Buhawi

To his surprise, the Net finds buhawi synonymous to unos. And he wondered if this was right. He grew up thinking unos was only a squall, a small, sudden, unexpected quickening of wind in the open sea. It did not require the spiraling of water, twisting, flying into the sky. In his mind it was not unos that hit Mambling earlier this week. It was Buhawi.

And he might as well spell it with a capital letter as if it was a name, a person or a mythical beast that now rides with his good friend, Habagat. It would be the first one in memory to visit these parts. It will not be the last.

A water spout is of course only a small tornado that develops over the sea. He had seen pictures of it in  television. Buhawi. Despite its reputation to kill, maim and destroy, he cannot help imagining how beautiful it must have looked moving into Mambaling slowly from the sea. And why does it seem so unprecedented? Perhaps only because he has never seen it before.

He is, of course, ever a lover of quirks, the unusual, those things that validate the idea that the world is changed forever. And these are portents of other things still to come. They go well with news of flooding in Europe, the hurricanes visiting the US with greater frequency and fury, great floods, and yes, ever more fearsome twisters in midwestern America.

And it was said, Buhawi is quite unlike a typhoon. A typhoon, we can prepare for. It comes with a bit of warning, enough time for us to trim our trees and batten down what might get blown away. And we have grown used to it, the same way we have gotten used to the flu, even a bad one like dengue. Buhawi hits all of a sudden and the more so he heard, when the sky is blue and the sun is out. It hits the worst in perfect weather. It is to wind what lightning is to a thunder cloud.

It is a sudden surge coming out of nowhere like a bomb that explodes inside a crowded place. We see the whole picture only after the explosion. And yet, even this leaves us at a loss for words. We are dumbfounded, speechless, awed. And we have no other recourse but to replay it in our heads over and over again, as if this helps us make sense of the senseless.

Like Ray Allen’s three pointer in game 6. Who would have thought? Who would have guessed? And the consequence of it, so devastating we wonder what to feel. We seem confronted finally with proof of an impossibility, a ghost or monster captured finally on tape. Proof positive impossible is real. And so with gods, angels, UFOs, alien civilizations, Bigfoot, Sigbin. Will we see more of them now?

And then some will say: It is only the magic of these times. And also its greatest curse.

It is only New spelled with a capital letter. As if New was a person or a great beast that comes at us with greater frequency and ferocity riding with the wind, the waters, the furies; as if New was a monster to be feared.  And yet please to think: Must we really fear what is new? Can we truly afford to? We can only live with it as we do those things beyond our human capacity to control.

And so he watches from a distance. He reads. He forms their imaginary picture in his head: New riding hand in hand with change. They make a lovely couple. Without them the world would only stay the same way. And yet even if we were all not here they would still be there. They do not owe to us their presence. The planet renews itself periodically. It warms or cools itself in its own time. Without us the mountains would still heave, the earth itself thunder and quake. The storms would still come and so the lightning, the thunder, the floods, Buhawi.

Though they kill. They are also bringers of life.