SABBATICAL NOTES. 25 JAN 2014 N2.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 25 JAN 2014 N2. 

IN THE MIDNIGHT HOURS, the house is a hermit's monastery now, like the one in Guimaras Island where you went last time, there to pray, there to commune with the Life Force, there to revisit what you have missed after calling it quits with the vowed life. 

Something has got to give, you told yourself. 

And you remember that day when you finally called it quits, and left everything behind those walls, including the friendship you have built up among those who learned to write poems of the walled life like you.

In the evening hours like this one, memory floods you, the bitter ones first, and the joyous ones next as if these are scenes of film that traces your story of prayer and protest.

For you, these two were the same, synonymous, equal.

You prayed.

But you protested too.

Resign Movements have become a fad for you and like stale air, you do not want anything of these anymore.

You remember your days being holed up in one room and calculating how else to express the rage of a people cheated by their government, a people demanding that the rule of its leader must now come to an end.

You thought writing those manifestoes for distribution at a rally was easy.

When it came down to the real act, you realize you needed the language of the streets, the cadence of anger, the rhythm of bodies massing up to challenge barbed wires before a palace haunted by excess, abuse, and deception, and the cumulative power of repeated burning of caricatures of greed and betrayal of public trust.

You see the contours of the same problem today with people entrusted with public office and yet unable to do what is just even if doing one does not require a lot of effort but just a minuscule of love.

It is a deja vu, this.

But tonight, we think of the ways to translate into action what dreams there are in one's head.

We go on in this life, and we hang on to the promises of daybreak.

We will never say, No! to the challenge ahead of us.

WPH, HI/
25 Jan 2013