The song I heard

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

LATELY, as I spent more time in the garden, I am able to sense more things. At a far distance, someone is playing an instrumental song I have heard before but could not remember where. I struggled to remember what it was, but what I remember is the feeling associated with it. That song reminded me of a trip somewhere where there was a vast expanse of desert in front of me, and trees growing in between cracks of solid rocks and a modest area of vegetation behind me. I was alone with a backpack, but there were others moving around the place, others are huddled inside a house. The space breathes. It breathes a solemn presence that is absorbed even in spaces already occupied by other things. Even when science reminds you that no two things can occupy the same space at the same time, you know that it encroaches, and finally inhabits your existence. Like it owns you. Like you belonged to that space and time.

So what was the song? I cannot remember. There were no lyrics to it. Besides, I was distracted by the scent of the kamuning (orange jasmine), which has now mutated the song with the wafting of the soft breeze. Mutated but not muted. In between the remembering and the smelling, the past and the present dance in unity to a future shaping itself with the givens, the outcomes almost predictable, as if with the exactness of mathematical equations, except for the unknowns.

Too many unknowns, given the “superiority” of the human race, making the scientists and the physicists as accurate only as the astrologers and the religious in terms of what could be. But all of them, including the charlatans, weave themselves into tunes, atmospheric tunes that shape human consciousness, sometimes unharmonious and without rhyme and rhythm, but nevertheless the song eventually seeps into consciousness, nurtured and overlaid with the composition of other voices.

But that is not the song I heard. I heard a tune that is soft and gentle and reassuring, coming from a distant place that is somehow connected like an umbilical cord to my vocal cords. It is primal, a cosmic melody from somewhere, which can only be remembered fully with faith, love and the fullest attention.

 

The Hem of Her Garment

Perhaps.

I can only approximate your beauty

from the visual glimpses of your reality

with the limits of my vision

and the stirring of my senses

that you are She

to most, a He

 

at times, an apparition

in the eyes of the blind who long to see new colors,

feel new shapes in an elephant just touched

or in the smile of a drowning child smelling the shore

from the sea salt drying on her parched lips

 

at times, an inspiration, a Muse

in the hands of a felon carving art

or in the heart of a poet

singing poems, glimpsing hope,

from the hemline of Your garment.

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