Uprooting

By Marifi Jara

This time last year, I wrote a melancholy piece about celebrating the sea. This year, there is a happy note. Our barangay, Nibaliw Narvarte (though it will always be Sabangan in my heart), just celebrated its first Tuyo Festival, timed with the province-wide Pista’y Dayat.

Activities were aplenty and though there was hardly anything related to highlight the sea and its bounty, it was an excellent beginning for hopefully more environment-focused festivities in the coming years. To begin with, it bears thinking the irony that our coastal community does not actually source its fish for making tuyo from its own waters.

Cheers to our barangay officials led by comebacking chairman Romeo N. Imbornal and the new and re-elected kagawads.

*****

By the time this sees print, I would be off to Mozambique, a coastal country in the southeastern part of Africa which used to be a Portuguese colony.

This journey won’t be a holiday. It will be a longish temporary settling, mainly for the sake of joined souls who have had enough of years of distance spent in individual pursuits.

But thanks to the wonders of communication technology, I will still be able to serve home by continuing my editorial work for The PUNCH. The technological leaps over the last five decades have truly transformed us, the world, and our concept of boundaries.

Now we can say goodbye without completely leaving; be seemingly near even when so far. Now, more than ever, we can pursue dreams elsewhere without totally pulling up our roots.

And travelling itself enriches our understanding of home and of ourselves. When we take a trip, we always come back somehow richer, both from the beauty and dreadfulness of what we discover out there. Pico Iyer, from excerpts of his essay “Why We Travel”, writes about this beautifully:

. . .  the sovereign freedom of travelling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head.

. . .  when you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves.

For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love. .”

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. . . “

(Readers may reach columnist at marifijara@gmail.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/roots/
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