HAPPY 81ST BIRTHDAY MOM!

Last night we celebrated Mom's 81st birthday by going to Go Fish Restaurant. Here she is with Michael, holding up one of her presents, Virgil Mayor Apostol's Way of the Ancient Healer:



Here's a review of Virgil's wonderful book by Leny over HERE!

WALK THE TALK

THIS is an example of "Babaylan Poetics" -- like the best of poetry, it's a verb not a noun.

BEFORE ECO-POETICS,

there was BABAYLAN POETICS. Here's a new Babaylan video featuring timeless intellectual Leny M. Strobel. What's interesting, among many things, is how the video opens. It features Virgil Mayor Apostol (of the infamous FART) opening up one of the events during the Babaylan Conference a few months ago. Specifically, he is talking in Ilokano, saying "Bari, bari" which can be literally translated as "Go away."

But it's not an aggressive order for anyone to move away. The chant is more of a charm to drive away unwanted spirits, while allowing benevolent ones to remain. As Virgil explained to me, "This goes back to how our ancestors feared the malevolent spirits, thus much prayers and offerings going to them, rather than the good ones since they did no harm. Therefore, the focus on the chant for the opening is for the purification of the space, and everyone within."

Virgil adds, "The burning of anglem (cloth incense) is universal in northern Luzon, and used for various circumstances from the birth of a child, illness, to the death of an individual. With its inclusion in the opening ceremony, its purpose is to drive away these malevolent spirits."

Very interesting, and a helpful explanation to me since, when I first heard of the literal translation, I was struck by its use. That is, since the Babaylan is about community and inclusiveness, I found it interesting that this "Go away" is the opening. Mom said that the chant also refers to how, as we walk the earth, we are telling the spirits to move away so that we do not inadvertently step on them or otherwise harm them with our movements.

In the video opening, Virgil also goes on to say to the spirits, "We do not want anything from you..." I like that! My initial reaction was: Well, how's that for anti-colonialism!

These chants go ... deep (grin).

You know, ever since the Babaylan conference at Sonoma, I'd be walking about Galatea's mountain chanting, "Bari, Bari..."

Mom used to shush Moi, saying I'd actually bring the spirits here. Thing is, those spirits never left Moi. Blood memory and all that. Wink.

A BABAYLAN-IC PERSPECTIVE ON REVIEWING THE THORN ROSARY

I am so grateful to Leny M. Strobel for her engagement with my book THE THORN ROSARY in the new issue of Moria Poetry! Here is an excerpt--though you can see entire review HERE:

Once upon a time the eyewitness to the rituals of a Babaylan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babaylan; http://www.babaylan.net) told of her altered states of consciousness when she did her healing, her communing with the spirits. They didn’t understand her language but they accepted the efficacy of her relationship with the spirit world. They trusted her. They knew she had access to this world. (Why else did the Spanish friars in the 15th century embark on the project of exterminating these Babaylans?). [3]

Does a poet like Eileen also perform, symbolically, the role of a Babaylan? If the Babaylan is able to ferry a person in-between worlds, or is able to summon a wandering soul back to the body, or plead with the spirits to be kind and generous, or negotiate a propitiation—can a Babaylan-inspired poet do the same?

Sometimes reading poetry, for me, is learning how to dive for one’s own meaning. In diving one learns, senses, embodies. This I have learned from my engagement with Eileen’s body of work over the past decade. [4]

If according to Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Rosary is “a meditation for the blind, the simple, the aged.” is it then possible that the The Thorn Rosary is that which pricks the meditation in order to return us to our own bodies? Our bodies that aren’t blind, not simple, not aged.

Isn’t this the work of babaylan poetics—to walk the angel back into its body in unborrowed light. Eileen creates her own light, a luminosity that is also sorrowful, joyful, glorious…the light is unborrowed because it has already taken upon itself all that there is—the world into the poem. It doesn’t ask for a return, only an invitation to dance. The dance of the babaylan.

Isn’t this what the babaylan does? She dances. In wholeness. In ecstasy. A body out of time and space. And when she doesn’t literally dance, she writes Poems that dance. The Poem, like this one, takes your hand and leads your sensuous mind, this mind that descends into the body to become whole and sacred:


Restive
—after “on God (en Garde)” by Archie Rand

The farmers are monitoring the sky. Rain dilutes sweetness in the grapes. Knuckles knot into themselves, mimic the knees of hundred-year-old grapevines. The cabernet hang like purple testicles. I am always fingering a bunch. Sometimes I pinch off a globe, split its skin before my lips and suck at its membrane. The farmers measure brix mathematically. I want my body to determine truth like Cezanne painted rocks instead of images. When I see the winged shadow glide over the fruit-laden fields of September’s wine country, I know better than to question how my body doubles over. How my mouth gasps. I feel blood flowing out of a creature, somewhere, felled on its path. Its last vision will be a vulture’s open beak. Sweetness, let the harvest begin under the most livid sun. “Sweetness” —perhaps I mean You, dear “God.” Lord, I am praying for life and living—I am making poems. (161)


Hail Mary, mother of Eileen. Blessed are we and blessed are the fruits of our wombs….

Thank you, Leny. I appreciate this Babaylan-ic perspective for reviewing my newest book. It's a unique gift!

BABAYLANISM AT OUR OWN VOICE

This is actually a reprint of a post I just featured at my primary blog, but I replicate it below for convenience:


BABAYLANISM

OurOwnVoice's newest issue is rather historic by focusing on the Babaylan.

I've got three poems innit, which isn't the most important detail but which I note for moi Blog-File ("Hay(na)ku with Ducktail for Leny", "The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon," and "Sacred Time"). Again for the Blog-File, I also have the novel "Dear Cloud" innit.

Having gotten Housekeeping out of the way, I found this essay by Cynthia Arias, "An American Babaylan: Living in One's Own Truth" quite useful. It's useful because modern-day Babaylanism is controversial in some circles as people grapple with the effect of the diaspora (and the resultant separation from "land"). Anyway, here's some excerpts from Arias' essay:

The concept that the Babaylan is defined by factors that override an individual’s direct experience of the originating land, the Philippine Islands, is vital to understanding the presence of the Babaylan in the Diaspora and the ways that sacred practices of the Babaylan have, as well, bridged the seas of consciousness that Pilipinos have traversed in their journeys around the world.

...

If we accept that Culture is a human construct, by which a group of individuals agree basic concepts of values, morals, mores to form a worldview, then it follows that Culture evolves as humans evolve.

...

While many may provide their perspectives, and assist in our discoveries, through critical analysis founded in scientific methodology, it is up to us to decide who we are and where we are headed.

Modern-day Babaylanism is empowering.

The Babaylan Conference, which seeded this issue, also empowered Mom to write her first book (which I'm reviewing now). But here is also one of her narratives, a memoir from 1939 entitled "Dawac". Good for Mom!

Also useful is the essay "Ways of the Babaylan" by Katrin de Guia. It's clear from her essay that empathizing/understanding (in my opinion, if you understand Babaylanism, understanding cannot occur without empathizing) cannot occur without that thing that many folks are scared to discuss: love. I do think Ben Okri's quote relevant: "Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery."

It takes courage to love as a Babaylan would/does. For, as de Guia puts it, "The first priority of the babaylan is the community."

I appreciate Babaylanism because it requires intelligent innocence.

MOM'S FIRST READING!

As I've mentioned before, my nearly 81-year-old Mom has a first book coming out! In celebration of such, she also had her first "salon" (oh my!) reading experience this weekend, as she read from her narrative (she's calling these memoir-vignettes "narratives") "Dawac" at beautiful Leny's beautiful house (it was so colorfully and, wink, indigenous-ly decorated!). Here's a photo of Mom in her reading chair--do note in the foreground a make-shift "altar" of blessings that Leny created on the spot from vegetables that I brought from my garden (that's when I realized, btw, that you're supposed to harvest zucchinis when they're smaller, not when they become human baby-sized....duh). That's the beautiful back of the beautiful Leny's beautiful head in foreground:



Here's a shot, too, of part of the audience to whom I'm so grateful for their openness and making my Mom feel really welcome as she goes on to her own literary debut. That's Jean on the far-left side of couch! It's not a good photo, but you can see the intentness of the peeps' attention....



At one point in the evening, one lady said that writing must run in my family. And I said half-jokingly, "Yes, but I didn't know it for the longest time!"

And what I was thinking of is that when some talent runs in the family, one usually sees it first in the parent and then in the child. In my and Mom's case, it was seen visibly first -- if one uses publication as a viewsight -- in me and later in Mom. But what this really means is that what was running through our blood is not linear but circular...

...evoking for me indigenous time's mythical space of creativity: where, in the space of creation, there are no delineations between past, present and future, or between geographically-defined space; in that mythical space, unity exists in the universe across all time and space. (Got that? Good!)

Last but not least, I mentioned in my introduction for Mom that "Dawac" is the first narrative in Part One of her forthcoming book, and that Part Two will be a reprint of her Master's Thesis at Silliman University when she had written (under since-recognized Philippine National Artists Edilberto and Edith Tiempo) the first critical study of "local color" in Filipino English-language short story writing. I thought it wonderfully synchronistic that Mom's own narratives will contain much local color, even as I consider her book also a recovery project for what was actually a historic literary study. The circle turns....

Thanks again to Leny for the salon idea and hosting. Thanks for making Mom and me feel so welcome. What a beautiful community you all make!

POETS FOR LIVING WATERS

I'm pleased to be part of the Poets for Living Waters project curated by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples in response to the BP oil spill disaster. Innit with a poem, statement of conscience and explication of Michael and his anti-colony collapse disorder beekeeping. The poem was one I wrote after the disastrous landslides in Guinsaugon, Leyte, Philippines on February 17, 2006.

I was happy, too, to be able to meld some Babaylan Poetics/indigenized POV into that conscience-statement, which I replicate here:

STATEMENT

I am also to blame for the BP oil disaster. I am part of the demand for oil. I do try to limit my footprint on the natural environment, in energy and other matters. For the former, say, a solar field; for the latter, say, hosting bee hives to help mitigate “colony collapse disorder” which also is a way to introduce my son to environmental concerns. But regardless of these steps, I do not wish to avoid acknowledging that I am part of the cause for the tragedy in the Gulf and many other environmental damages—to recognize blame’s expanse is a condition precedent for being part of any solution. As Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz has noted, there is a “moral imperative” to the making of interconnections that require, among other things, pro-active awareness including self-awareness—a stance also inherent in the Filipino indigenous trait of “kapwa” and what I call “Babaylan Poetics.” Ergo, for the BP oil disaster: I am very sorry—I will try to do better.

Colony collapse disorder, landslides from reaping trees from mountain, BP's oil spill in the Gulf -- we are all complicit, because we are interconnected.