Flying Through Cliffs

The cherubim ahead of me looked back and screamed towards my direction, urging me to speed up as the winged creature was fast catching up with us. I had burst into the branches of woods in the night forest and I had to cover my face with my arms in order to clear my view, otherwise the branches of the trees would harm my eyes and the feint illumination offered by the moon would not allow me to navigate properly through the dark woodlands, and especially if a winged creature that was blacker than the night was coming at us with full speed.

The night creature was an old woman with wired and mangled gray hair and eyes that was redder than blood. I kept looking into those fiery eyes every time I look behind me, checking out if the creature was already nearing or still farther away, and fear had never been so evident in me. The night creature had wings that were velvety, like they were made of black satin or a kind of a soft garment that are often used for curtains. I thought that perhaps those creatures knew how to sew and made their wings by themselves. I never knew exactly.

When I was a child, I had so many dreams where I was flying with cherubim or child angels. They never spoke to me in spoken words but somehow I could here them speak to me through their eyes, as if they had the power of mental telepathy. They just stared at me all throughout and I were just amazed at how beautiful and handsome they looked. The reason perhaps why I did not initiate conversation with them was mainly because of their foreign appearance. They had rounded faces and wavy blond hairs just like American babies that I saw in television back then. I reckoned that maybe they spoke in a different tongue. They were too young but their gazes seem to pronounce to me a much older and mature mind.

There was that cliff that I kept falling from every time I reach its vicinity, as I arrive at it with bursting speed right out the thick greeneries, and suddenly finding out that below me was a very steep cavity and although I was sort of flying through the air, the sudden change in height always threw me into deep confusion that my fluttering through the air became distraught and discordant. So my glide was often disturbed and my wings wouldn’t work so well that I start falling and I couldn’t stave my fall that I begin to scream so loud while my fall would accelerate. And there I was falling from a steep cliff and I remember that feeling of falling so well even towards this day, that whenever I ride the Ferris’ Wheel in older days, that familiar feeling come speeding back to me like a mirage. In those dreams of falling from cliffs, always I would wake up before I touched the ground but whenever I woke up, I find myself falling from my bed instead that my scream would be heard throughout the household. My grandfather would be awakened by my scream and he would make me drink cool tap water each time.

So in one of those flying dreams, we were again being chased furiously by the winged serpents of the night, and again I was there huffing and puffing through the woods trying to evade those night creatures, and I was scared like hell as usual. But the other cherubim were surer about themselves that they never fell and flew like they were masters of flight and in fact, they were just being playful and seemed to be toying around with the winged creatures, as if knowing that those hideous creatures won’t be catching up with us in any way. But I was so unsure about myself, and I feared the flying serpents like no other that my eyes were so wide-eyed with fright.

In order to lose our pursuers, we would thread into the thick forest and caverns at the side of the mountains and that night, we did the same routine until we finally lose them. There was great relief among our group as we proceeded to glide into the wide-open air and beneath us were great spread of grasslands with some assemblages of trees here and there, like oasis in a broad desert land. We decided to descend into a particular cluster of trees and there we settled on the branches. It was dark but the moon was so illuminating that there was some sort of daytime in the night. I could exactly remember how the branches of the trees would move and bounce as we drifted from one place to another, trying our darnest not to cause any noise as the cherubim which I always conversed with signaled to us to keep silent by putting his forefinger across his tight lips. I immediately wondered why we had to remain still and silent although I reckoned then that it was perhaps for us not to be detected again by our night pursuers. But I was to learn later on that the order to remain silent at that particular juncture in our night venture was mainly because of a group of men and women that was forming a circle around a campfire just nearby, about 20 meters away from us. The trees we hanged on were fairly tall that we could see all of the activities below with the widest of view and there I saw those people chanting some unknown prayers with their hands clasp and turgid. I saw the woman that had been one of our pursuers among the circle below and at that time, she had no wings on her back and was upright just like any human being. She was a shape-shifter I had reckoned then, a human being that could transform itself into a winged serpent when the night comes. I felt some fright again upon seeing the face of the woman who was always pursuing me, like I was her favorite prey. I felt leaving immediately but I could not just disregard the earlier instruction to stay silent. So I stayed and observed the proceedings below and the fire in the middle of the circle was blazing so thoroughly that it was reflected on our faces, while we clung to the branches with bated breath. I thought for a moment there that a male member of the circle had noticed us that he turned his gaze slowly towards our direction. I saw the eyes of the male person and they were so black all over like it has no white in them but all pupils and he looked like a dead person to me with his face pale as talcum powder.

All of a sudden, we heard the ruffling of the leaves just behind our position and we turned abruptly to see what had caused the noise. To our utter dismay and fright, it turned out that some of the winged serpents had found us again and we had to scurry in a jiffy and up we were trying to evade our usual pursuers again. Of course, we had been able to dodge them again by trying to confuse them into trees and caverns---the usual method we apply. Those winged creatures seem to have a weakness when flying into trees and dark crevices of the mountains, as if their guide system is all too flawed and far less superior than ours that it takes them so long to get out of those nooks and caverns.

And I will end this note about flying and falling from cliffs upon a certain dream where me and the other cherubim were slowly approaching the earth from a higher region of the sky, like from the clouds. As the ground became nearer, we softly and gradually descended towards a particular tree. It was nighttime and below us was a carnival that was set up so sparingly in the middle of a barriotic neighborhood. There was only one contraption in the middle of the carnival, or “carnaval” in Filipino common language, and that was a very high Ferris’ Wheel and nothing much else except for tables were men and women trooped into for some joint activity, like gambling perhaps on a dice game. There were a lot of people mingling about, as what would be expected of such event and they were walking about around the main ride while some other played card games and gambling on the wayside. It was sort of a busy scene and I saw a man in short pants carrying a child and some dogs loitering around. Just across the site of the “carnaval” was a busy and well-lighted sari-sari store where a group of men where around a wooden table, seemingly on a drinking binge. Some children where gazing and dawdling around the Ferris’ Wheel, gawking at the giant steel structure as if it was their first time to have witnessed such contraption. Around the “carnaval” where wooden houses of various sizes and style, the kind of shelters one see in a typical Filipino slum, where a few houses tower in height while others were smaller in comparison but more in number.

As I stared meaningfully towards the somewhat animated scene below, I had wondered to myself what place that was and why we came to it with evident purpose. One angel said to me: “ This is the place where you are going to.”

I didn’t responded to the declaration of the angel as if accepting it like a non-negotiable fact of life. But in my mind, I had wanted to ask why I was destined for that place and wondered to myself if there were any other places where I could choose. Like I knew that it wasn’t my call at all, I just shut up.

(This is a repost from 2006)

The Boy With The Swirling Ship

What do you know; I’ve got another vivid dream last night. No angels though yet I feel it’s worth elucidating if only for reason that it is such a lucid chunk of visions in my head while I slept so deeply and it may evoke some meanings for me or for the lives we all live.

The dream started on a steep hill in a place I have never been to in my entire life but it felt like I was in Antipolo, because the rolling hills reminded me of the place called Cherry Hill, the site of a famous landslide disaster some years back and which I was able to have a glimpse of in television and newspapers. I asked in my mind what was going on since there were a lot of people outdoors watching some neighborhood event, out in the open field while the sun was shining so brightly and the wind was warm as the summer breeze.

Some bystanders answered me: “A boy from Japan was showing some flying ship.”

I stretched my neck out and see for myself what the whole fuzz was all about. As I heard the whirling sound that went “whrrrrrrrrrrrr….whrrrrrrrrrrr…….whrrrrrrrrrrr……….”, like that of a motorized toy, I saw then what was to my eye was a colorful contraption the size of a small-sized passenger car, say a Kia Pride, lunging directly towards the sky like a rocketship although it didn’t look like a rocketship at all, at least not the specific way it had looked to me. The flying contraption look like a very small version of the Columbus---the Nasa space shuttle.

I observed the flying motion of the “thing” and the viewer could actually see the boy inside it, probably doing some navigation through some control dashboard. But with the manner it moves from one side to another, up and down, in steep trajectory and then changing directions so sharply, you wouldn’t think that it is being driven by someone, it moves more like a remote-controlled toy helicopter, so unstable and without a clear direction. I felt a lot of concern for the safety of the boy.

Yet, despite the queerness of the flying contraption, it actually earned my amazement and glorification. When the boy alighted from it, I was among the throng of men and women who trooped to him like he was a hero or someone famous. I said to him in a loud voice: “ What you got there is a landmark invention!” The boy probably did not hear my declarations that he turned towards another direction without a hint that he noticed me.

I was slighted by the boy’s disregard but I really felt that the thing was such an important discovery and it may be the prototype of a transport that would change the way we travel forever. In fact, the way it was designed earned my fancy for it looked like a very huge toy that every boy or every man with a child’s heart would like to have from the downtown toy store. The color was also my favorite---blue, yellow and red.

I will describe to you how the thing probably works. The flying contraption would lunge towards the heights by a turbo on its below, just like any rocketship, and when it is up in the air, it’s outer core would swirl so fast in circular movement that you could hear its sort of annoying, but mild whirling sound. This motion of its outer core probably was the main mechanism that keeps the thing above ground, and it has a couple of protruding wings that are also attached to smaller turbo engines. These wings probably control the direction of the thing aside from helping it stay afloat. The flying contraption moves in a speed that I have never seen before and that made me a little doubtful of the thing’s design credibility, for the safety of the passenger may not be secured.

Yet again, despite its flawed functionality, I truly believed that the invention by the Japanese boy could be build up further if only he meets the right persons that could help him find some technology companies willing to put money for its development. If the thing could work, we may finally welcome age of flying cars and finally say goodbye to the monumental cruelty of traffic jams in our streets and highways.

The boy went to see some persons in a nearby building that looked like the station of the Armstrongs in the old anime series “Voltes V”, in short it was a science building with an ultra-modern look and hi-tech facilities with a very high-ceiling. Buildings in the anime world seems all have extraordinarily high ceilings. I followed him of course and went into the building myself which I found to be completely empty although the mainframes and other electronic equipment were running since the lights on them were blinking and some sounds are whirling, a sign that some automated machines were on. I reckoned that the boy was inside some highly secured rooms busy discussing with some important personalities in the tech world. So I went upstairs but I still find the place empty as a dune. I took the elevator and went down to the ground floor and as I headed towards the main exit door, I saw the Japanese boy coming out of a room that I was not able to notice before. His face was full of distraught and I could see that he was disappointed. I knew then that the talks did not go well.

I watched him tiptoed through the tiled floor and could hear the sound of his footsteps reverberating throughout the building, the heaviness of his emotions were easily felt. I approached him thinking that I might desire to shake the hands of someone who invented what perhaps may be the future of transportation. He shook my hands so briefly and went on with his heavy walk without even looking at my face. I followed this boy who was so young and yet so arrogant and said in a loud voice, “You should bring it to the attention of NASA.” At this, he turned back and I could see that he wanted to cry. He said, “I will try.” And he went on walking, now in a hurried manner, as if he wanted to get rid of me. I just reckoned that a genius boy like him could afford some bad manners so I did not took it so badly that he doesn’t respond well to my engagements towards him. I just wanted to help him.

That same afternoon, as the day approached twilight, the boy was in the field again with the onlookers still on hand. I went to see the show again. He was with his mother this time around and they were in stiff argument as to how the thing should be launched into the air. This was in stark contrast to the smooth and confident launching he had earlier in the day. After some words, both mother and son agreed on the manner the flying contraption should be placed on the ground, and the boy step into the thing and soon the machine hummed again in a whirling sound.

The flying contraption indeed went steeply into the air that my heart leaped a bit as I see what a wondrous thing it was that such a small machine could actually fly into the air---like seeing a flying car for the first time. Yet, after a while, the thing kept on lunging downward and it was a little painful to see it struggling to keep itself afloat. The boy might be horrendously dizzy by then as the flying contraption went up and down in the air. I myself became a little bit dizzy just watching the thing fly in the strangest of manner.

Soon, the boy alighted from the flying contraption and he was sweating all over. I wanted to ask him if the ship had some appropriate ventilations but I decided against it. I approach the boy again without any inhibition that he might utterly disregard me again. He did not. I meant that he finally talked to me more graciously than before.

“It was hard,” the boy said.

“Yeah. I could see that” I said meaning to console him.

I asked the boy “Why did the thing fly so bad the second time around?”

“ I was flying on a manual mode this time.” The boy said in a sad tone. It turned out that the boy run out of hydrogen fuel and it was too costly for him to source them in a huge volume, in order to keep the thing flying for a longer period.

As we walked together towards a more shadowy area, I could feel the sadness in his breath. He confided to me that that the scientists he was negotiating earlier wasn’t sold out about his invention mainly because they said that the thing could not retain enough fuel in order for it to reach enough distance. The scientists instead advised him to find out the solution for this major flaw of his invention.

I suggested to him to use nuclear fusion instead because this kind of fuel is light and with a small amount aboard, the thing could go far. I also advised him to go to America because in the Philippines, even our own inventors do not get much support from the Government. He just nodded to my suggestions and we shook hands as we bade goodbye.

At this point, I woke up to a cloudy morning where rain was threatening. The weather made me a bit heavy inside as I remember the predicament of the boy with the swirling rocketship in my dream. I hope he would listen to all my advices and go to America where everything is possible it seems. I hope his dreams would all come true. I laugh a little inside thinking how could I wish well someone who doesn’t exist at all but only a creature of my dreams. But I remember the boy well, and if there is some sort of a police line-up, I could point to him always.

After I took my breakfast, while sipping hot chocolate, I pondered what the dream meant to me. There were no angels in it but I felt that the dream wanted to impart something to me. As I analyze the visions I had that night in my sleep, I now believe that sometimes we all have some idea that could really fly but could not fly so high at first due to some major flaws and yet, if only we try a little harder and knowing where to go and what to find and whom to approach, that idea could go a long, long way and may even change the way we live forever. Amen.

Into The Great Wide Open

When finally I was of school age, my mother got me back and started living away from my grandfather. It was hard at times to be away from my grandfather since I got so used to be with him. The giddiness and wonderment of childhood might have staid off these longings for my grandfather that I easily readjusted to newer surroundings. When I was with him, I played with my cousins, when I was with my mother I played with my sister and two brothers. Children always play it seems. They were built and created for to play and nothing more that games was like a narcotic to every child's longing and impartibility. Old habits did not die down that in the afternoon, on Saturdays and Sundays, I would earnestly find some solitary moments and played with "unreal" friends. I would climb trees alone and fish with a crude hook and line equipment in a nearby pond. My mother was living in the house of our grandaunt, Hadja Saniya, and it was an old house with a colonial built. In that place, there was some woods full of banana trees and a guava tree in the midst of it, near the pond were tadpoles litter it to the hilt.

The guava tree gave me a view from above and I had always liked the air up there. I would climb it and stayed up there for hours that I could not almost feel the afternoon passing by until twilight comes and all the children were up playing hide-and-seek or cherry base, a game where one would guard a post in order that the others would not take and conquer it by surprise and win the game.

One day while darkness crept slowly into the night, I was in a hide-and-seek game when suddenly, as I looked into the area full of banana trees, while hiding from my seeker, I noticed a little distortion in the trunks of the banana trees, and as I stared lengthily towards the woods, I noticed that a group of persons were looking at me. Some were standing while a couple was sitting in a kneeling position. They were all staring at me. They looked unusual that they had skin gleaming like bronze and their body sizes were relatively small like children's body and yet their faces looked old. I should have been scared and immediately run away but they seem to have put me in a trance that fear was absent in me at that moment. I remember it now so vividly, as I try to recollect these past events. I could even describe to you how one is put in a trance. As I looked at them, my head felt a gentle swelling, painless and smooth, as if the rest of me disappeared, except my head and my feet did not feel the ground. Again, my surroundings became yellow and everything seemed to glow despite the lateness of the day. My sight became sharper and I could hear my heart pounding and my body seemed ethereal like I was a spirit floating above ground. The one person sitting kept on signaling to me that I should approached them, because perhaps of the trance that I was put in, I headed towards the woods slowly, into the thick groupings of banana trees. As I pierced through the woods, the surroundings became brighter and ahead of me was a pathway in the forest, and I could see many of them at each side of the pathway, hanging from trees and huge stones. They all held palm leaves in their hands and shook it that collectively they made a swooshing sound that is gentle to the ear. Nobody spoke to me and nobody touched me. After a few meters of going forward, I stopped abruptly without deciding on my own, and turned back and into the games that I was playing with the other kids. It was a transition so smooth that I could say that time stood still and the event suddenly disappeared from my mind, never able to tell it to any of my friends or to my mother about the particular strange occurrence. It was only later on in life, that the memory kept coming back every time I walked into some woods with the same landscape and contour, feeling déjà vu every time, and vividly recalling details of such event. It must have been a dream. It must have been not. But dreams I could really recall to be dreams no matter how vivid they were and the forest incident was never a dream. In fact I had a dream once, about three years ago that was so vivid and yet I fully recognized it as merely a dream, not a memory of past events. In that particular dream, there was also a pond. I found myself in the middle of a wasteland, with red cracking clay all over, up to where my sight could reach. And then there was the pond that was unusually situated near a sloping hill and the air was yellowish and the sky a bit red, bleeding into many hues and concentration of red. There were no trees or a single bush in the arid ground except for a leafless tree protruding at one side of the shore of the pond and the wind was very still and motionless and the only sound I heard was the poundings of my heart. If you could perhaps imagine Mars and its landscape, that was how the dream looked and felt like.

The pond was of fair size in a shape that is almost perfectly circle. It was a small pond indeed with a radius not more than ten meters. I climbed the barren tree and sat there looking into the water, undecided about my next move. I could see the water inviting me to jump, almost feeling the coolness that it harbored; the dewy color of the water was refreshing to the sight. There was some life in the pond that I felt it could talk and communicate as if it was a creature on its own, with a head and a torso, and the tentacles of an ancient mollusk. I stood up from one of the tree's branches and dived into the water. The splashing sound it made as I entered the water reverberated throughout the heavy air that I could hear it rumbling even while I was deep into the water. Such sound made me reckoned that the pond was deep, so deep in fact that I kept going further and further into the water and I could not see ground. As I went deeper, there was exaltation inside me, a sudden gush of joy that became more and more prevalent as I dived deeper and deeper. But even as I go further into the water, I could find no end, as if it was a bottomless pit. I was insisting to lunge deeper when suddenly I felt a hand grabbed my body and pulled me towards the surface. When I reached the surface of the water I realized that I could not swim that the man who grabbed me had to help me reach the shore. There were actually two men that helped me get out of the water, as I lay there gasping in the banks. I examined the two men and observed them carefully and to my amazement, they both looked like me. They were my twins if only in that particular dream.

I sat there at the pond's shore while the two men stayed in the water, so expert in their swimming prowess that you could not tell from the surface if they are really moving their hands and feet to wade above the waters. That was the time that I saw this vision of an old person who looked like an old woman in a very long white dress. She looked so old that I had initially thought of her to be a ghost but despite such apprehensions, I could not move and continued to stare at the apparition. She approached me slowly as she floated through the wind, her feet entirely above the ground. As much as I thought that she was approaching me, as much farther she had become. It was completely a distortion of physics and of sight. She moved away from me, hovering towards the top of the nearby hill. A smile was pasted on her crinkled face that somehow I felt reassured that she meant no harm. She pointed towards the tree and through my mind, she instructed me to dive once more into the water. And so I recreated my previous dive and the sudden gush of happy emotion was there again as well as the temptation to go deeper and deeper. To seek the ultimate depth, the bottomless pit. The water offered such narcotic feeling that the two men had to grab me and pull me up before I go so much deeper and became lost into such very fearful depth. Every time I reach the shore, I dived again and then dived again until I was able to swim on my own, having gained the patience not to go deeper into the water.

And the dream went into a blur. The last recoverable image I have got of that dream was the old woman dancing atop the hill, while floating, and swaying her arms sideways and roundabout, as if ordering the wind and all the elements to move, and the air moved. In fact the entire atmosphere was in a whirl.

If dreams could be so vivid, nothing could top that particular dream where even when years had already passed, I could still remember the details, and the minutest of emotions that I felt. It was one of those dreams that once I woke up, I had the feeling that I had been transported from one place towards another instead of the general feeling of waking up.

Of dreams and of past memories therefore I have a healthy recognition and have reasonable distinction.

It was also in my Hadja Saniya's front yard that I also had another experience of trance. Again, we were playing a catch-me-if-you-can as twilight was already heavy into the night that it was only the full moon in the sky that gave us sufficient illumination. When the moon was full, us children would play into the night and it was sort of a ritual for us every time the moon appeared at its fullest. Before night came, the older children would inform all of us that the moon would appear in the night so we had to prepare for the night games. They say the night was full of monsters and ghosts but when the moon was full, even the olds would be in the yards to enjoy the mystic of a moonlit night.

The extra playing time we've got made us giddy and a little bit livelier. Every one seemed to laugh and snitched, until we were all laughing incessantly as we go running in a circle continuously and I started to hear laughing voices not of my friends but of some other persons'—old persons'. I stopped moving while the others kept running in circles, and the laughing voices faded as if I became suddenly deaf. And I stood there petrified and my body moved independently of my will until I was positioned apart from my playmates and gazed towards a guava tree whose leaves was crumbled due to the coolness of the night. The night became a little bit darker and my friends disappeared into a blur, as if I was the only person on earth that night. There was a red flickering light in the middle of the guava tree. The spark of light flickered so slowly as if someone was blowing it again and again. I squinted my eyes and I saw a figure of a huge man with the head of a horse, and the flickering light was at the end of what looked like a huge cigar. I could see figures in shadow because the tree was just about twenty meters away from where I was standing. The figure then changed into the figure of an elephant. After a few moments, I saw the shaped of a whale, then a horse head again, then of a monkey. The shape kept on changing and changing. The occurrence took about nearly an hour but when it ended my friends was still running in circles. I felt a sudden loneliness that I started to cry for no reason at all. I saw my mother coming after me and asked what was wrong with me. The other kids said that we were just playing. My crying caused the disruption of our over extended play into the night. Somehow, I could not remember telling my mother or anyone about the strange figures I have seen. Funnier still, when the day after came, nobody mentioned to me that I acted queerly by just standing there and crying so suddenly. Just like those other strange memories, I always failed to tell anyone for reason that is perhaps beyond careful remembrance. It may be perhaps the feeling I had then, even up to now, that no one would believe some queer stories anyway that it was not worth telling in the first place. Such memories faded in my head as the years went by, to recur as deja vu in later years.

All these experiences had one major tread that are similar to all and that is the feeling of entering into another dimension, penetrating an invisible wall that divides this world from some other parallel existence. I have a great feeling that those events were planned by some supernatural beings, as a way of introducing their presence here on our material world, to declare that they are here.

*****************

Hadja Saniya was unlike other elders we had. The more she got older, the sharper she had become. She had been tending a store and kids like us could not touch the goods as easily, in order to put some candies into our pockets without paying for it. All day long she played solitaire and was all too engrossed in it. I have learned one lesson or two about playing cards from her. At age six, I was already crazy about solitaire. At age nine, I was already gambling with the older cousins and uncles, playing poker and baccarat.

She never spoke much but she was always ready with the broom every time we did some mischief in the house, even those malefaction we did outside whenever news of such reach the house. One afternoon, words got to her that we took some bits of pork meat from some neighbors grilling a whole swine. I did not have so much beating from anyone as much as I had from her. That was my first religious lessons. Moslems do not eat pork she screamed and gnashed and from then on, I never touched the meat for a long, long time.

Her house would have been so grand when it was newly built as if centuries ago. While I was scrubbing the floor and wiping the dusts from furnitures, I imagine it to be a classic house made of wood, somehow Spanish in architecture but always remind me of American houses that I often see in the movies, just like the one in American Psycho. Her husband died years back that we did not really saw him alive but his picture hanging in the living room reminded me about how handsome he might have been, a man pure in Middle Eastern blood, leaning to the Turkish rather than Arab. He might have been a cinch with the ladies in his younger days. I imagined their stories of adornment. Perhaps, he was a handsome young man then, setting eye upon a fair Samal lad, and some other girls. He must have been a rich man to put up such a house. In Moslem wedding engagements, at least to those who were prosperous, all the matters are never settled in one sitting, at least not in one grand ceremony, merely climaxing upon such explosion of merriment and celebration. There would be the engagement procedures where the family of the male would bring all kinds of sweets and delicacies wrapped in colorful packages. In recent times, they used colorful cellophanes and Japanese paper when in the past they have to make use of carefully garnished garments and expensive silk from china. The china man brought these things and porcelains in exchange for the gold of the local tribesmen. There must have been a lot of gold vein in the area of Zamboanga that there were old pictures of Samal tribesmen flashing those teeth that glitter even if the photograph were in fading black and white.

Imagine yourself in a stock exchange as quoted prices flew by here and there and you would be able to feel how the parties negotiate for the amount of dowries to be taken by the family of the would-be bride. The spokesman for the male party would offer all the things that were superfluous like four heads of cow or a pocketful of pearls and morsels of gold. The father of the bride-to-be would of course negotiate for a better deal until the two parties meet at one delta of understanding. About a year after the agreement, the wedding ceremony would take place and in those olden days, it would last almost a week of merry making and festivity. The gongs would reverberate throughout, day and night, insistent and almost to the point of annoyance to the neighborhood. The best dancers would be invited to take turns, as the bride and groom are kept apart until the last day of the ceremony. There was the persevering smell of rice cakes and pastries made of mustard and egg, the kind that I always look for whenever I am in such activity, identifying the area of the kitchen as early as possible and then reconnoitering the area like a vulture. I usually fill my stomach with a lot of native coffee as the supply was bottomless and unending and every adult would took notice that such young child would spoil himself with nerve wracking amount of coffee.

Even in her fading years, Hadja Saniya looked fair that there was no doubt that she had deserved such grand wedding from the "Turkish" suitor.

Years after, the house of Hadja Saniya was graying and the paint on the walls subsided that there was an apparent darkness everywhere. When night comes, the darkness is more pronounced as silence complements the general dimness. The smell of old wood always lay heavy upon my nose that every smell of wood reminds me of the house. Dirt stuck to the decades old walls invites me always to stare at them and I reckoned then that the dark stains on them formed the shapes of men and other unlikely beings. The house was alive I thought then and it breathes into our lives every moment we happened to be there. In the night, these shadows become sharper that I thought I saw the shade of an old woman always while the lights are out and I lay there trying to find sleep, turning in my bed while cuddled inside heavy fabric, sweating profusely from fear of shadows.

I would sweat so heavily from warmth as I resisted the terrifying shadows of an old woman sitting just at the foot of my bed. There were times that the fear ate so much into me that I screamed and cried in the middle of the night. My father thought I was just missing my grandfather that at midnight, they would deliver me to my Uncle Mameng's house nearly ten kilometers away.

Of course, I would have to be back with my mother when school finally opened. The shadows finally came at lesser frequency and besides sleeping together with my brothers kept me somewhat reassured. If that old woman would strangle me, at least I would not be the only one to be strangled.

I could not tell if those shadows were really ghosts or spirits but I felt so sure that they breathe a life and they were unmistakably the shape of human beings.

My real sighting of a ghost came years later when I was just about ten or eleven years old. I could remember some particulars as I relate this to you now. It was near midnight, on one weekend, when most of the members of our household stayed wide awake to watch a television special; it was a late night movie if I am not mistaken.

Usually when the night comes, I had felt dutiful always to check the back door if they were safely locked and shut tightly. That night, before I sat to watch the show, I reconnoitered the kitchen and locked the door after reassuring that every chore in the kitchen has been done. As the show started, I felt a strong urge to relieve myself that I headed for the comfort room, situated just to the left of the kitchen. As I turned towards the direction of the kitchen, I saw a figure of a woman in white gown, with her hair down to her knees, walked pass the hall leading to the kitchen.

" Is someone still in the kitchen?" I asked.

"Everyone is here. Why?" quipped my Aunt Coney.

"I just saw a woman in white walked by in the kitchen hall!" I exclaimed.

"Do not kid us like that." She warned.

"Really. I did saw a woman"

We all stared at each other and after a moment, we all scurried for the main bedroom. Every one was blaming me for playing some wicked game on them and I kept on denying them.

"It must be your imagination." they all indicted me.

Half an hour later, we were back in front of the television while I was feeling so sick already from fear. I had no choice but to join them in the living room otherwise I would be alone in the room.

While the television was glaring, a sudden wind blew forcefully from the window and rain poured instantaneously as rumbling thunder shook the house. It was just another bad weather, as we disregarded the weather's tumult and stay stuck to the television show. Perhaps the wind was so whipping that small bits of stones were thrown at our direction, entering thru the window.

"Damn it. Someone is throwing stones at us," Coney said and we all peered into the window to investigate the malefactor and we find exactly nobody outside as more bits of stone came at us. The sound of thunder became extremely forceful that the lights went out. By this time, I could already feel the fear that had enveloped not only me, but also the rest of them; fear has a smell I realized that moment. In the middle of the living room, a small whirlwind was lifting the small stones towards the ceiling in a circular motion and while the stones circled above ground, the wind suddenly stopped and the bits of stone fell simultaneously to the ground. We all screamed and run to the bedroom.

It was strange that the day after, no matter how patently strange the experience we had the night before, everyone was merely jesting about it while Hadja Saniya simply dismissed it as the playful imagination of our minds, us who were still tender in the head. She was deep in slumber when the strange happenstance occurred. Even those who were present in that strange occurrence simply forgot about it, never mentioning it again. My Aunt Coney just did not talk about it. My brothers Nasrullah and Akmad and my sister Rimaisa just went to the yards and play the usual games, as if nothing happened. If I remember well, my cousin Nimfa and Mernisa was present then and similarly, they never took it so seriously despite the common terror we had felt that night. Where in contrast, that unusual night were etched forever in my mind.

The eldest who was there was Aunt Coney. I had expected her to convince the others that some spirits really played fun on us but she acted as if the strange night was merely a usual occurrence, and did go on with the ordinary chores, as if nothing happened, as if she was expecting such things to happen ordinarily. After that night in fact, she had slowly gained isolation from the rest of us, at least it was how I have observed her to be. She would walk along and would give me that iniquitous stare that I felt somehow uncomfortable that she had suddenly become so mindful of my presence that she would shout at me easily if for example I happened to touch the expensive jar in the living room.

I reckoned that she had blamed me for that strange occurrence in that one strange night.

First published: 11/28/05

The Pond In My Dream

The Pond

One night in 2001, some months after my last job in the government was terminated, I was stuck in bed gazing at the ceiling and was in deep thought on what to do then with my life. I had a job offer from a friend but the pay was way too low compared with my last paycheck that I much rather tried some other options then, like taking the bar examinations the following year. It was hard turning down that job offer especially when the offer came from someone I knew too well. What if he had needed my services that badly? But then, I had a future to take care of and so I had to inform him quite honestly that I was preparing for the bar that summer and it wouldn’t be in my best interest to have my hands full on an accounting/marketing job. I had to take some risk I had decided then and go for the farsighted plan that could offer me probable long-term benefits than be stuck with a dead-end job.

Perhaps it was too much of youthful diffidence in me that at some nights I had shivered just thinking how the realities of existence is not what many of us had supposed to be when we were much younger, that the world is at times a dog-eat-dog existence where one must claw up the ladder just about every time, even to the point of elbowing others and stepping on their shoes just in order to find a semblance of meaningful existence.

That particular night, the weather was so warm that even when the electric fan hummed at its fullest, I had perspired so monstrously that I could almost hear my sweat dripping from my skin. Drip…drip…drip…I turned on my stereo and listened to an aria of Andrea Bocelli and the coolness of his voice made me feel a little better. Conte le partira, Paesi che non ho mai…Vel dutto ver sutto conti….Conte le partira…

And then I fell into a sleep that wasn’t like sleep at all for it felt so much like I have just glided from one dimension of existence to another. Unbelievable as it may seem and yet those who believe in parallel existence may just sympathize with me on this. Perhaps you’d start to think that I have become so much of an inexhaustible dreamer that I started to live more of my life in dreams than in the real world. I won’t blame you for that for sometimes I feel that way already.

In that dream, I found myself suddenly bursting into a barren landscape where the ground was red all over and the air was smoky as yellow smog floated like grimes on the atmosphere. I gazed around and I could see a nearby hill gradually rose from the ground and I could see wide plains and gray mountains from afar. The sky was red, like a bleeding wall to my sight. I could see no bushes or any form of greeneries around and if you’d seen some photographs of Mars, then you might have the best of idea of how the place appeared to be. The air was so still that I could hear no sound whatsoever that every step I made I could clearly hear. I felt my feet a little harassed by the crackling ground below me, those plates of mud solidified by too much dryness. I decided to walk further until I reach a point where the smog cleared and in a sudden I saw a small pond just in front of me, with a leafless tree standing along its shoreline. The tree reminded me of the guava tree that I used to climb when I was a child. I could remember that guava tree only too well because I had fallen from it twice before and it was there that I saw a strange creature of the night, a huge manlike being with the head of a horse, with some burning object flickering from its mouth, perhaps a giant cigar, just like what our elders had always said about kapres.

I stared into the pond and saw that the water was a familiar blend of yellow and green, like dew, and it was so calm that its surface didn’t moved at all. That was how I reckoned that it was a very deep pond by just looking at it. Shallower waters are always fragile to the eyes.

The water in the pond looked so inviting and it seemed to have spoken to me like it had a life of its own. I went to my knees and smelled the water. The scent that it evoked gave me a mild exhilaration of emotions that it became all the more tempting for me to dive into the water. I touched the water again and a small amount of it in my hands was enough to quench the waterlessness of my body. Still, I was hesitant to go into the water as its depth intimidated me so much and I wasn’t a good swimmer. Suddenly I heard some rustling noise behind me and I immediately turned to look at the direction of the sound. As the smog cleared, a women in a white gown appeared and she initially smiled at me. It was a little unusual that I never felt any kind of fear the very moment that I saw that floating woman even though as I write this particular passage, I have goosebumps all over me. I stared at her and wondered what’s the purpose of her calling me into this dream. I wanted to ask her why she wanted to meet me but spoke nothing instead. In that dream, I did not remember uttering any words; in fact not a single word was spoken by anyone in that dream. I really had initially felt that it was the woman who had called me to that dream and that she had some important message for me.

I wanted to express so many things to the woman hovering just in front of me but I struggled to mumble even a single word. After a while, the woman stared at me so intently and it was a little strange for me to realize that she could actually speak to me by just merely looking at me. And slowly I had also realized that I could get all my thoughts across to her even without uttering any word. She told me through mind talk that there was something that I should know and some person had called me into the dream and not her. Then she moved slowly towards me but as I thought that she was coming closer to me, she actually went farther and farther from me until she disappeared from my view. It was a completely spellbinding distortion of distance and space.

Then my gaze was turned towards the nearby hill that I had mentioned earlier and there appeared another person that was also in white gown, just like the woman had worn. I thought at first that the woman and the person floating above the hill was one and the same person but as I examined more carefully, the person on the top of the hill was actually an old man with a white flowing hair that was too long; too long in fact that I had mistaken him for a woman in a glance. He had the face of a very old man and to tell you quite honestly, the old man looked like Leonardo da Vinci, the one most of us had seen in many self-portraits of the legendary Italian artist.

The old man caught my eye and without saying a word, he ordered me to dive into the water. I hesitated at first but the old man was too insistent that he kept on pointing towards the pond. Again, it was sort of a distortion of space and distance that despite of the distance of the hill from where I stood, I could see the old man quite so clearly like he was just nearby.

As if the old man had suddenly gained control of my body and mind---even from a distance---I slowly took steps towards the tree and climb it, this despite my clear wavering. My climb was swift like I was a trained scaler of trees. As a child, many of my playmates teasingly dubbed me as “Monkey!” for I had always loved climbing trees when afternoon came. On a period of the day when most kids in the neighborhood took their catnaps, I go play by my lonesome instead and climb trees. My favorite tree to climb then was the Datiles beside a small fishpond that bore so many ripe fruit that I picked and gobbled in my mouth. I have grown to like the sweet nectar coming from the Datiles fruit. The guava tree on the one hand does not bore any fruit that we kids rarely climbed it. There was also a Chico tree about five thousand feet farther from the Datiles and it is where most of us kids love to climb the most and where we play catch-me-if-you-can games atop that huge tree, would you believe. It was so dangerous to play games while hanging on branches because a simple mistake or a broken branch would surely send the unfortunate kid plummeting down to the hard ground. It was so risky but as kids, we did not realize that.

Let’s go back to the dream. And so I was finally atop the leafless tree looking downward to the small but deep pond below me. I had gained enough balance on top of it that I virtually stood upright like I was standing on a diving platform. The height of the tree was a little mesmerizing to me, about the same height of a two-story house and this had made me more hesitant of jumping into the water. The particular inhibition I felt when I was atop the leafless tree always gets back to me as a familiar memory every time I was in the same circumstances in the real world, even when I was still a child. This dream of the pond happened only about four years ago but some scenes in that dream came to me as a form of déjà vu even when I was still so young and fond of bathing in many rivers and oceans that are found in Zamboanga. Perhaps just like any locality in the Philippines, Zamboanga has just too many places where one could enjoy the water, from the beaches in Cawa-Cawa (its so polluted now that bathing there is prohibited) to the gushing riverways in Pasonanca, far deep into the forest. It’s sort of a strange distortion of time and space when the scenes in a more recent dream came as déjà vu in my childhood days.

It took me some moments in deciding whether to finally jump into the water or not; until that final moment I held my breath so steadily and immediately dived into the water. I felt those moments while I was on the air, as if in a slow motion, as my body plunged right into the water. I felt those feeling of free falling again, like falling from cliffs and beds in my other childhood dreams. Finally, I hit the water and heard the water splashing just as I was entering it. I found myself inside the pond looking upward to the surface. Above me I could see a ray of light while down below was complete darkness. The water was so cool to my body that I felt a sudden elation and regretted for a while why It took me a while to decide to jump into the water. I felt a general happy feeling, an indescribable feeling that made me forget all those previous fears and hesitations I had earlier. The water was solid and thick like it wasn’t any ordinary water at all and I could feel them strongly on my skin. I did not sway my arms or shuffle my feet in order to stifle my fall into the pond for mostly, I had enjoyed being inside the water that as I fell deeper, while I just let my body gradually settle into its depth, the more feeling of elation I had felt. My body went deeper and deeper into the pond and I did not fight my fall even though there was some moment that I realized that the pond may be a bottomless pit that even while I was getting deeper and deeper into it, I could see nor feel any ground below it. Worry started to descend upon me when I could not still see the bottom of the pond. I started to panic but before panic had taken hold of me, I felt some hands grabbing my shoulders and suddenly I saw two persons pulling at me and steering me towards the surface of the water. The three of us swiftly returned to the surface of the water and once I came out from it, I paddled my legs so furiously to stay afloat and see for myself who were the two persons that pulled me out of the water. The two led me to the shore and I climb towards a drier area and stared back into the pond. I examined the two men who remained afloat in the pond as I realized how strong they were for they had pulled me out of the water in such a swift manner; they must have been learned swimmers. They remained afloat the water and yet I could not see them move their hands or feet. It was a cunning way to swim I thought then and I concluded that they were not just ordinary swimmers, but extraordinary ones. I gazed at the faces of the two men in the pond and then I started to realize that they both looked alike and that they may as well be twins and that they both looked like me although they had longer and much muscular body. I mistrusted them for a while for they seem to be mocking me by pretending to look like me and my distrust had become more emphasized when the two men maintained stern faces all throughout, like they were soldiers, like it was illegal for them to smile or show a gentler countenance. I turned my gaze towards the hill and wanted to ask the old man what was going on and I saw him still hovering and his white dress flowing steadily from a passing wind that I did not feel or see, as my immediate surroundings remained so very still and not a single sound could be heard.

The old man stared at me so meaningfully and then I could see how he had the gentlest of faces, one that evoked great love and adoration that I immediately felt assured that he won’t lead me to any harm or injury. He had seemed to be so fatherly and I could feel his great warmth even from a distance. He signaled with his hands to me once more and urged me to dive into the water. This time, my earlier hesitation and uncertainties had already vanished and I climbed the tree with great confidence. I dived once more into the water. I heard the water made the splashing sound again, a noise that was refreshing to my ears and once again, I felt the elation that remained indescribable; a certain feeling of sudden joy, like a narcotic perhaps if one could actually know how this element works.

I floated again inside the water and all around me was the thick yellowish-green hue of the pond and I could see no walls nor bottom but the water was clearly refreshing and my soul was lifted again. I still did not fight the gravitational pull of the bottom of the pond, which actually appeared to be without end, as if it goes on and on until forever. I had wondered what the bottom of the pond looked like and what it had to offer me. Maybe there was a lost kingdom down there or a secret hideaway that could give me more joy and elation. The feeling of elation was so addictive that I wanted to go deeper and deeper but the two men who looked like me appeared again in the scene and pulled me out of the water. This time, they did not have to grab me as I rose with them towards the surface of the water and I had risen on my own accord---they just had to notify me this time that I was already getting too deep into the water. I remade and remade my dive into the pond and clearly I had grown ponder of it all the more that with every splashing of the water---as I break into them by a nose dive---the feeling of elation gets more and more emphasized. The last time I went into the depth of the pond, the two men did not have to grab me anymore for I have already decided on my own to rise to the surface of the water when I had reckoned on my own that I was already so deep into the pond. I was left alone the moment I finally gained enough discipline and patience not to go too deep into the water.

The last scene of this particular dream was me standing on the edge of the pond and watching the old man swaying his arms to and fro, from east to west, from north to south, like he was dancing some sort of an exotic dance that was completely unique and never heard of. It was a ceremonial dance it had seemed. As he swayed his arms from side to side, the wind move more dynamically and the yellowish tint of the atmosphere vanished gradually but swiftly and became clear like the atmosphere that we have now. And clouds in the horizon suddenly appeared and moved like there was a swirling storm until they settled over the hills and mountains. The old man was apparently controlling the weather and he was making the environment more and more pleasant to the sight. The brown hills became green and grasses and bushes started to grow from the ground until all around me was thick with lush greeneries and there was a forest just nearby. Then the sky became blue from its former hazy shade of red and I could see winged creatures gliding through it and everything became brighter and sunnier.

That is why I have said once before that when I saw an angel dance in the Manila sky in the year 2002, while I was there preparing for the bar examinations, the dance of the angel was so familiar to me like I have seen them once before. Now I can now point only too well that it was in the dream of the pond that I had seen the dance first. Nights after I saw that dancing angel in the sky, I was alone in the boarding house where I stayed in Manila (the boarding house was named BH Boarding House, a former office building that was turned into a students’ lodge, and it is just right beside a catholic center named after St. Lorenzo along Legarda St. in Sampaloc, Manila) as the other occupants went for a weekend getaway. It was nearly midnight and I was still awake reading law books. I felt the urge to drink some coffee so I went to the kitchen to prepare hot water. As I entered my room, I felt that someone was following me and I turned immediately to examine my back and for a split second, I saw the image of the old man hanging just above the air, right at my back and he looked so much like the old man in one of my dreams, which is this dream of the pond, and no matter how I saw that apparition, the old man looked like Leonardo da Vinci with a very long white hair, sharp noses and a very old face. I should have scurried away out of fear of the apparition but it was strange that I had felt no fear whatsoever in that particular moment. It was a span of days in my life that angels started to appear in my view, whenever I stared at the night sky and shadows on the wall and a bearded man on a huge throne that perhaps, the sight of the old man hovering just above me was not that surprising to me anymore, that I just disregarded it and proceeded to read my law books that night.


In the morning right after I had dreamt of the pond, I immediately went to search for a pen and paper so that I could write down the details of this vivid dream. At that time, I hadn’t still an inkling that I would be seeing angels in the future but I had felt so strongly then that the dream was too real for comfort like it was a story by itself, complete with plot and characters. I had in fact written down the details of that dream that morning and even typed it in several coupon bonds in order that I may be able to keep and preserved it. The way I wrote down the tale of the dream was in the form of a short story that in fact when I finished writing it, I had mailed a copy of it to the popular magazine Free Press hoping that it would be published as a literary piece. But after waiting and watching out for over one-too-many many issues, I have given up expecting that it would be published. Maybe, if one has connections in the Free Press organization, you could confirm the veracity of my story by looking for that submitted piece titled “The Pond” which I sent through mail in 2001. I lost the only copy of that written narrative about that pond and so I have to reconstitute it this way, remembering the details even without any aid of past writings, and completely writing from spontaneous memory.

What did the dream meant to me? Perhaps you might ask this question. For me, it was a dream that foretold to me so eerily of the things that I have to encounter in the future and how every dream of mine has a certain singular thread in them that every one of it evokes important messages to me and to humanity as a whole. I’d elaborate more in the coming entries about these messages because this entry has gotten too long and long entries often go unread. So I hope you’d be watching out for my next entries.

Ogden Kronengekel: A Wanted Murderer

OGDEN KRONENGEKEL---such is the name of the main protagonists inside my dream, other than myself of course. Have you had yourself a vivid dream? In my childhood days, I had numerous dreams of these sorts, the kind that are so crystalline in clarity that some of them I could still recall until now. I usually dream about angels in the past, flying with them into tree-lined outfields, and falling off from cliffs if I lose some footings while in the act of flying. Every time I fall from the air in those dreams, as I lose control of my body movements, I also fall from my beds that the falling sensation felt so real and everyone in the house could hear me scream.

My dream about Ms. Kronengekel (yes, she was a woman sporting jet-black hair falling down towards her knees) about three nights ago wasn’t purely about angels although some parts of it were about them cherubim. Unlike my other dreams, this one involves a narrator who whispers to me some facts that I need to know as the story progresses within that dream.

The visions in my sleep started as the narrator introduces me to the beginning scenarios (the narrator’s face does not appear throughout the dream and whispers only to my right ear as if he was afloat above ground just behind me and moves accordingly as I moved forward or backward or to any direction. He also has no name but in my mind he wears a huge black hood, just like the one wore by Death.). He introduced to me the people in the story. There was H. a friend who I knew in real life and the narrator also informed me that H.’s father was Mr. P. Mr. P. is a bailer of those arrested for crimes.
And then there was Ms. Ogden Kronengekel, a beautiful lad who always wears white t-shirts and fading jeans. When I was in Silliman University for about a year nearly two decades ago, I could recall that most students there wear this kind of generic outfit---white shirt on the top and faded or tattered jeans down below. It was known to be hip to dress so casually, a coy on pretending like a poor man when one looks so rich. I didn’t dress the same when I was in Dumaguete City because that kind of outfit needed a bunch of Levi’s 501’s which I only have one at that time. So I just was hip in few instances. The white shirt and jeans needed another garment and that was the bandana. In those years (somewhere between 1989 and 1991), to wear a bandana is to bring tribute to rock music, especially glam-rock music and since Axl Rose of the band Guns and Roses wear them always, a hip rocker ain’t hip at all without the head accessory. In those years, riffing guitars and bamboozling drumbeats emanates from every nook and corner of Dumaguete City and as freshmen students, we became so involved in the glam rock movement that spurned notable bands like Bon Jovi and Poison. In those pre-grunge days, new wave bands still had major clamp on the radio listeners and it was the times when the great Irish band U2 reached its artistic peak with a couple of great albums titled “The Joshua Tree” and “Rattle and Hum”. Making the “Joshua Tree” album for them was such an achievement already and yet within a year, they were able to released “Rattle and Hum”—how good can they get?”So the dream was centered on a murder that I have got to know for reason that I was acting as an investigating officer in it and my work companion was H. All along H. wore a casual striped t-shirt, walking short and sporty beach sandals that I wasn’t really certain if he was toddling along with me in the investigation as a police officer himself, like I was, or just an ordinary companion. We went on scurrying up the whole facts of the case and proceeded on unraveling the mysterious death of a certain C., a fairly known rice trader in the city. If he was fairly known in the town despite his being merely a businessman (you know, as differentiated from high profile professionals like doctors and lawyers), it only means that he wasn’t just an ordinary businessman but a very successful one.

The main scene that really stuck vividly in my mind was the one in a downtown store that the victim Mr. C. owned. Me and H. went there to question some people about the murder. In actual times, the store really existed somewhere in San Jose Road within the city limits and it really sells rice, lots of them. When we got there, we saw Ms. Ogden Kronengekel walk by us and entered a small doorway just beside the rice store of Mr. C. and proceeded to the second level of the building. Throughout the story, I never really seen her face yet I knew she had a foreign-looking countenance. She was pretty, so pretty that she was familiar almost to every one we knew.
H. remarked to me: “ That’s Ms. Ogden Kronengekel. Ain’t she pretty?” I said,
“ Yeah, I am familiar with her. You know, from school.” I then asked: “What she’s doing here?” To this question, H. just smiled and shrugged off his shoulders meaning that he does not have an idea. The way he smiled was a little insidious as if he knew something interesting that I do not know.

Then the scenes went into a cornucopia of various images. Just like any dream, the scenes in my mind change without lead ups or preludes and images and happenstances there intertwine like a spider web or a twirling spiral, at times without rhyme and reason, and they interlope upon each other like layers upon layers of sand.
The next memorable scene was the narrator telling me all the bits of information about the mysterious persona of Mr. Ogden Kronengekel. I bet I must have all the information I needed in order to solve the crime inside that dream—and Mr. Narrator helped a lot on this. Mr. Narrator said that Ms. Kronengekel grew up in Norway until the age of 5, and came to Zamboanga in the year 1986, the year when millions of Filipinos marched into the main highways of Metro Manila to overthrow The Strongman former President Mr. Marcos. Her father was of course Norwegian who married a Zamboangueña nurse then working in one of the big hospitals in Oslo, the most popular city in Norway. On the first time that Mr. Kronengekel went to visit the city, when he and Mrs. Kronengekel was still planning to tie their marital knot, he immediately fell in love with the local weather and particularly the beaches in the islands farther up north, and one just nearby town which is known as Sta. Cruz Islands. He decided then that he would not spend the rest of his life freezing among frozen lakes and icy boulevards in the Baltic Region and planned a scheme on how to make Zamboanga as the Kronengekel’s domicile. After five years of saving every penny they gained in Norway, they packed all their worthwhile things and settled here in 1986. It was rough times in the Philippines at that particular time yet Mr. Kronengekel did not allow any political disturbances to stifle his long-awaited journey to a land which according to him where the sun always smiled.
For quite sometime since they came here, the Kronengekel’s enjoyed a buoyant life full of travels around the country. You could really see for yourself how a man craves for seawater and sunshine in the way Mr. Kronengekel would stay in the water for hours and hours without getting ashore, snorkeling even in places when corrals where not all abound. In most of the beaches of Zamboanga, there are exactly no corrals or sea life to snorkel about except if one gets too deep into ten feet high seawater which would be a little risky with the sea currents so strong around here. There was even a story of some amateur boaters who went toddling in the night water in one of the resorts here while being a little drunk from alcohol. They paddled too far into the sea and apparently lost control of their boat due to the swirling currents that twirls and swirls like giant spirals in the span of both the Sulu Sea and the Celebes Sea. They found themselves in Indonesia a day after.Mr. Kronengekel applied as an English Instructor in a nearby college and was hired initially as a part-timer. Yes, he had professional trainings in the languages, especially in English from a fairly known American University and worked before as a professor in the English Department of a known university in Norway. He became an instant celebrity in the local college and became instantly popular with the students. A blond-haired lean man nearly six foot tall walking along the walkways of a school in Zamboanga was not exactly an everyday occurrence but with Mr. Kronengekel around, it was a daily sight for the students who could not help snickering and making some hush-hush and whispers, every time he passes by.

One day, Mr. Kronengekel caused a minor rumpus inside the campus when he just walked away one afternoon from a class he was tutoring and shouted along the hallways, “I can’t take it anymore!!!” Apparently, he was having a nervous breakdown and never entered the campus again, not even once. The talk about him in school did not die down as easily and went own like a legend being told and retold.The day that he found a certain man was the day that started his slide into the downward spiral of a doggoned life. This certain man was a student he befriended in school for reason mainly because this certain man had easy access to a drug seller in one of the mean streets of this town. Everyday, he would take in some puff of marijuana like it was his staple food---morning, noon and night. He was introduced to this illicit item in one of their travels to the islands farther up north in Visayas by a German tourist who took him for a couple of drink one cold night in the beach. He knew it was improper to take the item but he was too pretentious to let the German guy know that he is such a snob. In person, he is naturally a shy and introspective person but he was always inclined to hide this shyness when among a crowd, which he considered as his major weakness, and tend to overdo his show of coy extroversion by a mile.

So he smoked that illicit item just to do away with the German but it instead became the moment of his future desperation. At first, the stuff made him extraordinarily full of jest, snickered with the German to no end and laugh so hard even at the most humorless joke. His appetite for food became gregarious but what finally made him got hooked was the fact that the grass gave him a feeling of lightness that he never had before.
As his new habit progresses, Mr. Kronengekel had developed a general indolence that made him lose more focus in his daily tasks especially in his vocation as a teacher and soon started to miss on his own classes. He had been called twice to the Dean’s office until that one fateful day when he just stepped out of the classroom and never to return.

Mr. Kronengekel regressed so steeply into a man of unkempt behavior and soon Mrs. Kronengekel left home and went abroad again to earn when the finances of the family dwindled. Ogden Kronengekel became a “motherless” child at the age 9 and lived with aunts and cousins except when Mrs. Kronengekel was here for very brief annual or bi-annual visits. Mr. Kronengekel just wandered around the city drinking with by-standers from every mean streets there is in the city and huffed the prohibited item almost always until one day his body was found lifeless and stiffed as a rock near a city creek; probably by self-infliction as no contusion or bruises were marked on the corpse, and every possession in his body was intact, including a very expensive wristwatch. He just perhaps jumped into the shallow river and drowned himself by having so much alcohol to drink.
At the age of 12, Ogden Kronengekel goes home to a parentless shelter except for aunts and cousins she could bully around and whom she does not solicit for advises. The lack of sufficient moral guidance and the tragedy in her lives had affected Ogden so much that she became a wanderer herself, nearly like her father, taking drugs and alcohol in the night streets often than we breathe, never finishing college and running around with a lot of different men, even in illicit affairs. She became a creature of the night, as we know the term, hanging among many groupies in the city and creating troubles in the night streets as well as the streets of their own lives and of other lives.I asked my friend H. about the person of Ms. Ogden Kronengekel for I could not forget his strange smirk the last time we saw her within the vicinity of the murder scene of Mr. C. At this moment of questioning, we were in the office of Mr. P., H.’s father and the owner of the bail company.
My friend H. told me: “ There is no more need to ask questions. The murderer of Mr. C. has been arrested and he is out on bail, care of our bailing company.”
He handed me the folder of the murder suspect and saw for myself the front-view, left-view, and right-view pictures of some youth with browning hair and dark oily skin, with eyes protruding from perhaps lack of sleep or extreme tiredness. It seems all petty criminals looked like the guy on the folder in my hands, except the case in hand was not petty at all.

I asked in my mind why H. remarked immediately that the murderer was already apprehended when I only asked him about Ms. Ogden Kronengekel’s person. I smelled something fishy and wanted to create a line of thought from this unusual answer of H.. I wondered of course, since I was the investigating officer in the case, how come I didn’t know the arrest of some suspect on the case I am handling myself. In the Philippines maybe, this sort of things happens and since we were inside a dream, everything could happen indeed without explanation. The narrator made the story short and since Mr. Narrator seems to know everything, he saved me a lot of police work.
It turned out that Mr. P., the owner of the bail company, with connections in the police and in the Hall of Justice nearby, created a scenario where the murder has already been solved by the arrest of a pretending murder suspect, the skinny guy on the folder. Mr. P. was able to convince some fish vendor from Rio Hondo to pose as the murderer on the agreement that he would be bailed out after a couple of days of detention and then he could disappear to wherever he wants to go. The guy needed the money so much and the offer was hard to refuse.We asked perhaps why Mr. P. was interested in undermining the truth behind the murder Mr. C.. It turned out that the real murderer was none other than Ms. Ogden Kronengekel, the half-Norwegian wanderer and spoiled brat and Mr. P. was Ogden’s new paramour. Ogden Kronengekel was still then involved with Mr. C. and Mr. P. wanted her to get rid of him. Ogden got rid of Mr. C. in the cruelest of manner, the details of which could not even be spoken here for decency measures. You say, Ogden Kronengekel developed psychotic tendencies as she progressed through a life full of desperate measures.

It was H. unusual answers that gave me the lead to the final resolution of the case and at the end of the dream, the murder of Mr. C, the well-known rice trader in the city, was finally a case resolved.Now, I have said earlier that this dream of mine, which happened about two or three nights ago, was in some part about angels. Where are the angels? This is where the angels come in.

When Mr. Narrator elucidated to me on the true persona of Ogden Kronengekel, I forgot to mention to you that she was also a singer with a local rock band and that explains her rock-and-roll attitude. While telling me this particular fact, Mr. Narrator gave me a view of one of her performances (the narrator seem to have the power to go back and forth in time and view some happenstances in a three dimensional screen where the viewers are in it although unseen by the people inside the screen, like in Hollywood movies where there are repetitions of past events, like for example Bill and Ted’s adventures of years ago.)

So Ogden sang a song that was unlike any other song. In fact, despite the catchiness of the song, it was not a song that exists in real time. It was a song I have heard only in that dream. As she sang the song, heavenly choruses were backing her up. As the song progresses, I was taken through a time warp to a place where there was a low hill with trees lined up together like they were planted with great planning in mind and the air was so breezy and the sun was so radiant. It gave me a feeling of great joy like it was Paradise. And the place just faded after the song.

Ogden Kronengekel’s voice reminded me so much of Tori Amos. In fact, her voice was a beautiful combination of Tori Amos’s and of Fiona Apple’s. In real time, I doubt it if there is a woman living with this kind of vocal prowess. But the choral backing in the song of Ogden Kronengekel lifted me above air and gave me a gladness of powerful elation. Cherubim (with trumpets in each hand) sang the choral rendition behind Ogden Kronengekel’s main vocalization. What beautiful angels they were and what beautiful voices. At the end of this post, we can now ask what did the dream meant to me and what message it tried to invoke? I do not know. Some dreams of mine, even as vivid as they were, just do not mean anything except that they were about angels and the angels remind me always of places and times that gives me fond memories and great joy. In my childhood, my dreams of angels were just about flying and nothing much else. No message. No declarations. Their declarations came not by dreams but through other manners instead, which of course if you are a constant reader of my works, you should already know by now.

Some characters in the dream above narrated may resemble some people I know in actual time but the resemblance was unintentional and does not portray their true persons’ character. Dreams are just dreams.

Taberlok, The Moon Man

There was a time when my grandfather was telling me the story about “the man in the moon”. In moonlit nights, long after my grandfather died, I sat and merge with the cold wind and studied the geography of the moon’s surface. He called the man Taberlok, a scary name I surmised then. He rode the sky in a magic broom and had a pointed trumpet-like hat. He comes down once in a while my grandfather said, looking out for kids who did bad things and taking them away into some other world, never to return again. I shriveled at the proposition that I gained some distrust against my grandfather. How wicked Tamberlok was I thought for children only wanted to play and laugh all day long.

But Tamerlok was not a one-dimensional freak after all as my grandfather continued. On the other hand, according to the old man, a good kid was given a wild and happy ride across the stars and beyond. And it would be a very enjoying ride my grandfather always reassured me.

As I grew older, I reckoned this tale to be purely made up but somehow I kept staring at the moon when the moments were perfectly at hand. I had hoped very much that my grandfather was the real “man in the moon” in order that he may come and took me a ride across the meteors and along side those speeding comets. If he was the moon man I thought, I would gain the wild and happy ride, because I had been generally good with him, at least as I had believe then.

When he was alive, he would always take me with him whenever he had to go downtown or visit some relations. It was a happy walk always that before we went home, we passed by the store to buy some toys or new garments.

At times I stared at the moon so fervently that at one time or another, I saw a face with a huge grin pasted on it. The moon was sometimes a person, living and breathing. They say when it was at its fullest, ghosts and winged serpents would appear and roam the sky and the earth, but to me, it was another chance to summon the man in the moon.

I called upon the spirit of my grandfather also whenever I pray, after calling out to God. It was extremely difficult for me to memorize those Muslim prayers that after trying my best, I gave up and decided that I should settle with the prayer of the beads which only three words were muttered in Arabic. I conformed then to the idea that every prayer, as long as it was genuine, was good enough. There was this Tasbi that my grandfather had which I kept until now as a remembrance and I used it in my nightly calls to Allah. Since he died, my night calls gained sufficient frequency. I called on Allah and confessed all the things in my heart. The things I did in the day and all the things I did not. I felt so sinful then that not at one instance merely that tears would flow down easily from my eyes. “I am despicable”, I admitted always. I call upon God and sometimes I could interchange Him with my grandfather unknowingly that my tone for my meanderings were indistinctive, irregardless if I was confessing before God or summoning my grandfather.

Of Vice and Virtue

Of vices and virtues of men, who am I to enquire upon and much less to elucidate upon? Such aspect of humanity is they say the territory of wise men and sages. Am I a prophet? Am I a messenger?  Not me to answer these queries yet it is The Lord that has called upon me to be the bearer of His messages.

 

Man is but an imperfect creation of God. This imperfection seems to have been implanted to us as part and parcel of our nature for as we have discussed earlier, no man is perfect.  But to this I say, the imperfection of man is never enough ground to accept that man is a grievous sinner. We err at times but to sin must not be one of our intention or purpose. To err is human but to sin is evil.

 

We are sinners by nature not because we intend to sin but we have merely erred. For every whole or being, there must always be a margin for error. For every creation, there is always a chance for imperfection.

 

It is error that precedes every sin that redeems the man, which is to act without evil intent, where there is in fact no instance of sin but that of a mistake. It is not a sin to have done something wrongly without intending to cause harm or without knowing its consequences. There would be error and sin is unlikely in such instance. It is the intent that counts and not the outward actions of men. There are those for example who prays each day and yet in their homes, they are fornicators. On the other hand, there are those who are less pious in the eyes of men but in their secret lives, they are great philanthropists. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man unclean; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him unclean. It is not to defile a man to eat with an unwashed hand, but what defiles a man is the evil that comes from their hearts.”[1] 

 

When sin precedes error (to commit error upon the premise of intent to sin), pure evil permeates. To take something without knowing fully well that it does not belong to us is an error. But to take something fully knowing that it is not ours is sin at its purest form and an error no more and never an excuse for being merely human.

 

It is not merely an error anymore for a man to cause harm and injury upon others with malice in its mind for is never justified except in defense of person, country or of faith.

 

The occurrences of evil are never justified by our admittance that man is imperfect by nature for this would encourage the conduct in men where many are prone to sin because they believe that to be human is to sin always. They would go on saying “ I am only human” and this declaration becomes the end-all and be-all justification for their sinful ways. The Lord does not see in grace men who circumvent the divine law. Despite His greatest of mercy, He had punished men before who gravely defied His edicts and judgments most notably the men and women who were caught in the sulfuric fire that descended upon the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

Our imperfection merely allows us to err but never to sin. Therefore, it is foolishness to justify our misdeeds by invoking to the Lord that we are sinners because we are only human. That would be undermining the very complex and reliable human processes of determining what is right and what is wrong—the workings of the mind and heart. We underestimate the intelligence of human beings by saying man has no logic and common sense as well as a conscience by admitting that we are sinners by habit, that being left alone upon our own devices, we could not be relied to do good and avoid evil.

 

On vanity this I say: Vanity is one of the test of us being humans. Vanity is already present in each and every one of us the moment we came out of our mother’s womb and is but part of our human nature. We comb our hair and that is vanity. We iron our clothes and that is vanity. It is vanity that leads us to become better persons, to be more presentable to others so that others may relate to us with ease and not to maintain a close door to every man’s face.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                Vanity is virtue therefore.

 

But vanity had oftentimes become a vice to many of us nowadays. It is vanity that leads us to steal so that we could have a better bungalow than our neighbors. So that we could wear designer clothes just as others do for without the Italian leather shoes, we feel nothing in front of our friends. This is destructive vanity, a kind of vanity that takes control of our will and not us taking control over it. As a virtue, vanity propels us to go forward and work harder and strive further, to be more progressive in mentality so that we could be like others who had fully earned things without committing any mischief, and achieving upon pure ability.

 

If we could use our vanity properly, it could be the wind beneath our wings, allowing us to scale higher grounds and thereon makes us better persons, driving us towards exhausting the possibilities of our potentials, to strive for nothing less than the best we could be.

 

But when vanity becomes a vice (especially when envy complicates matters), men are often led to commit malice to attain things they do not deserve. For example, if I see a colleague who had become so successful as a salesman. For certain I would admire him and relish at the things he have. In my mind, maybe I could also be a salesman and earn as much as he do. But if I lost my spiritual balance, I would certainly feel so much envy at his very enviable position. And that envy upon the vanity of others and upon my own destructive vanity would lead me to do things otherwise unacceptable to me that at worst I would already steal so that I could attain his level of fortune. I would more or less put him down in other men’s eyes so that he is not that as enviable anymore.

 

Vanity as a vice brings forth evil in the scale of small and great. It had oftentimes led many of us to gossip against our neighbors and in extreme cases it had led some to kill or injure others. Vanity had led countless personages in history to instigate war among nations great and small, to prove who is the better nation or the nobler race. It had led to the rise of many empires and the destruction of the same and along the way as the blood of thousands of men, women and children poured upon the tarmac of battlefields upon the mere cause of vanity.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                And so is it the same with envy. Envy is also a virtue but at most times it is a vice.

 

Envy is a nature of man that could not be set aside. It is already in us at the time of birth. If we use envy as a virtue, it is a wind to our will to go forward and strive in life so that we would have things others have. As a vice, it would lead one to destroy the person of another so that he or she may not have that too enviable position anymore.

 

Envy is a feeling of want and lack of possession, material or otherwise. It is the nature of man to feel so lacking and wanting the moment he witnesses the greater fortunes of others---in abundance of wealth and comfort. The sight of a friend driving a brand new car would elicit the immediate feeling of envy. But it would foretell the kind of man you are on how such envy affects your person. In some, it would be good envy for they would feel the need to scurry for more and to work harder for if a friend could attain such possession, I could also. In others, it would lead to gossiping and the doing of misdeeds to attain such fortune in the most convenient manner. Like vanity, envy could lead us to do evil things in order to catch up with the rich neighbors, to have that state-of-the-art cell phone or to have that fancy car. Like vanity, envy had led also to many great wars even from the time of emperors and kings, to the woe of their subjects and people trampled to the ground, bludgeoned and sacrificed for the reason of envy.

 

And so is the feeling of anger. Anger is but a nature of man that is as clear as the sun rising from the horizon. Anger is a nature that is also undeniable in each and every one of us. In fact, it is more undeniable as a nature of man than vanity and envy.

 

To be angry is not to sin per se and not altogether to cause harm or malice against others. In its barest form, the feeling of anger is a defense mechanism of our personages, to enable us to thwart and purge things and condition that are injurious or unacceptable to us. To have anger is to warn others that my own self is a universe of its own, a universe which I protect and shield from the menace of others. My body is my temple and nobody shall encumber or pierce it against my legitimate will and desires. My body is a kingdom by its own, a whole cosmos which I could at least have control of. When my enemies stage a siege against this kingdom, I have no choice but to defend it and lead it away from harm’s way. In so long as my path is in the way of righteousness, my anger is my shield and when everything fails, it also becomes my sword.

 

In connection with the feeling of anger, the feeling of hate is at the same time both beneficial and deleterious to us. To hate is not to sin at all for to hate is to be human. But many times we hate for baseless causes or reasons, and that is the kind of hate that leads us to sin. Our hate and anger is never justified if we hate others just because of their faces or the color of their skin.

 

To be human is to feel the feeling of hate for we are indeed but a creature of emotion, an emotion that is in perpetual motion. We were not created as robots moving upon a set of mechanism.

 

To know the feeling of love fully is to know the feeling of hate fully. To see light is to come from a point of darkness. To rise above the level is always to start from a lower ground.

 

Like anger, hate provides us a mechanism in which to thwart all things unacceptable to us. It is a wall that no one should pierce by his or her own mischief. For certain, when evil approaches us, we exhibit hate in order to warn others from not pursuing such evil act, as we turn them away and repel them immediately. When our concept of good and evil is healthy and proper, our hate becomes the most formidable shield against the menace of evil that we could easily maintain the level of goodliness that is acceptable to the Creator above. That another man is capable of hate is a fact we should always assume as we carry on with our relations with others, so that we must always ponder upon our every actions and deeds, not to be hasty in words and shall by no means abuse the persons of others. It is the existence and capacity for hate that no man should treat others without pondering upon each action and deed. A man has hate that is why another man should always take enough caution in relation with him. This may be summed up with the Confucian edict that declares, “Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you”.

 

Upon the feeling of hate still, while this a part of human nature, existing even at the time of birth, such sentiment is often times manifested today through prejudice against another man’s race or creed, to discriminate merely by reason of race, to explode the fragility of the differences in man. I am white and you are black. I am a Catholic while you are a Muslim. I am English and you are Irish.

 

The conflict of the white man against the black man in the days of old, is not as we thought diminished by the many changes in our modern society. Of course, there is no more slavery and no more White South Africa, but still the same issues rage amongst that many conflicts still hounds our world today. The civil war between the North and South states in the Americas may be just a part history now but the same element of prejudice exist amidst the recent ethnic wars in the Balkan Regions, in the seeming annihilation of the Kurds in Iraq, the ferocious Middle East conflict between Arabs and the Jews, the segregation of Chinese descents in parts of Southeast Asia, in the war that tears Southern Philippines for decades now, the Islamic movement in Indonesia, and the Irish revolt against the Queen of England.

 

Through burning crosses and ethnic cleansing, hate continue to permeate in our world today, to pursue volatility in the differences of men instead of allowing these differences to unite men. Even in our everyday surroundings, hate and prejudices abound upon causes entirely self-indulgent. There are the rich who would not touch any poor man’s hands. There are the bourgeoisie looking down on the masses. There are the greedy capitalists abusing the fruits of another man’s labor. There are the huge landowners who give pittance to the hands that cultivate their land. There are the college frat men who sneer at others just because they are nerds. There are the Muslims who hate Christians and Christians who hate Muslims just because of difference of religion or culture. It is groundless hate that results into conflicts, conflicts that are both small and great.

 

The sentiment of hate is a defense mechanism that we should employ against the abuse and mischief of others but never to perjure others. Hate is often dangerous and volatile that if you multiply the hate of a single individual into the number of the people in a population, it becomes disturbing to the point of harming the world order. The Holocaust happened because the hate and prejudiced of a few men were multiplied into many that such massive loss of lives resulted. When we use the feeling of hate improperly, it is disastrous and destructive.

 

Then there is pride. Pride is also a nature of man that is already obtaining at the time of birth. And what is to be human if being human is not to have pride. Man is proud by nature and it is not wrong to feel pride. Pride is also a wind beneath our wings, propelling us to become better persons. I have pride so I have to look out upon my own devices and not depend upon other’s beneficence. I would strive upon myself to do things that are expected of me and along the way I would realize that I could do things that I thought not possible before. It is the feeling of pride that harnesses our potentials so that we may feel proud in the eyes of others. To be proud is to feel good. There is no denying a man’s prerogative to feel proud for to be human is also to feel proud. A man needs to feel proud in one way or another in order that he or she may live meaningfully. I also have what you have. I am at the same level with you. I am with you. I am one with you. And therefore embrace me as I embrace you.

 

Pride frees us up from the grasp of mediocrity and shoves us to find our true worth by leading us to exhaust every potentiality of our capabilities, and thereon allow us to live a full life without regrets. Pride makes us enjoy the true meaning of life, to be a force by our own selves and a force to others, in order to affect the lives of many.

 

The author who is proud of his writing continues to entertain many through the stories he tell. The painter so proud of his works continues to delight the sight of others. The singer so proud of her swooning voice endears herself to others by her soulful meanderings of love and devotion.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                But the pride of an individual is at many times false.

 

False pride would certainly lead us to a life of misdeeds, leading us to commit transgressions that are otherwise unacceptable to us. In order to be proud in the eyes of others, many would steal in order to gain approbation.

 

It is also false pride to feel more worthy than others on the basis merely of race and creed. I may be a doctor but without the fishermen in the sea, there would be no fish on my table. It is not wealth that makes us prouder than others, but the works we do for others and the society as a whole. What good does it do to be proud in the eyes of man and yet lose the graces of the Creator above?

 

Pride as a human nature propels us to become better persons, a wind beneath our wings. But false Pride kills and destroys not only others but also our own persons, leading us to steal and kill and to manipulate others so we could be proud in the eyes of other men, a kind of manufactured and artificial pride and not a pride well-deserved. Therefore, we must learn to use our pride in the most balanced manner.

 

Upon the sentiment of greed, it is also both a virtue and a vice.

 

Greed is a vice or a misdeed, as we know it today. We despise Mr. Scrooge for his selfishness and for being such a killjoy. We hate the conceptual fat and greedy businessman, full of fatty wealth and profits. We abhor the child friend who does not let us play with his toys.

 

And yet, if we examine ourselves, the feeling of greed is somewhat instinctive to all of us. We do not usually part with our things as easily. We ponder at length before we give them away. Even the most venerable philanthropist would feel this way because greed is a nature of man that we could not dispel.

 

Upon the other hand however, the feeling of greed allows us to survive, coming from a point where human has great instincts for survival and self-preservation. It is a virtue to be selfish sometimes. It is a mechanism instituted in our nature as a method of survival. The cave men protected their territories from the infiltrations of strangers in order that they may have the grounds from which to hunt and harvest their food without limitation and therefore protecting themselves from the pangs of hunger and the consequential risk of extinction of their tribe. They would protect these hunting grounds to the hilt, with blood if need be. These were also apparent in the natives of lands like the historical America and the old Philippines where blood stained the grounds in defense of territory, in protection of lands to which they live and allowed to live with unbounded and unguarded mobility. To feel greedy is not at all a vice or sin if it is towards self-preservation. You must not take the food out of our table in order for us to live. You must not take away my work through mischief and self-aggrandizement for you would take away my daily bread.

 

Nowadays however, greed propels the motives of men who merely look out for their own interest. There are the wealthy capitalists and huge landowners who take advantage upon the fruits of labor of their workers. You may have a thousand acres of land but without the workers to help you create wealth from such land, it is useless to you. You may have discovered the formula for soothing liquor, yet without the hands of the men and women that works in your factory (in order to produce your discovery in mass number) there would be no great wealth or benefit for you. You could implore the help of all your family relations, of all your friends and neighbors and yet you would not get so rich even if you have a thousand acres of land. You may just have to sell it to get compensation but tilling it is of no benefit to you without the help of hundreds of farmworkers.

 

The need to fill our greed have become insatiable that many today have so much wealth and yet they become the more greedy and continue to pile up wealth which they could not bring to the grave, a wealth so vast that even their great-grandchildren would not be able to expend it. As the biblical verses remind us all, what good does it have for a man to have faith and yet do not have works?

 

What is faith to a man when there are many sleeping in the coldest part of the streets with barely a garment above their shivering bodies, where some are living in ultimate squalor of the slums and dying in piles of garbage? Can faith alone save him and gain the graces of the Creator? What good does it do a man to have pleasures here on Earth if he shall lose the graces of the Lord? For certain, God would not allow greedy and selfish people into the Kingdom of God. For God is like a father who has many children, some children became wealthy and there are some who languish in poverty. As a father, you feel sorrowed to watch some of your children suffering that you call upon your more fortunate children to give a helping hand to the less fortunate ones, for the suffering of my children is also the suffering of the father.

 

All in all, it is the acceptance of the fact of the very imperfection of man that should impel us towards “perfection”, to be closer to the ideal self, the righteous self. It is not to be perfect that God wanted us to become, but it is merely to be righteous for in life there are many temptations and traps of morality, and yet the righteous man is fortified by his strong faith in the Creator. His will is good and temptations of life’s excesses are of no match to him or her.

 

It is undeniable that to be human is to feel anger, hate, greed, and pride. We are also vain by nature. But to be human is not to feel improper anger or hate or to be so greedy that you take advantage upon the labor of others or to be so proud that you encroach upon the persons and possessions of others to assert your false pride---building empires of your own so that you may alone take the richness of lands not of your own roots.

 

Today, men monopolize businesses so that they may have all the wealth and opportunities merely for their own. Men put down others so that they alone could be employed or be promoted. Landowners fail to share properly the fruits of the land so that they alone become benefited. What does it do to you to have faith and yet others lay naked in the streets? Does faith alone enough to save you and gain the rewards of the Creator? “…and though I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and have not loved, I am nothing.”[2]

 

You could feel proud with humble clothes on your skin. You could be vain if you are merely a farmer or a fisherman that you do not have to steal or kill to further your need for vanity and pride. Vincent Van Gogh died so poor that he died with a messy look on his person and yet no painter could claim more vanity than him. Leo Tolstoy defied his wealthy heritage and decided a life of humility and yet only a few writers are more influential than him.

 

Life in this material world is but a temporary sojourn or foray for all of us that ultimately, we should realize that the existence of man does not cease with the decay of the flesh. Moments after death takes the breath away from our mortal bodies, our soul would merely slide into another world, to face judgment as to what world you have prepared yourself to be with—either in the blissfulness of the Kingdom of God or in the suffering of an Eternal Fire.

 

Life is too short many say and none could be truer than this. What does it do to you to gain so many pleasures in this temporary world, even to the extent of committing misdeeds, when after your foray in this world, you gain everlasting sorrow and suffering anyway? Why fret upon the suffering brought about by poverty and a life of want and need when after all, after this sojourn on earth, you would gain everlasting life of peace and harmony in the Kingdom of God that the Creator had prepared for us. “But many who are first shall be last, and the last first.”[3]

 

To be human is to be imperfect but to be imperfect is not a reason for us to sin, but merely to err.

 

 

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[1]Matthew 15: Verses 19-20.

[2] I Corinthians 13 : Verse 2.

[3] Matthew 19 : Verse 30.