FIGHTING OUR UMBRA

To friend Sonja and grandchild Denise:

Remember our subversive nature.

The battle is always within: To rescue ourselves from our own umbra and be whole and glowing again albeit impermanence.

Impermanence. As in nothing is permanent, as the body that will eventually weaken and die. In the interim, our dark side may be a shade but it will break out like a prisoner in isolation and destroy us in the blink of an eye.

So where do we go from here? To earth, to dust that will be carried away and scattered by the wind that goes on and on and on?

Marga Denise De los Santos  Julian 

"Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. " --Eckhart Tolle, in "The Power of Now"

The Girl Coming Out Of Padsan River

     She was a wisp of a girl, no more than 12 years of age. She was coming out of the river, a water jug on her head. Seconds later, she was making the ascent on the river bank, balancing  with her small brown hands the vessel containing sweet drinking water. When she walked the flat ground, the street where I lived, I caught her smile but her eyes essayed a long narrative of sadness. They were poor like us, with no source of water except the river.

***
     "The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain."  ---Anatole Broyard

Notes To Josefino Zabala, Ex-future Nationalist Writer*

*the whole poem is included in the blogger's anthology of English-Ilokano poems, "Umayka Manen, Ganggannaet/Come Again, Stranger"




1.

Aristocratic fingers
Neither walk the yellow pages
     Of history.
Nor do they feel the pulse
Of the now-barren country
Whose impatient offsprings
Have gone away, lost
.....
,,,,
---
And the longing knows no end:
Who will miss the cool hills
     Of Sagada and Samoki?

2.

,,,,
Pinned against our cheek.

3.

The last stanza consists of 19 lines
,,,,
...
Tat end with:

By the tongues of fire-throwers
     And the politicians