I don’t remember the month of October being this drab! It’s
just a thick blanket of gray most every day and everything seems stuck in
perpetual slow motion. So after a terrible Friday night dinner-out with a
friend and a Sunday lunch with family that ended in deafening silence (of
course, I didn't help matters out by sulking), I just had to walk it off.
Months of doing the graveyard shift in a call center had
made me forget how much I enjoyed just walking around aimlessly in our village. That and the law of inertia (“A body at rest will remain at rest…”). So I put on shorts, tee and trainers and went
off on my own again for the first time after a long, long while. Aside from the
smiling lola sitting on the low wall
of their front gate and giving me an unexpected "hello", there’s just one highlight to
yesterday’s late afternoon walk. At the
corner of Jonas and Jansen streets in my village, there’s this tall, gnarled,
bare fire tree (let’s call it that since I know squat about Philippine trees). It was just standing there with its bark peeled off exposing rough white skin underneath at some junctions, so starkly
beautiful with a background of ashen clouds and shadow mountains I just stopped
and stared at it for a couple long moments.
“Everything around us sings. It is up to us to stop and listen with awe
and wonder to the music.” Aside
from my other numerous excuses, it’s also these moments of unexpected beauty of the place I live in
that has me still living with my mum, dad and younger sis.
This was
what I had been missing for the past couple of months now: endless sky, wide open
spaces and serendipitous beauty. I
missed the places “far, far from the madding crowd” I had been to like Sagada, Mt. Province and Mt. Romelo (Famy) in Laguna. I love our capital city’s cornucopia of
things to see, hear, do and taste (never mind its smells), but sometimes you
just have to throw in the towel and agree with Wordsworth that the world (of Manila) truly is “too much with
us”.
I
suspect my love of the outdoors will always be with me. I understand now that I NEED nature to
“refill my well” so to speak. At this
point, I hear Leanne Rimes belting out the lyrics of that Pinoy-videoke bar
staple (“I need you like water like
breath like rain…”), so that’s my cue to stop.
