Gaea’s Easter

Heaven seemed to promise rain when peripatetic scribe Cirdan Giovanni Elendil woke up in his seaside room at Sumilon Island on Earth Day.

Stepping outside and gazing west, he saw an April shower drape mainland Cebu’s green hills gray. Matutinal rays wrestled with pregnant clouds in the east.

In rumpled, shin-length blue shorts, a white shirt, rubber slippers and a myopic’s glasses, the 21-year-old stirred the humid air and walked the concrete path to the top of a craggy rise overlooking Bohol Strait.

Near one end of the plateau that served as his chancel, a priest prayed Easter’s Third Sunday Mass.

* * *

A light breeze blew from northeast, as if in time to help Padre store his core message in hearers’ hearts.

“We must feed one another,” he said in his homily. “We must walk with one another. We must wash one another’s feet.”

Occasionally, Cirdan glanced seaward. Sunglow glazed the water gold. He hoped the bright seascape, not the bleak sky, would prove to forecast the day’s weather. Nothing like a generous helping of sunlight to feed a week’s first day.

* * *

Mass over, the priest and a handful of followers—Cirdan and a band of scuba divers among them—descended the promontory through a flight of stairs. They ended on the beach, where a low stage stood amid a copse of coconut trees. Padre climbed upstage and began a rite to bless Earth.

“Grant, we pray,” he asked God, “that this land enriched by your bounty and cultivated by human hands, may be fertile with abundant crops.

“Then your people, enriched by the gifts of your goodness, will praise you unceasingly now and for all ages unending.”

“Amen,” Cirdan whispered, making a mental note to pray for his loved ones the way Padre did for the planet. People cannot claim they are traveling companions till they intercede for one another when they speak to the infinite.

Padre, bearing a phial, stepped off the stage and roamed a portion of the ecru shore to bless it with holy water.

He sprinkled some on the gentlemen divers, too. They were to spend hours under the sea, scouring the corals for trash, translating feet washing into the cleansing of Gaea’s depths.

* * *

Cirdan promenaded the island a few minutes past midmorning.

Toting a wooden walking stick, he hiked up a rocky forest trail.

An army of lead trees, ipil-ipil in Cirdan’s native tongue, ruled the thicket that the trail bisected. They had thin branches, feather-like leaflets, flowers that mimicked wispy white dandelion heads and pods that roasted and split open under the sun, riddling the ground with seeds.

The jagged path brought Cirdan to a defunct lighthouse that dwarfed an ancient coral and stone watchtower. He entered it through a wall hole.

Standing in the enclosure, he surveyed its root-wrought cracks and savored the silence.

Rapid-fire croaks suddenly ripped the air. A gecko protested Cirdan’s presence. In a flash, he deserted the structure, loathe to check if the eremitic lizard was alarmed enough to jump off a wall and cling fast to his skin.

Outside, composure retrieved, he picked a southward, downhill trail to the waterfront. Fishers anchored two boats at the coast. The brine issued gurgling sounds as it fiddled with the rocks. Across the sea loomed Negros Island’s bluish-gray southern end. Its peaks pierced an arching cloud.

This was A.D. 2012, nearly half a millennium since the dying days of chieftain-led Cebu tribes. Eco-advocates branded the isles mere ghosts of their pristine state. But Earth, from islander Cirdan’s vantage point, kept enough magic to help anyone grasp what sages mean when they discuss Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous.

* * *

Cirdan suddenly recalled a decade-old conversation he had with a teacher while they walked during a pilgrimage to Oslob, the town that cradled Sumilon.

Plump, curly-haired Ma’am Ella Storm had told him there is a force out in the world whose sole goal is the rape and pillage of Earth.

In the sun’s warmth, Cirdan felt his spine tingle.

More precisely, Ma’am Ella had told him, there are people in the world who want to see Mother Nature laid waste. She was too faithful a sacrament of her Maker. Only by obliterating her can they wipe out every trace of his existence.

Cirdan assured himself that Ma’am Ella did not mean to scare him. Earth’s enemies may be busy, but the teacher herself resisted them. She tended an organic garden at the back of her urban dwelling and habitually decked worship spaces with plants and blooms. In every corner of the world, there were many like her, part of a growing movement of spirited green warriors who would trade their blood for a seedling’s sap, the life-giving civilization it signifies and Eden to where it points.

The sun approached its zenith.

Cirdan’s fear passed.

He was a warrior-in-training.

* * *

Westward again, Cirdan stopped in his tracks. A pair of cuckoo-shrikes perched atop a bough to his left. They stared at the expanse of the water that rolled blue and green and aquamarine.

When the sleek black pair flew away, he resumed his solitary walk.

Sumilon resounded with the cawing, chirping, pecking, flapping and tweeting of birds. The winged creatures love this island, Cirdan mused. Brown tree sparrows had greeted him in a pavilion near the trail’s starting point. They hovered over dining tables and hopped hither and thither on the floor, foraging.

As he covered the last stretch of ground to his seaside cottage, a mass of fluttering, white-speckled black plumage to his left caught Cirdan’s eye: A pied fantail played in the brush.

Closer to his apartment, mulching leaves and driftwood camouflaged a wandering zebra dove.

Another bird he could not name glided in the shade of eucalyptus trees. Slightly bigger than a dove, it looked black in the dark, but its sun-dappled head and back shimmered, velvet blue.

Cirdan thought those who gut the planet, anxiously hoarding and splurging away her goods, badly need to heed the script writ large in the mail of avian life.

Nesting, egg-laying, worm-catching, flying, birds treat Earth with reverent detachment, as every gift of providence deserved.

“They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn,” the Master from Galilee once said, “yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!”