bopis

Again and again, the Botanical Garden. No matter how nature makes me feel at home – like Hey your blood drinks of the same sun, says the leaf, so cheers! – the source connects to me in these “places of nature” in many different ways. For example, the flora of Diliman reeks too much of nostalgia to be considered natural; red seethes so from Mountain Blank – and the green stench hunting ever so near – that my bones cannot rest there and my ears are thrilled even in sleep; Makiling whispers betrayal with clear intent so that even her stones seem to me crystallized hate; and the lake that we called “sea” when we were children by the Quisao shore remains ignorant. Always, in these “pockets of nature,” something that keeps me from a clear voice. I taste nature – more precisely, Nature in Me – on the bus that speeds through the South Luzon Expressway. Tears come to me when I see those trees, all of them strangers. In a moment, even if I already anticipate the moment, I suddenly feel they are kin. Not merely know, mind you. Feel: a more biblical sort of know. My motion and motor somehow connected to the primal stirrings of bark and root, wired to their wind-obscured stillness. The red curtains and the rain-stained glass do not deceive me. They too are nature. This brings me to thinking: maybe I must begin with strangers to understand. The mute trees seem to me most eloquent, while the leafless tree in Lukutang Maliit was etched by a foolish heart – mine, yes – so I fail to hear its throb. The Fertility Tree offers me such density of meaning that I am deaf to the spirit in it that is also me and is also the Big Bang and is also the clouds that sucked water from the bodies of my granderparents. But again, the Botanical Garden. The garden always slaps me with the inviolable presence of the thick date palm under whose shadow a Master denied me tutelage. This rejection is cool water, sweeter to me than love. Still, it remains a dismissal of such substance that the tree, the soil, and most of Laguna stay imperceptible to me.

Etiquetas: woman19