A season would come, when you could wake up and your deserted beach would be filled up with junk. There is nothing as disconcerting as having just spent the last three months cleaning up the beach and then suddenly finding your piece of paradise strewn with trash washed up from Neverland.
There’s a story in this. Palawan is so far away from the rest of the Philippines that if you turn on your radio, it would receive frequencies from Malaysia and other South East Asian countries rather than Philippine radio. Its flora and fauna are unlike those from our country, they are more akin to that of Sabah and Malaysia.
And as it is with the trash. As to Shampoo bottles alone, I was able to collect at least seven kinds of Procter and Gamble shampoos that came from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, difficult as it is to believe. My prize was a beautiful glass bottle with a Nazi sign at the bottom, but aside from this, there were slippers of every size and shape, Red Bull containers with unfamiliar characters on it, a ton of styrofoam and anything that has the capacity to float from other countries and end up in Kalipay beach.
I couldn’t throw it back, it would just return with the waves. So I was stuck with the challenge of getting rid of it without having to burn it. I decided to create a fence. A big fence made of junk that surrounded my Flower of Life garden where I planted my dreams and recycled my frustrations at a world gone mad.
What is outside is inside. Whenever I cleaned Kalipay, I was cleaning my life. My morning habit was to pick up all the seaweed strewn on the beach and pile it on a pattern called the Vesica Piscis, where I decomposed all the biodegradable trash I could find. I became a compost monster, sometimes obsessing about every small leaf I passed along the sandy way. Coconut husks, especially, took a lot of my spare time, which was all the time I spent in Kalipay. A free man’s time is all freed up. I often had to put up with raw or bleeding hands from tearing apart coconut husks to be used as both mulch and compost fillers. Don’t ask me why; I just felt like it decomposed me inside when I decompsed things outside.
When the leaves, the seaweed, and the coconut husks turned into soil, I was one ecstatic alchemist. I invented a swing, using bamboo poles, some strong rope and plywood that also washed up on the beach, surrounded by a junk fence that was constructed with materials imported from around the world. I never felt richer in my whole life.
We keep thinking that life will fix itself when we do this, do that, take this course, eat this food, read this book, watch this movie or have enough money. There’s another way. The opposite way, which is to do nothing, eat nothing, read nothing, watch nothing, buy or sell nothing. Just nothing.
It’s like leaving something alone, and finding our life just fixes itself when we fix our inner selves. It is the natural way, the way of nature. Decomposition. Before you know it, after you live in nothingness for a long enough time, manure becomes nutrients. Death becomes life. Frustrations become dreams, and seeds are now grown plants that are bearing highly energetic food that can take us to that higher place we call the I AM.
I was a very bad boy, with a good heart. Few understood me when I used to speak of these things while I functioned in Corporate Manila. I couldn’t explain why I hated myself and that I had no capacity to change before I learned the gentle art of crawling into the arms of the divine mother and letting go in a beach where junk washing up by seasons is just a part of the great cycle of life. I’m back in the city, and there are new rules, new falls, and new dreams. It was my inner junk that drove my frustrations, yet it was the junk that drove me to dream. Was it God via Nealle Donald Walsh that said, we somethimes have to experience Who We Are Not so that we can choose Who We Are?
I am changing again, and so are you. Changing and Choosing once again. There is much more to all these than you think, dear Horatios. I know you feel the same way. Thank you for being a part of all this … The Becoming.
