Joycie set her paper in front of her. She set it on a portable easel inside a small chapel near the cemetery. The chapel had a tin roof but no walls save for one which covered the back of the altar. This is the chapel of the village of her birth and she was feeling reborn even though she had grown quite old, had been away and then returned. She is back to her past, back to where everything began. She felt quite content it would end here. Eventually.
Here is a beautiful place. This is the title of the water color painting she is about to make. But there is nothing in her head yet and she worried whether she could put all these, her here, into the small space of her paper. The beauty all about her seemed simply too large. It was an overdose of sensation that boggled the mind.
The village sits in a small plateau cut into the side of a mountain in northern Mindanao like a small step set right before mountain’s peak. One side of the village is a vertical wall of stone rising into the heavens. The other side is an embankment that drops at a steep angle into hills descending finally into the sea in the far distance. To the left, the view disappears into countless mountains stretching as far as the eye can see, when there is no cloud to block the view. The clouds drift in from time to time. They are alindahaw.
They come as a fog, tiny droplets of water flying with the wind, wet and cold to the skin. They come into clothes, into hair, defying any manner of covering. They engulf. Her paper has become damp. Any stroke she will put into it will be soft around the edges, wet on wet, like alindahaw, like everything here, like the place itself, soft and gentle, as vulnerable as the people themselves.
She had changed. She is sure of that now although it took a while for her to realize just how much. On her return she brought home with her the hardness of the world with its concrete highways stringing cities into each other. For a while, she worried about the village’s vulnerabilities, its abject lack of the simplest amenities, like flush toilets and general health care. She thought of the village as backward, caught in primitive times and ways. She brought her body back home but her heart and mind took a while longer to arrive.
For a while, she suffered these lacks and told herself that her people were too backward to even care. She felt mystified that her village was this way. They lacked so many things and did not even know it. For if it were left just to simple disinterested judgement, they looked happier than any other people she had ever been with. They were happy in their ignorance or so she thought. And so she obsessed in trying to make things better, teaching her people this and that, dreaming of one day putting flush toilets in every household. And yet, when she told anyone of her great vision, they only nodded politely and quickly found something else to talk about. And always it would be about somebody’s child and how they had grown, what grade in school they were. It did not seem to bother them that their toilets were only unhygienic holes in the ground in an outhouse a bit away from the kitchen.
It took her brother to finally remind her how happy she once was. Here, where things have not changed too much since she went away decades ago. Get off your high horse, he advised not in as many words but just as firmly. Before you can make anything better, you have first to love it.
And this was what she finally learned to do. Only after she had done this did she see how everything worked here the same way they did anywhere else in the world. People build the world about them and it is always a working system even if it works always in a way less than perfect. And in time she discovered how well this world, once her own world, held her even after all the changes she had gone through. She can never be what she used to be, of course. And yet, she knew she was happy here. She just had to be less imposing and more open to the world which now engulfed her and taught her something new with each passing day. And then she reminded herself that she was only remembering. She must have known these already. Why ever did she forget?
All these cannot of course be contained like a story inside the painting she was about to do. She told herself that for this painting to work, it must simply contain the colors of this day. And they must come like little accidents, like the first accidental steps of a little child. She dipped her brush into a mix of blues and greens. But before she touched the tip of its bristles ever so lightly into the paper, she first contemplated how beautiful the empty paper already was. Immaculate. She hummed a short wordless prayer to the sacredness of the day and the little stroke she would make to mark its beginning.