anyag

02/4/12

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her grand daughter is my cousin’s one-of-my-favorite-buddies-in-the-boarding-house-when-everyone’s-going-to-the-countryside.

 

 props: Xee Cogollo

she and her husband own a very old kapehan in our little town. they have cowboy novels, hot babe calendar girl posters, schedule of cockfights. she’d usually ask me, “when are you bringing a lover around?. well, since i’ve championed evasion already, she’d forget her question when i ask her husband about her timeless beauty, her lovely bestidas and her funny way of killing flies. recently, i realized that i have not cried over something heavily dramatic. i’ve been shedding tears for everyday beauty instead- wide wide green fields, a sight of friends communicating via sign language, a big fat hug from a new friend, kind words from a stranger, butterlies in mid-air, ferns swaying against the wind on the neighbor’s brick wall. i cry for thses and more tiny things, or, maybe, i cry for how swiftly the moments come and go. that little gap of wanting to trap it and freeze the moment THEN just let its vines curl and slip away. or downwards.

 

I brought the Waygoer to this kapehan because he has this affinity for old tea houses and coffee shops. He’s been to the oldest of Vietnam, Kashgar and some places with names that I have never imagined. he handed me a pair of beautifully knitted foot covers. They’re from his favorite city somewhere in Uzbekhistan. I’ve been wearing it when i go to bed, thinking of the very moment when he first got it from an old woman who spent an hour making it with her hands. The Waygoer is somewhere else today, maybe we will meet again in Laos, maybe not… but these days, i am writing a chapter of his travel book. can you imagine that? you are writing a book of someone who has been to the boundary of China and Russia- where he speaks in hand signs and doodles.

Doodles are food for the soul. In some days, i just pause and look at/into the doodles of kids we’ve met in the mountains. Soon, we shall watch the clouds from the waterfall tubs.

 

 

This rich oneness with nature, I’ve been sharing with friends. In those 4AMs that we’d hug each other thank you, we’d take naps under sunsets, on grass, on rocks, under Cerulean skies.  my dream to find people i can talk to has been granted by the universe. this exchanges of energy, this giving and receiving and not just merely stealing of what’s unseen. and, as i write this i think of the stars again tonight as we camp and lay on our back, our armpits relaxed, cold. mind, relaxed. and the fruit trees shall watch us. 

 

these lovely friends of mine are out there too, making the shared dream happen. and in no time soon, we shall be teaching aeta kids to take snaps, mold clay and make kites. capture awe and capture that moment of beauty, celebrate the power of the hands and observe life/freedom soaring a bit without flapping.

 

Sodam wants to flap. we’ve been talking about birds and The Iluminati lately. the former for that feeling of being able to see everything from the top and latter for mental exercise. she’s studying Aesthetics: Art Philosophy at Seoul University, she learns about much from our flaws and some pimples to signal menstrual flow. Ellen, 37, child-like, tells me that there are not much stars in Seoul skies.”What is your dream?”, she asks.

 

i tell her about something very simple. she sighs and tells me they are going to come true. Skype yawns. I think of this man named Claudio (from the road, from Switzerland, from Brazil working with the kids from the ghettoes)  who asked me about beautiful ears, Murakami, Blue Valentine and —

 

“is it JUST about YOUR passion OR the people who can BENEFIT from a long-term scale”?

 

I want to tell him about this beautiful woman in the coffeeshop, the friends who has found me in this small town, the Waygoer who has lived with the tribes of Africa, the mincing toes of the sun between naked trees, the awe of reading the Celestine Prophecy, the new Le Petit Prince mug which Clytie gave, the calloused soles, 

 

but I thought about what he asked.

 

One day, I’ll write him a long mail about it. 

 

 

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