By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

IT was big. The moon in the pale lavender sky. Not as big as the one Sr. Mary John Mananzan and I saw in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That moon was so big it filled the whole window where we both sat watching in awe. It was so close, I felt like I was beside it, in that dreamy, deep purple sky. Confronted with the beauty and the eternity of the moment, we forgot to take pictures.

Today, I took photos of this moon, but the camera was not able to give justice to what I saw, a moon so quietly bright suspended in the silence of shifting colors, from lavender to light blue with shades of light orange, a mystical story unfolding every second. I wonder where it goes.

At Puso ng Carmelo, a hill where the moon and the stars appear so close to the trees, the moon slowly dips into the sea, immersing itself with the elements underneath, with the eternal God within. It appears to me that way, the depths of darkness claim all souls, even the soul of the moon.

She touches, she changes

Everything she touches, changes

That chant again. It keeps playing in my mind. I heard it in Thailand, during the Asia-Pacific Conference on Religion and Peace, sang by a Korean religious, as the moon smiled witnessing the sari slipping off a woman’s waist, shaking itself off from the body, demanding total freedom from tradition, in the same manner that my being shakes off the doctrines and practices of organized religion. Religion divides. In its attempt to feed itself, it feeds on human life. Religion eat its own children. It draws blood.

It is the same bright moon that is seen in Gaza, where its existence is overshadowed by the light of bombs descending on houses. It bears witness to the agony of a mother who told a reporter that each night, she would gather all her children in one place, so that when the bomb drops, they will all die together, and no one is left to suffer. I wonder if I would see the same moon in Gaza, with the same awe as I have encountered it in places where I could sit quietly on window sills and feel the breeze pass through the strands of my hair. I wonder if I would see the moon at all.

 

Like petals of a flower

 

come, my children

let us gather together

like petals of a flower

if in our slumber

a rocket hits,

and bursts open the roof

we burst,

we burst together

like seeds of a flower

dancing in the wind

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