SABBATICAL NOTES. 26 JAN 2014 N1.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 26 JAN 2014 N1.

WE COUNT THE HOURS, human and finite, mortal and unforgiving as we talk about drop deadlines we have to beat. 

We are reminded we are at the mercy of un-eternal moments, and the most we can do is pray the road we take would rise up to meet us and open another world for us to get enter into, explore, discover. 

There is something tempting in the journey, and perhaps that is the only we can find consolation?

Sometimes, sometimes, the process is as good as the telos.

We have the end in sight, but the way to that end is as joyful as the dreamed-of terminus.

So today, on this Sunday, we coax our lives to go slow by seducing Sunday to go slow with us.

We sit around the living room and partake of leftover from last night's family gathering to celebrate a son's early graduation from his graduate work.

The food still tastes the way it was last night, the Ilokano noodles, extracted from the ice box, still giving off the savor one has has always depended on to heal nostalgia and the malady of craving for a piece of the homeland.

We gather around in laughter, lots of it, and long and loud, the decibels of our early morning tease of each other waking up the sleeping hedges that marked the boundary of our Waipahu lives, the boundary setting forth where our private lives begin and where it ends.

We count our blessings, and perhaps, with the endless bounty of the Maker of life, we will have more of those, or we pray for more in the hope of sharing this with others.

We travel on forked roads now, one road leading back to the homeland, the other leading back to our immigrant dreams.

Perhaps this is the lot of everyone who lives his homeland to another homeland elsewhere.

Or the semblance of another one but always beholden to the old one, with its problems also our home, with its people also our own people, and with its problems of linguistic justice and cultural democracy also our problems.

Perhaps, perhaps, we have never left home.

Perhaps, every sense of home, in real terms, is an account of continuum, of overlaps, of borderlessness of spaces in our minds.

Or, perhaps, time is eternal after all.

WPH, HI/
26 Jan 2014