Growing Up Filipino II

I was 10 when someone gave me my first diary. It was small, hard-backed, had a teddy bear on it and, most importantly, a lock. What more could a kid want than a space where she could say anything she wanted? Crushes, rants, dreams, magic, love songs. It was all in there. What my first diary meant to me can be summed up in one delicious word: FREEDOM! I was hooked on recording the details of my life, the soaring search for the right word, playing with poems and stories from that moment onward.

I was one of those kids who loved her English teachers and was wide-eyed with wonder (and a little intimidated!) at these wise-owl women we called librarians. In L.A., in the 1980’s, there really weren’t too many stories with Filipino or Filipino American kids on the bookshelves. In third or fourth grade, I had an assignment to write a report on my heritage. When I went to the public library, the librarian wasn’t able to find any books that mentioned Filipino culture. She shook her head sympathetically. The invisibility of my culture in books  sank into my consciousness quietly, stealthily. Because I never saw an author of my heritage, I’d assumed that people like me didn’t have any worthwhile stories. Hey, if my beloved English teachers and the wise librarians didn’t have stories of families like mine on the shelves, the stories couldn’t possibly exist, right? Kid logic.

So I wrote, secretly. I was a writer before I even had a word for it. No one in my family and no one we knew wrote stories. The grown-ups in my family were all nurses and navy men, vendors at  sari-sari stores, and med techs who worked long hours and relaxed by watching TV and movies and feasting at potlucks. No books for pleasure, only text books for saving patients’ lives. I thought I was weird for writing my stories and kept my weirdness private. But, man, the joy of locking my bedroom door, curling up on my window-seat with flowery cushions, turning on the radio, and letting my black felt-tip pen glide in loops and swoops across the page!

The first time I ever met a Filipino writer, I was already 19, studying at UCLA, and firmly convinced we had no stories. It was one of the most awesome moments of my life to learn, at last, that someone from my background was an author. His existence showed me that dreams are possible (and that, perhaps, I wasn’t so weird after all). The writer happened to be N.V.M. Gonzalez, who is considered a national treasure and one of the founders of literature in the Philippines. He was also a keen teacher who respected his young students greatly. N.V.M. didn’t make a big deal about himself. Humble, like the characters in his short stories.

So it’s with the greatest pleasure that I share with you all the U.S. launch of the anthology Growing Up Filipino II, edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Cecilia is tireless in publishing stories from the Filipino diaspora — a fancy word that simply means my sea-faring, adventurous, and  hard-working community has traveled and settled around the world. It’s filled with 27 stories from writers of Filipino descent who grew up in the Philippines, the United States, and Canada. There are wonderful writers like Marianne Villanueva, Paulino Lim, Jr., and Cecilia Brainard. One of my own YA short stories, “Shiny Black Boots,” is included in Growing Up Filipino II. And I count myself lucky to be in such fantastic literary company.

I think the me who was the L.A. Valley Girl in the 1980’s would have loved to see Growing Up Filipino II on the bookshelves. I wouldn’t have had to wait so long to learn that we, too, had stories worth reading. And to my friends who, also, never knew that Filipino stories existed, this is a great time to introduce them to your teens. As a kid I loved Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Stories of survival and resourcefulness, creating bonds of friendship, and taking care of your family are universal.   James Baldwin said it best in his 1984 Paris Review interview: “Your self and your people are indistinguishable from each other, really, in spite of the quarrels you may have, and your people are all people.”

- MGB

I wrote this Sunday morning at Thatcher. Communing in nature has become one of my spiritual practices :

Koan #7

Frozen River

Silence in the glen
Winter stillness
The rare peep of an unseen bird
Clumps of snow drip
from bare gray branches,
soft thuds onto the ground.
Blue glitter,
a million prisms of light
bless the banks, decay of logs
the ground sculpted into rounds and slopes
by hours of wind and river tongue lashings.
The DesPlaines has frozen –
Time in hibernation,
Spring arrested and Summer’s bubbly frolic
soothed into a cold lullaby
beneath blankets of fleecy white powder.
Delicious hush, how healing you are!

I want to show my son
the land the way it really is,
naked beauty, precious pale sunlight,
the deep sacred silences
no hand-made temple or church can surpass –
this is the open sky, the vault of heaven
the original cathedral.
Too many cars drive past,
one every minute,
speeding to brunches or Sunday services,
rushing on the frozen crunch of road.
But I don’t mind –
more silence for me,
unashamed of my greed,
drinking beauty like a dying woman
as the feathered tips of treetops
brush the morning chill.

Koan # 8

Hint of egret wingspan flapping
behind the tangled jumble
of gray winter branches.

Koan #9

Rush

I hate the rush of days,
man-made hours,
boxes I am trapped inside.
I push against the walls
only to break through
to another box.
Schedules, deadlines,
start times, end times,
school bells, radio alarms,
buzzers, timers, beepers,
cell phones, online bids –
Enough!

Where is the deep time?
The sun moving westward in the sky?
Shadows of trees growing longer?
The moment suspended,
like a dust mote hanging in sunlight,
the slow growing of grass seedlings?
The halted flow of river
beneath the ice?

Where is the joy
of climbing snow heaps
falling, rolling, tumbling
until the laughter and ice streak
your face and there is nothing left
but the pleasure of returning
inside to a hot mug of cocoa
and damp socks drying on the radiator?

I rail against the boxes
we have made
and claw the pages of every schedule
and run, a free woman, to the frozen Palos hills
where time is kept in drips and ice crystals
forming in the winter sun.

- M.G.B.

No. Last weekend was our annual time for girlfriends, a time when we gather at our friend Joy de Vivre’s house. A time for talking, and bonding and laughing, yes. And also a time for rejuvenating our spirits amidst the trees, sitting on the beach as ladybugs used us as warming stations, gulping down the pure silences like we’re dying of thirst.

It’s good to see the stars at night.

It’s good to taste how clean the air can be…and to feel the eyes of a hawk upon me.

It’s good to unplug (even though I love to tweet and Fb and work on my laptop and Skype and all the technological wizardry that comes with this age).

It’s good to just be.

Thanks to Joy…to Lucky the Ladybug Magnet…and to Cool Blue.

~ MGB

But when I think of my artist and writer friends and family, so many of them are creative in more than one arena. My ceramicist friend, Renaissance Queen, can sew a velvet gown, paint a mural, and cook a mean roast chicken. My musician friend, Dark Side of the Moon, plays guitar the way people breathe, does graphic design and water colors, and cooks some mean Korean short-ribs. My cousin, Can Rewire Your House And Redesign It Too, has a crazy force of creativity running through her: photography, painting, interior design. And she cooks a mean set of cupcakes that look like sculptured flowers and butterflies, only they’re made of sugar.

All this to say — Creativity is Polymorphous. It takes many forms, busts out like an unstoppable riot of color, sound, movement…spirit. It’s not about being an “expert” in all of them (though there are those who are that, too). It’s about the Process taking over.

As for me, I’m really glad they all like to cook.

- MGB

-MGB

Look out your window. Better yet, GO OUTSIDE. Unplug. Live a little. Above all…Love.

Back in the day, and by this I mean of course my obsession with the sixteenth century, there were Filipinas who were found resting on the limbs of trees, on thick branches of the balete trees. These trees were massive, roots stuck in the ground at estuaries, where the salt sea meets freshwater and boughs stretched forward in complicated intertwinings as the tree reached for sunlight. These women were found overcome by visions. They were in the process of being called to serve as healers of their communities; they had undergone trials in the spirit world and, if they survived, they had the ability to go back and forth between the mundane world and the realms beyond to guide their people. In various Philippine dialects, these women were called babaylanes, bailanes. But my favorite term for them is Visayan: Daitan, the Befriended Ones.

If you, like me, were raised in a largely Judeo-Christian environment, you might find indigenous spirituality shocking at first. So we’ll have to peel back the layers of time, take off the Western lenses through which we see things, and try and uncover, accept an older kind of spirituality. Two things amaze me about my ancestors’ indigenous Philippine religions back in the day: * The leaders were women. * And living nature figured prominently in their rituals and ceremonies.

Certain trees were revered as dwellings of gods. You did not simply chop a tree down and sell it for lumber. There were forest spirits from whom they asked permission and gave offerings, special times of harvest and rest. Nature provided herbs for healing. The balete trees which cradled the priestesses were part of their rite of passage in becoming healers and, from the time they were found having visions in their boughs, the daitan had a special relationship with their particular tree (but they did not “own” the tree as property).

Recently, in my small corner of Chicagoland, I’ve noticed that congregations have been finding ways to incorporate nature into their prayer life. One Jewish synagogue holds seasonal prayers in the prairies. There are Buddhist mindful meditation walks. Some Christian-based churches do forest and river clean-ups taking up stewardship of the Earth as another way to practice their faith. Certain relatives of my own generation, who are jaded by their experiences within organized religion, talk to me about their awe of Nature (with a capital N), of being swept up by its tides and swells or amazed at the beautiful mechanics and physics and improbability of life on this planet. Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Green Party, my friends of all political persuasions seem to really find something in nature to connect with.

And so, today, in my thwarted state, I’m wondering about the connection between nature and spirituality. When the forests and the rivers are thought to be the home of the gods and goddesses, why would we mistreat such sacred places? If the trees and animals are part of the same Cosmos, if we manifest the same mysticism as other sentient Beings, then it is a joy and delight to take care of them.

We people, we two-legged seem to have a really hard time finding common-ground. And yet perhaps the ancient Filipina babaylanes knew the answers all along — our common-ground is literal. It is the Earth.

Summer in Chicago is also a jazz riff, a pulse of throbbing beats, bodies crushed out onto the street block parties, in festivals, at parks, chowing down on smokey barbecue (or veggie skewers), hitting the Lake, scouting the dunes and just getting out there into thronging life. ‘Cause winter’s brutal. And when the Sun comes to stay, you party.

But this summer’s been markedly different. Cool. And I don’t mean in a hip lounge, sipping-absinthe-at-the-Violet-Hour kind of way. I mean cool. Cold. Chilly. The kind of chilly that’s like San Francisco in the summer. As in,”The coldest winter is a summer I spent in San Francisco.” (<– This, btw, was not said by Mark Twain.) It’s been cool enough that neighbors and friends and all sorts of folks in my community have asked off and on all summer, “Is it global warming?” Except, of course, that sounds lame, right? We don’t have a good catch-all for what’s happening because all these changes in weather patterns will be different in different parts of the world – cold in some, hot in others, drying, melting, rising…CHANGING. We’re a planet in transition, grappling for how to talk about it. The beautiful jazz rhythm of our Chicago summer is losing its beat. (Can the plants keep up? And the animals that depend on them? And we, the two-legged in our four-wheel-drives?)

Okay, not to be a summer bummer or anything. But you gotta wonder right? We Chicagaoans (and, yes, I’ve lived here long enough to count myself among the locals) love to talk about our weather. We practically own weather — the extreme balminess of summer, the frigid winters, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it falls, and the tender, dewy springs. Weather bonds us. Why else would we be so neighborly?

So this summer, I’m wondering. Was it summer for you? Was it Global Changing? Did your skin feel the summer the same way it always did?

- MGB

“Cory in Yellow”

by Mary Grace Bertulfo

Here on EDSA

there is a statue

of Mama Mary,

her hands outstretched

in blessings over Manila.

It is to help us

remember

the place

where peace won out.

Cory in yellow,

I saw her on TV,

she looked like my mom,

short, permed hair

and glasses.

But she marched

in front on EDSA

making an “L” with her fingers.

“Laban! Laban!”

Fight! Fight!

She led her people

to walk and face the police

who guarded the dictator.

Her people swarmed

behind her,

Cory in yellow

who fought greed and killing

with peaceful marching

and prayers

instead of guns and fists.

They stormed Malacanyang Palace

The police gave way

the dictator fled.

Cory in yellow

made the victory sign.

Cory in yellow.

Aquino.

They called it

the Bloodless Revolution.

Milking the Rhino shows just how complicated it can all be — the tangle of race relations, colonial history, poverty, women’s place in traditional society, and conservation. This film is honest. It interviews Himba women, Massai men, European eco-tourism business owners, African conservationists like fiercely eloquent Helen Gichochi, European tourists, and an expatriot who started his own wildlife preserve. It shows all the rough edges and also shows people (from all parties) being challenged, undergoing transformation as they figure out how to change their relationship to the wild ecosystem and their natural resources. I really dig that it’s raw and that people, in the end, seem to learn how to work with each other despite not always agreeing. Can there be win-win-win solutions? Yes, I think Milking the Rhino shows there can.

The second documentary I’d recommend is Arctic Dance, narrated by Harrison Ford. (Okay, ya got me – I’m still an Indiana Jones fan at heart, pulpy and antiquated as it is.) This film chronicles the life and impact of Margaret (“Mardy”) Murie, who is known as the Grandmother of the American conservation movement. She and her husband, Olaus, worked tirelessly to establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She was riding dog sleds and trekking across Alaska’s tundra, punting on rivers (baby in tow) when it was unheard of for a woman to be doing these things. Mardy was the first woman to graduate from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She often worked as Olaus’ secretary, and seemed, by nature, to be a behind-the-scenes kind of person. But after he died, she gently took to the microphone to lobby in Washington, D.C. for the wilderness they both explored and loved. President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work.

What’s touching about Mardy is how humble she was about her own role making environmental history. It’s as much a love story as it is a piece of American history. She truly makes the personal political — it seems to me that she loved the land and terrain of Alaska where she grew up and she shared this with her dearest love, Olaus. There’s a solitude, and solid peacefulness to their existence. And the humility she shows is the mark of a truly great spirit. A gentle strength — I love that. Plus, come on, now, she shows that elder women rock. What a role model.

Milking the Rhino and Arctic Dance, two really different takes on conservation. Check them out if you can!

~ MGB