Cosmicomiche

Insights do come in the weirdest ways: leftovers on my dinner plate, a crevice along the road, looking at the car’s speedometer reading a little over 80 kph , and as of late while skimming through, of all things, a transcription of a crappy telenovela. (Enlightenment though, didn’t leap from some line in the script or Joyce’s stream of consciousness, not even Eliot’s catalyst; it must have been the space-out mode that did it.) I just came back from Dumaguete yesterday, and I have yet to digest the entire experience when a sudden realization hits me: that Dumaguete taught me how to live out what philosophy I was trying to impart in one story I had in the workshop. “Easy does it,” as Robert Frost himself told Mom Edith Tiempo. I have always loved Manila, and still do for that matter, but lately I just feel like my attempt to catch up with the fast pace is futile.

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Zhuang Zi’s dream of being a butterfly and then wondering which life is real is happening to me. Who am I really, in this gigantic city among Pound’s mere apparition of faces? Back to automaton mode, I can’t help but think that the past three weeks may have well been my entire life for all I know.