Love's Home

Under a watchful sky, I gaze frowning at the Pacific. For the moment, the friendly hour has lost its voice. With a straight stare, I scan the waters gradually capitulating its prison walls of separation.

                               One more dawn

                               One more day

                               One day more –

I will be home. A fresh discovery of assurance comes upon me: that home is where I’ve left my heart to hang.

Love's Tears

In my tropical island home, rain is aseasonal. Without warning, it can fall on the sunniest day – an anomaly that is both dazzling and confusing for its absurdity.

It trickles down the kuapa fishpond walls, forming a translucent curtain of crystalline thread daintily obscuring daytime's brilliance. Then it settles like a scattering of a thousand lustrous pearls on the sun-drenched philodendron and muddied earth.

This incongruent display always rouses my melancholia, for although rain is a paean to jubilation, I believe what local lore tells me - that it is the lament of separation.

Legend says that the volcano goddess fell in love with a handsome warrior and asked to marry him. When he refused because he had already pledged his love to Lehua, the goddess fell into a destructive jealous rage and turned him into a twisted tree. 

Taking pity on the heartbroken Lehua, the gods turned her into a flower on the tree. 

It is said that if this flower is plucked, it will rain on that day because of the lovers' anguish over the breakup.

Alas! Undoubtedly someone, perhaps unknowingly or on a whim, has plucked a flower off its lover tree, so on this sunny day, it rains. 

It is rain that gathers into a puddle, then runs off into ocean waters that separate mountains. It is the sorrow of rupture. It is the misery of rain falling in one’s heart.

It is the kind of rain that makes me cry.

A Love Missive

If you don’t think of me in a thousand years,

I will think of you a thousand times in an hour.

- Christina Lamb

Memories can easily go by me in a blur, but there are those that have insistently grown more powerful with passing time because they have enabled me to overcome the disjunction of a seriously literal life.

Here is a litany of some of those moments. Hopefully you’ll remember and recognize yourself in them.

1.

You cried upon seeing a photo of yourself with a walrus at the zoo – because you thought you were a walrus. You said my teeth were yellow, so I got them professionally whitened, pronto! I was late going back home from school one day and was speeding, knowing that you would have arrived already from kindergarten class. All the while, I was distressed, certain that you would be wandering the streets like the tear-stained waif from Les Miserables. To my relief, I found you waiting, nonchalantly sprawled on the daisies in the front garden. I was petrified when I spotted you sharing popsicle licks with White Paw. Pawie, as you called him, was a bunny. We smelled perfumes at Smitty’s and ran after the ice cream man.

2.

You said my face was heart-shaped and my mouth was small. You compared me to a dandelion that blew where the wind would blow. We got spectacularly lost on the streets of London, but made a pact to not tell anyone about it. You often invited me on a shopping spree at Ross, but you never brought your wallet. You were mad at me one time, so you wrote a letter - my first name on the envelope - alleging that you were adopted. You said we lived on the edge of the world because of the view of a chasm and an endless sky from the bend on the road.

3.

You both laughed when I said, Bring down stuff from the car – wrong idiom! - and at my mispronunciation of Cheezwhiz. You left the crust off your chicken pot pies because you knew that I loved to eat crusts. We went through cycles of gerbils, goldfish, and bunnies – delighting in their little lives and mourning their demise in a wee graveyard marked with popsicle sticks.

4.

You’re a master humorist. I laughed even when the joke was on me – like that time when you announced that Mother’s Day had been canceled. I wanted a mink coat for Christmas. Alleging your support of non-cruelty to animals, you bought instead a faux fur one from Price Club. You surprised me with a fancy bedroom set – all oak and mirrors, and lit like a Las Vegas marquee. You let me take the only cell phone in the house when I first drove to a synagogue for my Hebrew class. The place was only seven miles away. You let me copy your answers to the Disciple class homework because I couldn’t figure out the answers to the life application questions. You cleaned our toilets because you knew that I hated doing that. On Christmas and New Year’s Eve and sundry wine parties, you’d get me Moscato or Asti Spumanti because alcohol made me incoherent. You’re goofy despite the smarts; vulnerable behind the stoic stance.

Need I say more?

You have each filled the displacements and absurdities of my life with joyful, sometimes silly, distractions. 

You have given substance to my otherwise meaningless moments. 

You have given me salvation. 

You are the memory that makes me smile.

Love's Voice

exquisite, unheard:

mute swan lets out a 

lament

in utter despair.

Simply Be

From its haven in the anxious dark,

Quiescent chrysalis breaks forth in winged glory

To herald the manageable rapture of a new day.

Break the butterflies free.

Bask in the privilege of Being.

Be that Truth.

Be that Joy.

Simply Be.

Becoming Joy

Festivities for the Loi Krathong holiday had begun.

I peered at the ugly shadow of the graying sky. At first it was simply darkness without texture - indifferent, not promising. It seemed like a portent of something perhaps missing in life.

Then, a commotion.

Natives from the nearby hill tribe of Chiang Mai began chattering excitedly, They are bringing out the kongming lanterns!

I had learned as much that in Thailand, people released lanterns for good luck. When they set one free, they believed that they were letting their worries and problems go away. One of the tribal folk also disclosed in a whisper, You know secret to enlightenment? Give lantern gift to monk.

I watched with curiosity as the fire starter at the bottom of the rice-paper balloons was ceremoniously lit. The lantern frames were carefully held down as the fire burned - timidly at first, then fiercely. The lanterns slowly swelled with hot air. One by one, then in twos and threes - bloated fireballs were released.

The entire scenery was breathtaking. I had previously seen lit pyres of ceremonial baskets floating onto lakes and ponds, but not fire afloat in the endless sky.

Thai sky lanterns

The kongming gamboled in the heavens like jellyfish bobbing through murky water. They banished whatever mourning there was into dancing. My sackcloth of grief had been loosened, and I was girded with gladness.


The Lord of the Dance had presided over all, enjoining me to dance, dance!

And I lead you all, wherever you may be
And I lead you all in the dance, said he.

It was a celebration. Under the luster of a Thousand Lights, my happy feet cavorted in the joyous intersection of time and eternity.

Becoming Truth

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond
or of very clear crystal in which there are many rooms.

- Teresa de Avila, Castillo Interior

How does one capture rhythms of the written word? What is the elusive imagery recurrent in literary works? What pervasive leitmotifs abound? My mind tires wrestling with the dissertion topic that has loomed large in front of me. For the past Almost-A-Year. 

I've been on a mountain-top resort accessible only by driving on treacherously curvy slopes of dirt roads. The house on the Street of a Thousand Flowers has been my sanctuary for afternoons of writing in semi-seclusion. I literally take a breather in the scent of Benguet pines breaking through the windows, after which I focus on the intimacies of my interior space. A more interesting preoccupation, it seems, at the moment. 

The writing area is just outside the curtained wall of the bedroom. Behind it to the right is a Corridor of Doors each of which opens up into a labyrinth of hidden rooms and secret niches - large and small. In some concealed corner, a wood carving of a wooden icon stands guard. Crossed spears arch over a passageway. A gentle push on the paneled wall to the right of the framed kalinga dancers reveals a stairway into the maids' quarters.

I pass through successive chambers, climbing short flights of steps through a network of alcoves - each a promise of architectural ingenuity and mystery.

Ultimately I enter the Place Most Holy, an inner sanctuary of indigenous Ifugao ethnic art.

This hideaway is a storehouse of strung jewelry beads, antique ceramic plates, and wood carvings of animal figures and anitos. I survey a row of tribal deities, awed by the immutable power of their impassive face.

In this Room Most Revered, I find refuge. It is as if a veil has uncovered the True Form where the Presence of Beauty dwells.

It is my Araby.

My Interior Castle through which my soul passes to achieve union with Truth.

Perfection.