By Rex Catubig

 

THE past week held us hostage in a cliffhanger situation, dreading the landfall of Typhoon Kristine, who from all accounts, is the personification of the saying: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Close on its heels, another typhoon named Leon, like a spurned lover, was on a hot pursuit following her trail. And this Roadrunner and Coyote chase had wreaked collateral havoc along the path of their dangerous liaison.

I have had traumatic experiences with typhoons. And recalling them triggers morbid yet conflicting emotions that linger in my mind’s “area of responsibility”.

Like the dilemma I was caught up in several years ago.

Spurred by the warning of an oncoming howler, I rushed back to Dagupan after a lunch meet up with college friends in Manila. Much to my distress when I arrived, an ankle length flood water had already menacingly crept into the living room of our family house. Sensing a worse scenario, and feeling helpless, I fled right away and sought shelter elsewhere.  After several attempts at checking in, I found myself a hostage of the weather gangster in a value-priced nondescript hotel room with a tiny 32-inch TV as window to the windswept world outside.

I tried to make sense of this forced retreat but ended up more frustrated.

The wind was howling outside when at 5am, my phone rang and roused me. Our house sitter reported that the upstairs windows had been felled by the raging winds.

My heart sank. When I switched on the TV and peeked into the ravaged landscape through the small screen, I was greeted by the pixelated images of less privileged brethren, who despite being shaken and shivering in the cold, and having irretrievably lost the little they have, were just grateful they had survived. Looking dazed and gripped by despair, their eyes somehow gleamed with a ray of hope.

Yet, here I was, inconsolable in the comfort of a hotel room, pulling my hair in misery, agonizing at how our family house was being battered and humbled by nature’s uncompromising wrath and behest for obeisance. I was windswept.

Learning of my predicament, a friend called to assure me. There’s not much you can do now, he calmly said, that house can be fixed, and you are safe. It’s what matters.

That led me to do a double take and a hard look at my value perspective, at being self-engrossed. The lesson that the sinister typhoon jolted me with, was the awakening to what is essential. It blew off my cover–stripping my material fixation and emotional attachment to ephemeral concerns. I realized that when all seems desperately lost, what remains and what wins is spiritual strength, the power of faith, hope, and love—which no typhoon can ever blast away into kingdom come.

And I thought of another friend, who even in the midst of chaos and calamity still manages to go about her usual business –brightening up her world of coloring books, posting Norman Rockwell vignettes of her ordinary life, being proud and enjoying the vicarious thrill of her novelist daughter’s rave reviews, meticulously fashioning precious “necklockes” out of sundry remnants  –and time and again, she loses her herself in the moment, and lovingly thinks Christmas.

Her heart is never a lonely hunter, her mind always a happy camper.

It showed me the power of positivity that deflects the wrath of dueling typhoons and turns things around—transforming the mundane into the sublime, the barren into something nurturing, the imminent harm, to a challenge of change.

Even when downtrodden, the force of positive perspective enabled me to look at the debris, death and devastation with kind eyes, without negating the destruction done, but accepting the cycle of inevitability and understanding and finding ways to cope with and make sense of the stormy lessons in progress.

Bagyo ka lang, tao kami.

You can howl, bend us, kill us; but as the sun rises after the typhoon passes, so shall we.

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