Desert in Spiritual Quest

Long before I heard about the Desert Fathers of the 3rd and 4th centuries in Christian Egypt and Syria, desert had come to symbolize one of my earliest religious experiences.

As a child my inner world centered on the high festival days of the church year. Jesus and God were one. At Christmas I literally believed God was born and on Good Friday at three in the afternoon believed He died. God died on some of the hottest days of the Philippine year when nothing moved, not even the stray dogs in the dusty streets. I imagined people stumbling along when they had to do something, bereft of God’s enlivening presence.

The early 1970s were a bleak, dark period for me. What had propelled me forward suddenly lost steam and I kept my head barely above water after losing all sense of direction. As happens with many others, in those years of dumb deprivation, religion was a lifeboat, and I didn’t leave it for years thereafter, taking it to many shores of discovery, disappointment and reorientation.

I was staying in a one-room apartment in Quezon City one year during Lent. The sun was hot, turning the day outside white with heat and light. Inside my room the air hang motionless like a dead animal. In that unearthly silence I found a chink that was not quite light but it pointed to something like hope. Being young has its advantage. The future stretched before me like an endless sea: I had time.

With nowhere to go, nothing to do, I decided to spend Holy Week sequestered in my room. I didn’t go out for food but lived on what I had in the refrigerator. The days were long, the nights even longer but after a day or two time seemed to stop. It lost punctuation and became one fluid line like a motionless sea or a straight line I later learned to read on a cardiac monitor when a patient’s heart stopped beating.

It was in that time of emptiness that I found what felt like a spring in a featureless desert, a gush of surprising joy. It didn’t lift my spirit but spirit came to rest in itself, a kind of death with the mind staying astonishingly alive.

Later I struggled back into historical time. I spent a year working at Clark Air Base in Angeles City where I met an African-American captain, a nurse at the ward where I worked. One day Maddie invited me to dinner at her on-base Quonset hut home. She showed me a book with an unfamiliar-sounding title, the Bhagavad-Gita.

What she told me that evening didn’t make sense to me until years later when I rediscovered that thin volume in America and its words gave form to what had become the shape of my spiritual quest.

Today desert and the bleakness of Temperate Zone winter are one. On this first day of what people reckon is a new year I give thanks for all the people who somehow came into my life, leaving me with books and memories, words and images, with a bit of energy that has become part of my own energy.

We are truly one boat, one seamless garment even though most of the time we live as though solitary, alone in a desert with just our personal demons to struggle with and no one there to lend a helping hand.

We don’t undertake a quest. The quest is our life. There is nothing to discover, nowhere to go but we go as though hiking miles and miles of geographic time, often without an enlivening spirit. We go because that’s what being alive means.

Beyond Two Loves – for Words and for Images

Heaven (by which I don’t mean the sky above us) sends us different gifts. Some gifts we may believe to be curses that don’t allow us ever to raise our heads to see that sky (by which I don’t mean heaven); some gifts we don’t think of as gifts at all: we take them so for granted. Gifts from heaven, as another writer wrote in his blog, are what we come into the world with or what comes down into our lives like rain, often in summer under a cloudless sky when we least expect it.

Two gifts for me are two loves—for words and for images. Some days I wish my gift were for persons, a love that takes passion into the realm of intimacy and personal sharing. This does not seem to be my gift this lifetime. For gain or loss my passion is for words and, later again in life, for images to expand the scope and power of mere words.

As a child I used to take the pencil I was learning to use to shape letters so that I could read and write to draw lines, circles then rudimentary images from what peopled my inner world. I was terrible. I could not draw a straight line or a perfect circle. Those early failures soured images for me. I turned my efforts to words and grew skills to express those inner images. In the process I honed thinking and earned compliments for academic achievements.

An indifferent student in grade school, in high school I discovered how to make use of my limited intelligence simply by putting more time and effort into my studies than my classmates did. I found glory by sheer force of need. Passing tests and showing off what I knew made up for deficits in social graces that years later I had to attend to or live life an emotional cripple.

My difficulties with identity and personal images drove me to sharpen skills in thinking and words expressed thinking well. When in medical school I encountered another deficit, this time my lack of ease in mechanical manipulation, I threw myself even more into the world of ideas. I became a psychiatrist whose tool was words to reach into my reservoir of experience to help others connect to their own reservoirs and make peace with gifts and curses.

Only in my fifties did images sneak back into my life as intellect began to feel barren, like bone-dry deserts when no rains came. I went to a film-editing seminar in New York City and fell into Circe‘s arms: images can be manipulated to reconstruct identities and lives and the results are potentially more powerful than words.

Heaven’s gifts are unpredictable. One might even say that unpredictability itself is heaven’s chief gift. If everything went according to the plans we generate from our limited experiences we’d all be cripples. Our worlds would be so small we’d be living our whole lives like Plato’s cave dwellers—in darkness live in cramped universes that belie the hugeness of It all!

I didn’t go into film editing. I shot a model and rediscovered the energy in images—in color, lines, shapes, and the message altogether they convey that seem to me not as direct or limited as thoughts are, as words harvested solely from a vapid, mechanistic life.

After a few years of tooling with images I’ve come to realize that neither words nor images alone can draw all that living gives us. These twin loves no longer contain me.

Sometimes we must simplify chaos into equations and sometimes must throw out those potent formulas and reconnect with their primordial sources. No wonder that ancient peoples evolved myths about a Creator God. Creation is inherent in humans if we only risk taking time to let the god within us speak.

We don’t need to stop purposeful activity. In the midst of our business, if we keep our ears alert, our eyes or whatever sense we’re gifted to prefer at the moment or over a lifetime, we can sense an Other from which we take new gifts to refresh the old, to sow new energy in the old, to rediscover that we are not who we think or feel we are but something more alive, more dynamically linked to the ever-changing universe, what Buddhists refer to as anicca.

In the end, heaven’s greatest gift might well be another passion I’ve had all along: creativity. Creativity or the gift for uncharacteristic invention is expressing ourselves in surprisingly new but authentic ways, beyond what we can strategize to produce but within the strictures of what we call “me” or “mine.”

The greatest mystery (if by mystery we mean that ultimate source of power and life) may be right here in our heart of hearts, in our neurotic, limited selves. If we but learn to listen or see we might find in the drought-dry landscape of our barren lives that precious nectar of immortal life.

This to me is heaven’s gift this morning: that we are not doomed to live only in that blasted cave of Plato but that living there we see we don’t need to live anywhere else. Right here is where heaven is, if we but have the eyes, the ears, and the heart to live it!

 

Perception, Our Unique View of a Slippery Universe

A friend who has moved away used to visit in the summer bringing me her herbed vinegar in long-necked, amethyst-colored bottles with simple garland and fruit designs. One does not usually think vinegar when remembering someone fondly but somehow those bottles have come to iconize the brief times we spent together.

How I perceive events, how others too appear to perceive events especially events we’re privy to together and divergently describe them, endlessly fascinate me. Not that by dwelling on the observable nature of perception understanding would necessarily purify its objects for me because nothing approaching human seems powerful enough to be its alembic but because the faculty of perception itself seems so at the core of what we call experience that any attempt to see it in action feels somehow right, even a responsibility for anyone interested in what makes us human.

To purify perception is antithetical: by its nature perception is subjective, a phenomenon of the inner self, mind sailing into its native harbor, its home port, its own part of the sea where it naturally belongs.

Mentioning those summer gifts to my friend, I heard back from her: “Oh, if I’d known you loved my purple basil and garlic vinegar, I’d have kept you supplied!”

Friends, mirrors of our different worlds, provide tiny escapes from perceptions that bind us in ignorance. Relationships  are so beautiful because they add to our otherwise hermetically closed worlds that we can glimpse other worlds outside it, beside it: we don’t have to live alone as we  do; we connect.

Awareness of the operation of perception may be end in itself. It’s not necessary to rid ourselves of experience. Imagine life stripped of perception and it’s life without meaning! For perception infuses an impersonal world momentarily with our presence and presence is, like it or not, what creates meaning.

I raise herbs on my tiny deck facing the lake so concocting herb-infused vinegars is no great feat but my vinegar would not be anything like my friend’s. Perception would have been so far from the icon I remember. It’s the old lila of Hindu philosophy, so is nothing new.

As humans we are immersed in the sea of our own making and perception is one of its creators. To be human is to live immersed in our unique “seeing,” our own karma-mediated perception and intoxicated we identify appearance as reality. Should we avoid intoxication?

Without the intoxication of perception would life still be the delight (and terror) it is to live?

So we take the entire spectrum of experience as it is, consoling ourselves when we’re located on an unpleasant point to see we’re moving endlessly on a slippery slope, now down but later up again, motion that distinguishes us for being alive, being human.

“It won’t be the same,” I wrote my friend, “but I’ll do it anyway. For the sake of our friendship, for the sake of what is gone.”

Indeed we might like to keep our friendships where they were when they showered us with grace and abundance but letting go too is human. Letting go we turn the carousel round: what goes up comes back down, what is gone returns. Maybe not in the form we recognize at once but it all comes back.

Merry Christmas to all and to all friendship, love and return!

Religion – A View of a Beautiful, Terrifying World

It is not insanity that the most joyous fete in the Christian world comes in the very midst of dark, cold winter.

As Christmas comes once again to North America, a predominantly Christian country caught in the paradox of science and rationalism versus mystery and faith, my own thoughts come to dwell on the religious experience.

Experience is subjective; that is, unanalyzed it is integral to ourselves. I shall attempt to step out of my self as I am able and translate experience into words that I might say define where I am this moment when it comes to religion.

Listening to Diane Rehm this morning talk with Rt. Reverend Mariann Budd, the newly consecrated Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. I was reminded of what drew me to the Epicopal Church in my last-ditch attempt to stay within the deistic-religion world. Budd spoke of the three foundations of Episcopal belief and practice: the Bible, tradition and reason.

Earlier this morning I picked up Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (1993, republished 2004 by Gramercy Books) and read about what seemed to Armstrong one of man and woman’s strongest and earliest interest: fabricating a religious world out of their experience.

A new friend on WordPress wrote about miracles, what he preferred to call “gifts from heaven.” I contacted him two days ago and our connection seems fraught with possibilities. He is interested in photography, as I am, and in words and ideas. In the same entry about a day he spent in numinous beauty while conducting a friend through Jerusalem he mentioned visiting a place where his father used to talk to him about philosophy.

Events sometimes come together suggesting a pattern, a kick to the behind. “Here, what do you do with this?” it seems to say. Huston Smith wrote somewhere that the human mind was a “pattern-making” faculty. It seeks and finds order in a chaotic universe. One of these kinds of order we call religion.

I stuck with the Episcopal Church for several years until one Sunday while repeating the Apostle’s Creed with the congregation I realized I was modifying so many phrases to make them acceptable to my own view that I no longer belonged there. It took a few more years for me to speak the words I’d been struggling to suppress in the mind: the God I grew up believing is superstition.

For decades after arriving in America I’d been reading books, talking to people, and visiting places around the country to learn  as much as I could about religion. In the end I concluded that Christianity like other present-day religions was just like the ancient religions we only read about in books. The Greek and Roman religions are today seen as myths. To me Christianity was not different. Myths for me don’t mean “falsehoods.” Myths are often visual or plot-driven constructions into which we can plug our day-to-day experiences and make sense of them. Myths encapsulate our profoundest insights about the nature of reality and the world we live in. Myths are the patterns the mind creates to explain both imminent and transcendent experience.

Religions to me are the myths that give meaning (pattern) to our experience. Living in communities we share myths with others. Myths are receptacles not just for ideas or rational thought. They are most useful when coping with the most intense emotions we have, whether these are emotions of awe, terror, wonder or existential beauty.

Yes, beauty, because to me beauty is emotion. Emotion is that which summons will and usually results in action. Emotion slides the slipper slope down to action that we claim we chose but is most often a simple knee jerk response to emotion. Only when we gain a measure of discernment (knowing is power) that we can interpose awareness and therefore authentic choice to the actions we take.

Beauty attracts us, draws us just as ugliness repels. Pain is usually repugnant but through such human actions as in religion or art can be transformed into something beautiful. Then one might say that Beauty is not so much attractive as the quality with which we co-exist peacefully – with plenty of space between us that we don’t suffocate.

Religion too allows us to have space when experiencing the most intense, emotive experiences. The loss of a loved one, intensely painful disasters or disease—religion can transform all these and make them human. Religion and art are human activities, acts we have through the ages attributed to a Creator God without acknowledging that we are at the heart of the whirlwind, at the heart of the storm, at One with the creative power of the universe.

I no longer live believing in a supernatural power that grants my wishes randomly, when it chooses but I remain faithful, even fanatically faithful to the religious experience, to attempting to verbalize (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God….) inner events that point to a reality beyond my childish, immature reason, beyond what I can conceive, plan or execute with all my puny resources.

God is the power of the universe and my own power, too. It is the quality of mercy that comes while I struggle with vindictiveness, hate and cruelty. It is the quality of joy in the midst of suffering and pain. It is love when we lose ourselves in the wonder of unity and peace. It is beauty when we use images to describe what even words cannot express. It is what even images cannot reach but we reach nonetheless like “gifts from heaven.”

Eckhart Tolle – A Different Drummer to Human Development

Two scenes in my last 12 hours contrast sharply: the pretty, young athletes at Life Time Fitness this morning obsessed with physical health and beauty and Eckhart Tolle on the DVD I viewed last night on the fictitious self we’re constantly feeding because it is never complete, never satisfied.

The people at the fitness center this morning are a tiny percentage of the city’s inhabitants. Even as health experts issue warnings about the dire state of Americans’ health with increasing waistlines (each inch increase associated with greater risk of cardiac disaster), as a people we’re still struggling to modify the lifestyle to which we’ve grown accustomed to avert individual and social calamity. In fact, most would probably argue against the use of “calamity” to describe the phenomenon.

It’s not as if the ship is sinking. Most Americans have not even realized what a boon we’ve had in our increased longevity. Both men and women are living into our eighties and nineties despite higher incidence of diabetes and other metabolic disorders. Obesity and its attendant risks of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and metabolic disorders are below most people’s horizons.

Yet here is this German-born, English-educated, Canadian transplant teaching in seminars attracting the spiritually curious that all these sturm und drang are elicited by an illusion and that spiritual liberation involves liberation from the control of these forces that could never bring us happiness or peace. All that we struggle about, our aspirations and pretensions, what we worry about and lose sleep over, our successes and failures, the very way we see the world are reflections of this hunger as universal as St. Augustine’s original sin.

Tolle’s spiritual teachings arose from an “inner transformation” that he spontaneously underwent in 1977 in the depths of depression and suicidality. “I couldn’t live with myself any longer,” he said, then found himself asking who this self that wanted to die to stop the mental suffering. He fell asleep and the next morning woke up to hear the birds singing outside his window, sunlight dancing on the sheets, and a strange but familiar peacefulness suffusing everything.

Tolle stopped studying for his doctorate at the University of London and for the next two years spent his time sitting on park benches in Central London just “watching the world go by.” His family thought he had gone insane.

I don’t know if Eckhart (he changed his name from Ulrich to Eckhart after this life-changing event) had studied Eastern philosophy. During the two years of irresponsible living he is said to have stayed with Buddhist friends when he could, instead of sleeping outdoors on Hampstead Heath. The language of religion is metaphor for inner experience that we can’t satisfactorily express in words or images so we toggle through various systems to find the one closest to the experience to describe it to others. What strikes me about his teachings is their sincerity. He is not reading from some text or previously composed essays. He teaches from what he remembers or knows of the experience and to me that has the ring of authenticity.

His first book, The Power of Now, was recommended in Oprah’s magazine, O, in 2000. In 2008, a New York Times reviewer called Tolle “the most influential spiritual author in the [United States].” The DVD I watched last night, The Flowering of Human Consciousness, was issued in 2001.

The Exaltation of Books: Edmund White, Writer

Edmund White is best known for his novels but he has written more non-fiction prose that I hadn’t read until recently, in David Bergman’s comprehensive collection published in 1994.

Reading the magazine articles and essays in the collection sparked my interest because for years I’ve struggled with writing fiction and frankly I don’t have a fiction-writer’s bone in my body. I have no imagination!

One of my earliest recollections about art and imagination was Tatay (“Dad” in Hiligaynon) poo-pooing movies. “It’s not real, it’s just make-believe,” he told us after taking us to see a movie at the Main Theater on Calle Real downtown Iloilo. My youngest sister was not in the picture, just my older sister and I, so I must have been seven or younger.

The New Formosa Seafood Buffet, a Review

In the Philippines, Chinese restaurants were everywhere and were, outside of the mercado, often the only choice for dining out. The situation is changed now. Restaurants offering native Filipino food but spruced up for the modern palate are sprouting as expression of a reborn nationalism, especially among young, educated Filipinos. My nephew even opened a traveling kiosk selling various flavors of guinamos, that lowly, smelly, native counterpart to the Western European anchovy!

The change in the U.S. is even more marked. Until the 1980s, ethnic restaurant meant Chinese restaurant, and Cantonese-American at that. Now, of course, we have Indian restaurants and sushi joints at every corner and Mexican groceries and restaurants are appearing even faster to serve the fast-growing Mexican expatriates. These are usually families with many children (Catholics, you know).

The new Chinese restaurants are no longer your familiar Cantonese. Insular Americans, even here in the Midwest, are finally getting their palates tickled by the rich variety of regional Chinese cooking. China is a gigantic country and its culture bespeaks the gigantic diversity. Surely this is the global village social gurus have been predicting and that we’re now in ferment of comprehending, fighting off (xenophobia is universal), and, for some of us, appreciating!

8 China Buffet (eight is a lucky number among the Chinese) used to be my go-to place after the now defunct Forbidden City (that in its day was the first to offer a Far East, not just Chinese, menu). Forbidden City is gone and 8 China has been floundering since The Journey opened in Fishers. Now the owners are trying to recapture their cutting-edge position riding the new popularity of seafood (yes, even among native-born Hoosiers) as our population think “healthy” and “cholesterol-friendly.”

Formosa Seafood Buffet opened today. When I called at eleven this morning the guy who answered the phone told me there was already a long line of people trying to get in. When I got there shortly before noon, the parking lot was full. Yes, it may just give TJ a run for the Chinese-food-lover’s money.

New uniforms outfitted many of the same people I knew from 8 China Buffet but the place was bustling with new staff, too, each cadre distinguished by their distinctive uniform. Maitre d’ staff had white and gold blouses, waiters rich maroon jackets, busboys had plain white shirts, and wandering from table to table were largely Caucasian (they spoke English!) manager surrogates in long white jackets. The latter asked the diners if they needed anything, anything at all, and if we did, the need was quickly taken care of! This is unheard of in two-dollar-sign restaurants!

Five long rows of steam-heated dishes line the central room whose stadium-like spaciousness was not mitigated by pillar, wall or partition. I was reminded me of an Asian market, lines of vendors under an open sky. Close to a half of the offerings were the old standby from 8 China but there were more than a handful of new dishes. At the top of my list were: pork rind in a rich sauce with veggies, spinach buns (the wheat pastry was thin like wet napkin, unlike the Middle Eastern spanokopita), crispy squid (thin pieces so they were tasty-crisp through), steamed white fish (tender and just the other side of mushy), fried “spring” chicken, crispy pork ribs and beef sticks (thin fillets of marinated beef still hot from the grill). One of the front desk staff who knew me from 8 China told me that the weekend brunch include wandering dim sum carts!

Formosa (recalls the old name of Taiwan, meaning “beautiful”) has some ways to go to seriously compete with The Journey but the new dishes were wonderful and all freshly cooked. It certainly has promise and the price, same as that charged at 8 China, might mean the inevitable demise of the older restaurant.

Part of my interest in the new restaurant hinged on how the owners designed a new restaurant. There is the choice of food to serve but beyond that, what other choices do a business owner take to separate himself from the competition? FCB tried to go for elegant. The booths were Chinese rosewood, the napkins were thick cotton oversized hankies matching the waiter’s jackets, the chopstick were long, lacquer-like black heavy plastic sticks. The dining areas were spacious but more people-friendly than the buffet room. You should see the bathroom with OVOToilet fixtures in gold against black faux-marble countertops. Instead of the goop most buffet offer as ice cream they had nine flavors of real ice cream and in addition to the restaurant-supply Chinese cakes good Bundt cakes. (The lemon cake was terrific.)

The staff was perhaps the big difference. The Chinese staff seated the patrons but the waiters and wandering quality-control staff were Caucasian or Hispanics who spoke English. The busboys, of course, were Mexicans. I was most impressed, after the food, by the incredible number of staff floating around. I congratulated the new manager, a former veteran waiter at 8 China. He was decked in ill-fitting Mao jacket but beaming with pride.

Just having a floor manager seemed to me a most unusual feature. Several members of the Chinese family that owns the new restaurant were also floating around, not interacting with the diners (unlike at the old Forbidden City where the owner herself went from table to table) but checking to make sure everything was running smoothly.

Here once again we see the Chinese showing us how they do business! Big and elegant they know how to do but now they’re borrowing a thing or two from American restaurants, like providing staff who speak the language and can explain the dishes and address diners’ needs. Viva diversity and the new global economy!

Doing Stir Fry Right, La Paz Style

After a massive workout at the gym this evening I was gung-ho coming home to fix as awesome a supper to complete an awesome day. I’d stopped by the grocery earlier today to pick up a package of beef liver. In the fridge I had defrosted five cocktail shrimp, a few ounces of pork belly and, in a canister, already cut-up poached chicken breast.

While my gym clothes were tossing in the drier, I gently poached the liver and pork in enough water to cover, skimming off the gray foam as it rose to the surface. When the pork was just fork-tender, I turned off the heat and set the pan aside while I took out the vegetables.

I took about 2 cups of bean sprouts from Asia Mart, rinsed those well and let drip in a colander. I sliced scallions two ways: in small pieces and in 2-inch lengths and set aside in a ramekin. I finely julienned organic carrots, sliced some choy into strips, and sliced three garlic segments and half a celery stalk thinly. I took a piece of now-cooled pork and cut up a small mound (barely a third of a ramekin), took out the chicken breast pieces, and rinsed and dried the shrimp. I was ready to stir fry.

I heated a medium-size wok with a flat bottom (to make contact with my ceramic-top stove) over high heat until very hot then poured in a scant tablespoonful of Canola oil. Very quickly I added the garlic and the small pieces of scallions. Stirring constantly I cooked these for about 10 seconds and added the shrimp. These I cooked until the translucent flesh became pink and opaque, careful not to brown or overcook them. While the shrimp was cooking I threw in the poached pork and chicken pieces and when the shrimp was done took all these out with a slotted spoon and set aside.

I added half a tablespoonful of oil to the wok and heated it for about ten seconds before adding the carrots and celery. Again stirring steadily I added the choy then the sprouts, all in a matter of seconds. When the vegetables were thoroughly coated with the hot oil, I threw in the long pieces of scallion then returned the meat (“subak” we call it in Hiligaynon). I sprinkled half a teaspoon of sesame oil, about a tablespoon of Bragg’s aminos, and a little salt, stirring continuously.

I quickly turned off the heat, continued to stir until everything was heated through, then emptied the contents into a warmed up bowl. Everything else should be ready so the vegetables can be eaten while still hot. I’d heated some Botan rice which I rubbed into the now empty work. Nothing is wasted. I quickly tamped the rice in a moistened ramekin, turned the rice out on a plate and dinner was ready!

At home when I was growing up, we used at least two kinds of meat to season a stir fry. This is usually shrimp with pork or shrimp with chicken. In America, land of plenty, I can afford to use more than two kinds of meat. I could have added beef liver, Chinese sausage, poached clam or squid or octopus, anything firm enough that it can withstand the brisk stir.

A vegetarian version is easily prepared but I would probably add at least two kinds of mushrooms e.g. fresh and dried mushrooms and tofu or bean curd or even cooked chick peas for protein. Indonesian tempeh would be a great addition. That would need to be marinated in soy sauce, maybe with some ginger, scallions and garlic with rice wine and a little sugar, browned and added on top of the stir fry.

The beauty of cooking without a recipe rests on knowing the principles of cooking e.g. how ingredients should be prepared for the desired effect, in what order they should be cooked, and the cooking method best suited again for the intended effect. What ingredients go well together is perhaps at the heart of good cooking. Knowing these one could concoct satisfying viands with impunity and grace, making the consumption of energy sources for a living body an art in itself, a social grace, culture for the palate and, yes, a cultivated mind!

The Writing Community

Through the years, and even from when I was a child, I always seemed to march to a different drummer. It’s just the life I’ve been given. Instead of drastically fighting to change much of that life I’ve gradually grown to embrace it, to honor, respect and care for the unasked for gifts. (Some may call them curses, some others, blessings.)

I’m an archetypal outsider, someone looking in on others living conventional lives united as they are by conventional beliefs. Me, I’ve never felt comfortable with conventions unless I’ve examined them closely and made my own personal choices. Conventions or common beliefs tie individuals together in communities of faith or common grounds, like religious credos and constitutions on which religious and political organizations are founded.

I may not strike some people as all that unconventional or atypical. Even outsiders or people who straddle different worlds have a kind of community albeit small and non-cohesive, dynamically changing and as flexible as weather forecasts. I’m certain that in many ways I belong to conventional communities, too, like everyone else. (For instance, there is family. Two days ago I became a grandfather.)

One community I belong to by reason of innate passion is the community of writers, those who love language and delight in communicating ideas through words in thoughtful, delightful ways. Most people write because they have to write. I write because I enjoy discovering the many ways thoughts can be expressed in words, phrases and sound bytes.

One of my favorite authors is Englishman Gerald Durrell, younger brother of his more famous brother, Lawrence Durrell. Gerry once noted that his brother, Larry, wrote because he loved to write, loved finding the mot juste, the perfect turn of phrase to express a moment or an idea; Gerry said he himself wrote to earn money to support his own passion—his interest in animals of the natural world, and, later, in the preservation of endangered species.

Yet Gerry’s literary output I find much more engaging than Larry’s attempts at serious literature like The Alexandra Quartet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell) I like similar topics that Durrell the senior also liked to write about—a Bohemian style of living, cosmopolitanism, literature, the Mediterranean cultures, and, of course, Alexandria itself. But Gerry’s prose, based in his recollections of experience, feels to me more intimate, closer to the man himself. He used memories as the basis for what comes across to me as a poetic, even lyrical fable about human nature, treating humans themselves like the wild animals he so loved. He dissected human personalities and their characteristic foibles with light, humorous and caring skill, a quality I suspect he exercised easily, as part of his own persona and an extension of his incredible curiosity about every other creature in nature, big, small or minute.

For Gerald Durrell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Durrell), writing was a way to earn money to fund his collecting safaris then the foundations to preserve endangered species and his belief these could be saved from extinction when bred in human-designed environments, today universally accepted by zoological institutions all over the world.

For me writing is a way to organize the wildness of my inner world. Few of us are troglodytes extending the solitude and silence to our creation. We like our creative offspring to have life outside the cave and they take on life when someone other than the author, the creator, the writer or artist connects with the work and a cycle of life and death is completed.

Iloilo circa 1955, the Days before Christmas

I am sure other people today, both in the Philippines and in the U.S., have a store of Christmas and New Year memories from which they re-create the celebration of these early winter holidays year after year. I do.

Years after I stopped putting up the trappings for Christmas—Yule tree, presents under the tree, Christmas carols streaming in the background as I cooked festive media noche fare, twinkling lights, candles, evergreen boughs, multicolored ribbons, Christmas cards and Christmas holiday stamps— I continue to treasure those childhood memories of perhaps the most nostalgic holiday in the Christian world!

Christmas when I was growing up still centered around church services. Starting December 17, for a novena of nine mornings before Christmas, people woke up to the pealing of church bells inviting them to aguinaldo, missa de gallo, mass of the rooster’s crow. This was traditionally at four in the morning when children were still wrapped in sleep and going out into the chill Philippine air would discourage anyone. But got up we did, eyes still half closed and bleary, to walk the half hour to church.

Church for me then was the wooden structure with a concrete triangular façade that was lit in multi-colored lights for the Christmas holiday season. (On semana santa, the lights were severely plain white.) I miss that façade, those lights. For me they represent a bygone era,  part of Christmas that felt distinctly Filipino—sentimental, a tad melodramatic, but oh so sweet when recalled today in our more high-technology times.

My mother raised us in the Aglipay church, officially called the Iglesia Filipina Independiente or IFI. (When the church became closely allied with the Philippine Episcopal Church in the 1960s and 1970s, it became known as the Philippine Independent Church or PIC, a name that didn’t have the élan or mystique of the Spanish name. It was during Spanish times that the church was born and it partook of the historical period, a feature of the native church the younger laity and priests are re-inventing today, more power to them!) Monsignor Aglipay after whom the church was familiarly called was the first bishop of the group that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Filipinos’ struggle for independence from the Spanish.

After two blocks we would turn the corner at the town plaza and suddenly there at the end of the short street was the candy-lit church. It barely clung to the edge of the plaza, the much bigger, more imposing Roman Catholic Church sitting right smack in the center facing the square.

Walking to this tiny wooden church beside the behemoth mainstream church was a potent shaping influence on me. From then on I aligned myself with the Davids of the world, straddling the mainstream and my own idiosyncratic choices, whether social, political, religious, philosophical or just personal.

I have always felt the outsider, difficult stereotyping but one that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking. After decades of living as one kind of minority or another I feel comfortable, even empowered, here in my own little corner of the world!

At Sunday mass in late November and the first three weeks of December, a period Catholic tradition called Advent (looking to the coming of the new Messiah), altar vestments were purple but on the early morning novena masses the altar was decked in white. The Redeemer had already arrived at the missa de gallo.

Those little touches of liturgical significance was another shaping influence on me, probably contributing to my interest in depth psychology after medical school, later Jungian psychology and the works on mythology by Joseph Campbell. Religions became for me systems of metaphor that needed to be explored for their store of accumulated wisdom, not with reason alone but with imagination, with intuition and the more mystical functions of consciousness.

After mass there often were vendors of snacks strategically positioned outside the church, in front of the plaza or along Jereos Street, to catch the exiting congregation. Rice cakes with coconut toppings (bibingka) and ibus and various suman delicacies tempted the children and parents doted as they were able to dote. After all they too had been starry-eyed children and Christmas was, still is, for children of all ages.

Nowadays, here in America, we can buy Americanized versions of these Filipino sweets (with twice more butter, more coconut, bigger portions, etc) but none can compare with those childhood treats. I can still see the vendors with their offerings, all lit in the glorious yellow light of kerosene lamps even as dawn was breaking in the sky above.

Back home we dove back under the mosquito nets and under the blankets. School was just a couple of hours away and sleeping a little longer felt delicious. We’d done our duty and enjoyed it too, a preview of Christmas that would manifest in its fullness on Christmas Eve