"How? How do I retrieve my own memories of indigenous knowledge and indigenous spirituality when colonialism has robbed us of the language with which to speak of the knowledge we still feel in our bodies and in the depths of our Loob? When what we have is the language of the West and the language of a theology that is the language of the West and the language of a theology that is difficult to translate? When we aim to be understood by transnational and diasporic peoples whose engagement with the world is also determined by discourses not of their own making?...our spirits have need of nurtures, mythic and symbolic, rooted in the soils and souls of primal cultures so that we might have an amulet against pathological forgetting forced on us by modernity...." -Leny Mendoza Strobel
He flashes through my mind at certain moments, especially in the past month when I feel his spirit and his memories so vividly that it feels as though he is calling me. Sometimes it seems as thoughI could breathe him in, he is so close. I was no one special to him, just a companion in the last few months of his life. Not a lifelong friend. Not the love of his life. Just a passerby that happened to love him very much despite our differences, despite our weaknesses, despite the depression, the confusion and the anger that would suddenly show themselves during our time together.
He is hard to forget. His smile, his eyes, his voice, his determination, his focus, his love for his family. No, he is an unforgettable man. It’s been more than a year and when I feel his presence, I often wonder where he walks, if he is now passing by me, reminding me of his vibrant existence during this life.
Walk in peace. We miss you.
May 14, 2011
I look out the window as we pass conifers and desiduous trees native to the Northeastern United States finally beginning to bud after a long, cold winter that I had the great luck of missing. As the winter thawed and I found myself back in a world full of frozen, bronzed spirits and surrounded by pure artifice, I thought that the buds of spring would re-energize me and bring me closer to the endless summer that I had left behind.
There are days when it works. When I can breathe in next to a body of water and feel my spirit shudder in anticipation. There are days when it doesn’t. The leaves look tight and rigid to me, as if they are bracing themselves for their impending death in the fall. The branches and trunks, too stiff, too straight, too thin to make my heart beat harder. They stand far from one another –isolated and almost awkwardly misplaced.
Unfairly, I compare those sharp, pale leaves to the expansive, bawdy green of home. The branches that grow endlessly and the trunks that bend under the weight of its fruit. I romantically remember how those trees and leaves disappear into themselves, never letting you see where he ends and she begins, mated restfully until a breeze causes him to turn here and her to shift just there.
I wonder why I torture myself with such comparisons and remind myself that after all, I was born here! Mama wasn’t even pregnant with me when she left home. That I could understand. If I was conceived in the humidity of February and forced to fly to JFK while being jostled in my liquor amnii, I might understand my spirit’s longing to lift itself from my body and visit for a little bit. I almost wish it would, in the darkness of my sleep -just leave and catch its fill of home so this void wouldn’t continue to punch me mercilessly at the most inopportune moments. Fly through the muddy terraces and warm waters for hours only to burst back into my body with my first waking breaths.
Sometimes I urge my spirit to leave while I’m awake. Leave my body in a trance while you collect the remnants of a place I miss so acutely. I won’t mind.
What is calling me home? Who is calling me home? I can’t see their faces. It is my own? Is it simply myself? Will I always feel broken in two when I look out the window? Places that were once so familiar, places that defined me are now secondary identifications of where I came from. Does my ancestry supersede my circumstance? Will I ever just be able to simply exist?
Do I want to?
A bird shrilly calls, crickets chirp and I feel my blood lift in response. At night, I lie awake, straining to hear the bird sing. I know this creature for some reason. It sings alone, reminding me of home, reminding me of myself. Besides the regularly scheduled trains passing, it is the only sound I hear at night. All should be sleeping, but this bird sings as though its breast is sweating under the heat of a noontime sun. It reminds me that somewhere, far from here, it’s daylight. Somewhere far from here, birds and people sing and sweat under the noontime sun. While I sleep, someone calls and my spirit flies to meet itself where dreams and reality merge into one.
