I watched from a distance, helpless, for the last of the 12 standing trees forced to fall to the ground

I was on my way to the church for some afternoon silence. Weekdays for me are better than Sundays for silence – everything appears ordinary in motion and stillness, including the line of Indian trees that greet one right at the entrance gate.

But not this afternoon of January 2, 2012 because my “plan for peace” turned into bewilderment and protest. 12 Indian Trees (Polyalthia longifolia) averaging 40 feet were toppled mercilessly to the ground to give way to the parish project of a covered walkway and expansion of parking lot to accommodate more motorbikes. I asked one of the cutters how long have those trees been around. He said 16 years ago since his relocation in the area, the trees had been in their current height. And those paid cutters were cutting the Indian trees matter-of-factly, disrespectful in the way they exchanged jokes, the absence of a sense of loss and delicadeza as dull as the rusty bolos they used in butchering those trees. What a bland, pathetic scene to stay on, the compulsive sense of human control – repulsive.

The remaining few at the mercy of human hands...

Rev. Fr. G.B, SDB
Parish Priest – MHC National Shrine

Dear Fr. G,
I am writing you to express my deep disappointment and anger over what to me was a very pathetic scene to watch on the afternoon of January 2, 2012, around 3pm: the cutting of 12 Indian trees in view of implementing the parish plan of putting up a covered walkway and expansion of the parking lot. Since this happened on a Monday, after the usual overflow of Sundays and understandably, when church personnel including resident priests are on a day-off, except for the paid cutters and half-a-dozen youth chasing each other at the “flag area,” not too many actually had witnessed the killing of those trees.

I heard you preached yesterday, January 1, 2012, during the 6:30pm mass about how God is using the recent flashflood in Mindanao as a reminder of our negligence of our responsibility to the environment; that God is using the tragedy to cleanse us. I am fine with the rhetoric. But if the matter-of-factly cutting of 12 Indian trees can take place right in the churchyard, then, I don’t know what message the Parish Pastoral Council is transmitting to the parishioners, to the city dwellers in general? In view of the flashflood in Mindanao where the cutting of trees in the existing dying forest was considered one of its human causes, I found the killing of those 12 Indian trees grossly unethical and one that sets a horrible example of environmental shortsightedness and arrogance for the sake of human convenience. Should living trees always give way to steel and concrete structures, to covered walkway and parking lot? We walk for 15 minutes to get to church and we don’t really mind being rained on sometimes with our umbrella. I don’t believe a lot of people are complaining about being rained on. To my hunch, I guess, it’s primarily about parish beautification that I have always been familiar with. People are highly capable of walking and self-sacrifice.

What added to the already lamentable scene was nobody seems to grieve over those trees’ forced death. Soon, they will be dumped somewhere, forgotten. What a display of human arrogance when people can grieve for their dead parrots or infants but not for 20-year old living trees. I hope their fellow 7 remaining Indian trees, though seemingly proudly standing, out-wise us human beings in their grief.

I don’t patronize too often because doing good is our basic call. But I appreciate the way those 4 narra trees were cordoned, even if with concrete rather than cut for the Devotion Garden project. How I wish these could have been done with the Indian trees. I also appreciate by the way how the parish is spearheading the collection of plastic sachets to convert them into concrete pavers. But then, I continue to wish that greater sensitivity is also extended to our existing city trees. They have life and they are so much a part of the gasping ecosystem in the city.

Sincerely,
AM

But there’s something poetic and philosophical that Lolo does almost everyday, even if he does this matter-of-factly. Often, I wake up earlier than Lolo whose house is just across the street. Without forcing my focus, Lolo’s habit often gets my attention – he would crane his neck to check some yellow leaves of their two 15-foot lanzones fruit trees, the only tree in front of their house. Then he would shake those trees as strongly as he can that I could hear its rustling. Ready to fall or not, those yellow leaves either cave in or stubbornly hang on. Then Lolo repeats the ritual either during midafternoon when he is alone or in the evening after dinner.

Where’s the poetry? What’s philosophical about “shaking trees”?

I am leaving the answers to your hunch.

But relevant to an end-of-the-year recollection, I am finding comfort out of the poetic mystery of “shaking trees” from some lines of the farmer-writer Wendell Berry:

What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall – field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.

During the last hour of 2011, I pray there will be silence in a little corner of our house because I intend to rejoin what “stood whole” during the year into its own Sabbath. I existed, warts and all, and then the wholeness of my existence passes, falls like yellow leaves, dies to the memory of the Earth but charged with hope to rise after the last hour of the year when 2012 begins. As another year dies to rest, another new year is born. Blessed be God for this mystery!

Happy New Year to you…

According to the Global Language Monitor, the top English word ranked based on its worldwide usage is “Occupy,” and the top phrase is “Arab Spring.” “Occupy” as most of us are aware refers to the global movement of protests against inequality and corporate greed in public and private sectors. Inspired by the Democracy Village in Britain, with its slogan of “We are the 99%,” its main aim is to bring back participatory democracy into the hands of the majority and its main target is the 1% who controls resources and power at the expense of justice and equality.

The “Occupy Movement” and the “Arab Spring” are two faces of the same coin: they mutually fuel the flame of anger against the elite power hoarders, the “Occupy Movement” more civil in its outcry while the Arab Spring rages through bloody protests from Tunisia to Yemen, Libya to Egypt. The “Occupy Movement” on one hand has so far mobilized not only the poorest in industrialized countries like the United States and Germany but also its middle class, what the Oxford University Press has classified as the “squeezed middle” or “the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those people on low or middle incomes.” The Arab Spring, metaphorical in its desert basis on the other has been revolutionary in its outcome by supplanting or even killing despotic leaders of Arab countries. While the Arab Spring has transformed the political landscape of the countries concerned by way of more democratic elections, it remains violent also in its rising number of civilian casualties. Perhaps, this itself bespeaks of the reality of desert life that any discovery of oasis courses through the violence of human thirst and exhaustion and the passionate, fiery desire to quench it. Desert freedom can be costly.

That this wave of global anger is also captured by popculture could not be farther from the truth. Consider this:

“In April 2011, Angry Birds won both the “Best Game App” and “App of the Year” at the UK Appy Awards. At the 15th edition of the Webby Awards, Angry Birds was awarded “Best Game for Handheld Devices”.

It’s Christmas time and so it means we are also at the height of consumerism with all sorts of novelties from China storming our malls. Anywhere I go, “Angry Birds” stare at me with those supercilious looks. I find amusing their spiked brows, their Donald-Duckish squeaky voices as they conquer the barracks of their nemesis the pigs and retrieve their stolen eggs. Not far from the outcry of the 99% to claim what has been stolen through a “credit card culture” and the false promise of capitalism. Those “Angry Birds” that even the innocent wear – they are the populist projection of the emerging angst over the deepening uncertainties within our economic loops. Those “Angry Birds” are effigies of the human discontent against inequality, against the lavishness of the lifestyles of the “rich and the powerful” because they are irreconcilable insults, salt, vinegar and chilli rubbed on the open wounds of poverty of the many. For those who cannot carry a placard of protest on Wall Street or who dare not join the chaos of the streets of Cairo, those “Angry Birds” are the subdued, subliminal caricatures of our silent anger against a pigs’ barracks called capitalism. I love those “Angry Birds”!

That those barracks is also found right in our yard is also worth holding an “Angry Bird” stone to slingshot at. Consider these words from a woman-lawyer who champions the cause of justice for the poor. Her name is Conchita Carpio-Morales:

“It has been observed that society itself is partly to blame for having created an artificial construct of a leader or even a professional, in general.

Totally erasing the constitutional directive to “live modest lives,” the situation now stands that it becomes socially acceptable or even perfectly normal for public servants to own 10 mansions and/or have 10 cars.

This insatiable desire to get rich quick in order to satisfy the social expectation attached to one’s status is what drives honest men and women in government service to leave behind their moral core and jump into the bandwagon towards the ravine. It is not so much the rising cost of living. It is not the escalating cost of tuition for the children’s education. It is not the superficial sense of security or safety. One root cause is this disturbing social expectation. The nation must get rid of this phenomenon. This social expectation is a realistic manifestation that the notion of public service as a public trust has gone to the realm of triteness, amounting to a condition of social numbness to a blatant disregard of legal imperatives and a flagrant display of moral insensitivities.”

This pressure of social expectation is what the Arroyo clan (and other oligarchic elite including the Aquinos except that PNoy is trying to simplify his lifestyle now) has exemplified throughout their years in power. This desire to hoard and to appear “acceptable” has cost our current mess and the lives of many, including the suicide of General Angelo Reyes. It is abysmally destructive! The rest of the world has just celebrated the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize win of 3 women from the sub-Saharan countries of Liberia and Yemen – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymay Gbowee, and Tawakkul Karman – for championing the rights of the poor, especially women. Look where our second woman former president is – under a hospital arrest for her laundry list of crimes against the poor, of stealing from the poor. No wonder those “Angry Birds” are so ubiquitous in our households and visible nooks of the city. They “Occupy” a lot of our cityscape these days. I look forward to the “spring of justice” this 2012. Good luck to Chief Justice Renato Corona and the many tentacles of Mrs. Arroyo!

Lest I forget – simplicity begins with oneself.

Since he cannot limit himself to talking about what he knows, the Expert pronounces on the basis of the place that his specialty has won for him. In that way he inscribes himself and is inscribed in a common order where specialization, as the rule and hierarchically ordering practice of the productivist economy, has the value of initiation. Because he has successfully submitted himself to this initiatory practice, he can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socioeconomic order. He speaks as an ordinary man, who can receive authority in exchange for knowledge just as one receives a paycheck in exchange for work. He inscribes himself in the common language of practices, where an overproduction of authority leads to the devaluation of authority, since one always gets more in exchange for an equal or inferior amount of competence. But when he continues to believe, or make others believe, that he is acting as a scientist, he confuses social place with technical discourse. He takes one for the other: it is a simple case of mistaken identity. He misunderstands the order which he represents. He no longer knows what he is saying. A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities.”

Michel de Certeau (Jesuit, sociologist, philosopher, contemplative)
The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press: Berkeley. 1984, pp.32-33)

I am not alone
I am not alone
Though this world is not my home
I am not alone

I am not afraid
No, I am not afraid
For the angel has proclaimed
His holy name

He shall be called Immanuel, God with us
He shall be called Immanuel, God with us
God with us

You are not alone
No, you are not alone
Though this world may leave you cold
You are not alone

Be ye not afraid
Be ye not afraid
For the angel has proclaimed
His holy name

He shall be called Immanuel, God with us
He shall be called Immanuel, God with us
He shall be called Immanuel, God with us
God with us

Be ye not afraid (Immanuel)
Be ye not afraid (Immanuel)
Be ye not afraid (Immanuel)

Words and Music by Karl Kohlhase

MERRY CHRISTMAS DEAR FELLOW CLIMBERS AND DESERTFISHERS!

_______________________

Karl’s music can be downloaded for free here.

Photo credit: lifewithaccess

Karmen MacKendrick

A story or two in words of some survivors, a single photo, are enough to move me to tearful silence. Their suffering, the depth of their sense of loss, the trauma so marked up in their bodies, in their faces are unspeakable. No human language can contain their grief;  the survivors themselves have no language for it except by way of stammering, wailing, broken, torn ones. By way of tearful silence, of tears and silence. Movement in silence and through silence could have been the best response.

But how does one make sense of the constant interviews of the survivors, asking them “how they feel,” often cornered to respond in a language (in Tagalog) that runs against their tongue and their manner of speaking it, the source of stigmatization? How does one make sense of the closed-up corpses that sociologist Randy David and a fellow blogger so poignantly pointed out that is so disrespectful of their dignity? Of the constant scrambling for photo opportunities and endless chatter in sensationalized media voice as if it is a climax of a soap opera that TV sells? In this kind of situation, often, one doesn’t know where charity ends and self-promotion begins.

And I have one perception on this malaise – it is a desacralization of the sacred silence, no matter how marred by the reality of loss and death, that the dead and their survivors so deserve along the river bank, by the single post of the house left, in churches-turned-evacuation-centers, before a mass grave. Let silence reign in the midst of such unspeakable suffering. But no because the Filipino pathos is always cast and cultured in the Hollywoodish climactic, the sensationalized ‘underdog’ of a soap opera whose upcoming triumph could happen through a sudden twist of the whole drama. Before any donor knows it, media and some charitable organizations have been telling them that the first tall order in the midst of a tragedy is to fix the damage, to fix people’s suffering. Abate? Yes. But to ask people to articulate their grief through interrogation, covering their tales by words or images as if “everything must be said; it must be said now, with nothing left – it has to get somewhere,” – isn’t this irreverent and violative of a very rich refuge in times of unspeakable suffering – silence and the need for someone to stay in their silent scream.

True enough, the dead need further autopsies and the survivors need food and shelters and movement through mobilization for its delivery are needed. But I’m convinced that this movement can be done in prayerful silence less the self-flaunting, and more reverential of the silence of the dead and the survivors.

But then, this silence has to start from within and has to be cultured also. Perhaps, those cameras can still keep going in meditative movement minus the reporters’ microphone. I bet it’s more powerful than any professional’s seemingly endless chatter.  And then through silence, lessons from the tragedy are better learned and absorbed as well, who knows. And by the way, one can also stay in prayerful silence from afar and be in solidarity with the suffering.

________________

Photo credit: interaksyon

1. The red circle is the approximate area in Kalatungan and Kitanglad ranges where heavy Sendong rains fell. It is also the approximate area where logging is rampant e.g. Vicmar Dev’t Corporation and Bualan Cooperative which was exempted by DENR in April from EO23 or the PNoy logban.

2. The two red lines to CDO and Iligan is the water flow from the denuded forests.

3. This would show the source of the flood waters that hit simultaneously Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, and sparing the coastal municipalities in between Iligan and Cagayan de Oro. Heavy rains brought by typhoon Sendong fell in the Kalatungan range. If you observe the light green-brownish color, it indicates thin vegetation. This is where massive logging is happening for the last 30 years. If you notice it drains straight to CDO. If you go to the left of the map, down Kalatungan is Kapai and Mandulog, this is the part that drains to Iligan. There are ridges and gorges there that feed directly to the Mandulog river.

I’m sending my little help with these odious facts in mind…

___________________

BenCy G. Ellorin of Help CDO