off chance of snow.  I remember the March before the Iraq War.  I remember my toes and my hair and America as it used to be.  People said it would be Vietnam but I said, no it will be Iraq.  History looks similar but does not repeat itself precisely.  It is spoken word, not a record.  In this March my hair is long and my thoughts are clear.  Without love there is time for work.  Without love that work is numb.  

We walked past lots and lots of walls- down streets with names of warmer places, we spoke to a man about “Clockwork Orange.”  When will we have such movies about our time in Iraq?  I have not seen the country, but when the first soldier arrived I was there.  Even a March snowfall can’t separate Americans from America.  I am a pair of boots.  I was on the ground near Howard University.  My friend and I walked to a party where girls were dancing to protest “The Wall” and men were saying things like “wack” and “yo”.  

And I say, there is never one wall.  Every neighborhood has one, every man creates one.  Every man, woman and child is building walls to keep some people out and trap other people in.  We are all crying out from behind blockades.  In Gaza they build walls with brick and mortar, but in the Philippines it’s intimidation and fear.  In Washington it’s merely colors that separate and in California it’s language and ideas.

The snow fell like sleep from the tear ducts of God, like dust from the mines, like bodies on Mindanao.  Soldiers there can build walls with the fallen activists, with the brown people our governments say are “collateral damage.”  Is justice not of equal importance everywhere?  Do we not see that if these walls are torn down one at a time, they will only be rebuilt in other people’s cities?

I could hear the wall wailing when I was inside at the party.  Behind my cup of beer I tried to remember how to talk to strangers.  History looks similar but doesn’t  repeat itself precisely.  Iraq’s a red herring and the Philippines is a clay pigeon.  We see them behind the wall and we shoot them down, we don’t even bother to collect the plunder.

My boots touch down in the snow in Northwest.  When I walk past the wall, I caress it with my gloved fingers.

Shards of glass

I know this girl who lived in a village in Grenada and she told me about the glass that would wash up on the shores of the island, broken glass from bottles and other things that had been smoothed down by the salt of the sea.  In Oakland I find more glass in the street.  In Berkeley, the glass stays in the windows, between the yuppies in the bistros and the Asians in the noodle houses.  Homeless folks can feed off the warmth of the windows and in liberal Berkeley they’re not chased off the sidewalk, but there’s still no glass that stands between them and February cold.

In Oakland, I feel like most industrial towns, those windows are shattered.  What are we hiding?  Who are we fooling?  My imperfect heart longs to hear “We don’t like you for this” and “There’s no place for you here.”  Because in all this acceptance, in all these hyphenated words, I worry for honesty- just like salt worries down the shards in Grenada.  Just say that you’ve learned to hate, just tell me I’m not who you want me to be.  Speak to the darkness, because if you don’t, it can sneak up on us from behind.  

Don’t say equality like it’s a temple, speak to it like it’s a child- not a destination but a fleeting concept we must devote ourselves to chasing.  It will lead us to places we’d rather not go; our past, our future, downtown, out-of-town, past our parents, through our children, down rivers of tainted water and into cities left to fall.  If we ignore equality, we lose it, if we fence it in, we pervert it.  A child locked inside will never know life and equality kept in a block or two will wilt in its isolation.

On a cold day on the West Coast, I dream of walking along an island with a friend at hand: I run my fingers over a smoothed piece of glass that tells me time is endless and mankind is no more powerful than the salt in the sea.  Does my salt perfect or merely pacify?  Shards of glass can refract light into the darkest sewers- once glazed over they can get lost out among the sand.

Water and light

When I left Davao the moon was full enough to light the way off the island, to reflect in the open sewers and draw the foam of the waves ever closer to their death on the shore. The tides, so tragic and final, are unaware of their sadness. When resurrection is immediate and clear there is no need for grief.

My last night looking into the bay I could not bring myself to tears. I floated in the cool water, my belly button facing the stars from underneath my cotton pajamas. My body rejoiced in the homogeneity of complete fluidity.

Now delivered to my origins and to the fruits of over anticipation, I am surprised to see that even the moon, to whom I was so faithful, has continued on. Her phases are not like mine- they’re solid and real, they last and give meaning to earthlings below. The moon waxes and wanes at the heaven’s command while I fade like laundry in the sun. In Davao I’d believed we were something special. But here, the whiteness of the moon fades in the wattage from the skyline. And here, I’m no longer a daisy in a pineapple field, but a piece of paper in an air-conditioned warehouse. Loneliness is when I could slip through a crack in the floor and the world would just switch to a different box of toner.

What is it that draws us back to the known? The world is moving on and we’re keeping ourselves sane by imprisoning our memories in sound bytes and photographs. Water does not keep its pictures. Each ripple clears the palette. The waves do not record their breaking. The timelessness of being keeps everything safe in the sea. Back on land, time is dangerous. And the moon is the same now as it ever was but here instead of lighting the way, it just blocks out the view of the stars.

Christmas trees and pineapples

The white Christmas tree reaches out its coarse branches like the dead coral I saw off Mindanao.  The crown of thorns starfish had attached itself to the reef, sucking it dry: the coral around it was white as snow.  Nothing else on the reef is white, except for me, frog kicking my way through the tropical water jungle, taking in all I can before I go, giving nothing back but my carbon dioxide.  What is is like to be the predator of heaven?  Who can blame a starfish for what it’s evolved to do?

The white Christmas tree also lives in Mindanao, rather it was sent there by foreign manufacturers for Christmas, which was put there by the Spanish.  I saw the tree in one of the many western shopping malls on Mindanao, the tree’s whiteness representative of the snow the islanders have never seen.  Its branches curled like the fingers of an arian ice princess, its ornaments mirrors of consumerism.  Mindanao has its own trees, but they’re not for Christmas.

The air condition chilled me my last week on the island.  All I could think of was why I had to go home, even if home wouldn’t want me.  I was so tired of standing wide and pale, one of just a few pine trees scattered in the endless pineapple fields.  But now, far from the island and not yet home, I already long for something that is gone forever.  Pineapples are sweet, worth fighting through any prickles to get to the heart.  They were sweet enough to welcome a white pine tree like me.

I was sold, but I am not a soldier

In Lanao del Norte 30,000 people still live under tarps and sleep on the concrete, afraid to return home for fear of the fighting.  When we arrived there in October, we had little comfort for them- sacks of rice and packets of noodles, the hands of doctors and the minds of counselors.  I hefted the sacks on the shoulder; my brawn attempting to make up for my helplessness, our helplessness.  Thirty thousand is too many to make a difference and fighting that’s lasted decades and decades has no hope of waning.  The government says “No peace until disarmament” and the rebels say “No disarmament until justice.”  No one can hear what the people are saying- their voices are eaten in gunfire.

I took pictures of women and children, soldiers and Muslims.  I washed my hair in the pouring rain and noticed the beauty of the mountains.  The pictures seemed to say that something was happening even as the burned out homes said that something was over.  The babies in Barangay Munai were dehydrated and weary from diarrhea.  I covered my head and rolled down my sleeves.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.

A week after we returned I read in the paper that a measles outbreak killed fifteen children in Munai.  There were only a hundred or so in that place, so as I scroll through my pictures, I wonder which ones.  Who did I capture a last time?  Who among them now can only be seen in my camera?  There wasn’t money for inoculations, there was barely money for rice.  This is just the collateral damage of war, the collateral damage of a “supply/demand” system allows drug companies to charge whatever the hell they want because that’s the free market.  ”Free to choose,” capitalists say.  I guess these children just forgot to decide.  

For my part, I see the US Government has been generous to send guns to the Philippines, like this M-16 pictured above.  This child may be among the dead.  At the very least he lost a sibling, cousin or friend.  I wonder if he would have traded one of those bullets for a measles shot.  The price of production would have been about the same.  But the only shots that protect Western interests and foreign investment in Mindanao are those fired by soldiers.

When the Lord passed over the banana trees

That morning we left well before dawn.  We loaded into the back of the flatbed and stood shoulder to shoulder, back to stomach, feet on the edge.  Our walking sandals were strapped on our feet, theirs brown, mine white.  In a different time we would have carried walking staffs, but on that morning we all had our packs strapped to ourselves or the truck and our sarongs and hijabs wrapped around our heads to keep out the cold.  When the Lord passes over the Philippines, he does not dictate his people to make unleaven bread, but we did brew corn coffee on a fire under the stars and sipped it out of metal mugs, praising God with our slurps and silence.

Orion turned on his feet above us while we floated through the dark.  I could feel the cold migrating through my nose to my cheeks, my eyes turned up to the sky thinking of anything other than malnutrition and military occupation.  God moves the stars above all those things and the headlights of the truck pull us across the island below them.  Banana trees lined the road to the bridge- in the dark they looked like creatures trudging through a swamp, their massive leaves crowns of shadows over bodies bearing gifts of fruit for the Lord.  They told us the spirit of God rested on the other side of the bridge and we did not dispute.  Trees are not like people.  They are upright and true.

Inside my hiking sandals, my feet fell asleep and my pack wore a pain on the shoulder but my eyes did not come down from the sky and I did not blink when the cloud moved over us.  The fog was thin, merely a veil on the stars that gradually faded in the east, and it only took a breath before it floated into our past.  Can air still be cold when it’s inside the lungs?  Can clouds grab light and hurl it into space?  On that morning the whole universe revolved around a tiny valley on a tiny island in a vast ocean in an unending space.  And so the spirit of the Lord came down and blessed the valley with its cold breath.  Because banana trees are reborn each season, they have a better understanding of the world.  They were not surprised to see the Lord- they had their offerings out and ready to bless the cloud as it passed.  God’s children, on the other hand, still had sleep in their eyes and coffee on their lips.  

The Spirit isn’t bothered with details, it loves us all differently.  The cold kiss stayed on my nose until the sun rose a few hours later.

A space between

On my way home from a brief stay in a cloistered convent in Digos City, the bus took a path between the mountains and the sea.  We rode the space between, the land rising on our left and disappearing on our right, for a good two hours as we passed through massive crowds out to mourn their dead.  November first is the space between, when the Filipinos grieve who they have lost and not yet found; celebrating the sureness of death with ice cream and Coca Cola, packed in hobo tents in festive cemeteries.  Over the grave of a four-year-old girl I offered sugared breads and ready-made cookies.  I ate cold tuna with rice and vinegar and munched on Western style cornchips while I gossiped with coworkers.

November is a space between.  I am still here on Mindanao but I am already lonely for what I will miss.  My parents count down the days and prepare the fatted calf for their wayward daughter and at night I lay awake thinking of pumpkin pie and snowfall.  In some ways the tropics has consumed me but in others it has only driven me further into America: Here I have found a place that I love but it’s far from the place that makes me who I am.

But that’s not America either.  It’s the space between the earth and the sky, the room inside each cell of our being.  We are created by that moments in between the big moments because just like elections, life isn’t won on the night of the victory.  The real battle happens in the silence when no one is watching, when we’re just cruising along the water in a seat by ourselves.  November for me is just in between, but that’s all it ever is, really..  We’re just pages in between the beginning and end- filler in book whose cover we never glimpse but is all we ever know.  We’re trapped in the middle of something we don’t really understand.

I leaned back in my seat on the road from Digos and watched the mourners on the streets.  They had their candles lit high in the air and their bottles of Coke were tucked under their arms.  The smell of the sea mingled with their barbeque and rice and the moutains reached up to the sky.

Big moon

Certain things can never be translated, are not to be found for the people in between languages, those of us just passing through a place and a time.  Some words are only for one generation, are only for one country or population.  When in visiya I say the moon is big, I mean I’m thinking of the time the moon was looming over my parents’ house so large I thought its gravity would pull me off the earth.  But as we walked to buy cola in the October night, my Filipino friend laughed and said the moon was fat and white like me.  I allowed my mouth to smile in its luminescence.  Fat and white is only a general interpretation.  Tambok and puti mean something else.  Somewhere else.  This thought is lost, this moment is lost.  I record it in a way that only warps it into a half-truth.  I hope the moon isn’t self-conscious.