Obenieta: New yearnings

Friday, December 30, 2011

EXPECT the noise, through all the hullabaloo of hellos for the New Year, to include an invitation for murder from a microphone. “And now the end is near,” someone would kick off and throw caution to the cold, as if conceding the certainty of a knife slash or a gun blast, wailing headlong to a self-reassuring heave of relief: “I did it my way!”

Out of earshot from those who already passed away in peace, the deadly overtones of such insomnia-causing interpretation smacks of a stubborn insistence to rock the regrets away. No disappointment, no dire circumstances—resurfacing as usual with the constant deluge of dark news—can be as futile as hoping to find Noah’s ark. Everything will be water under the bridge in the long run, or so the videoke daredevil seemed to have believed.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

Doubt not the drivel many a cynic often dismiss, especially if this is an optimistic wish for a good fortune. Even in the murky face of misery, the switcheroo from glum to glad can be as awkward as unwarranted grace. Such as the story of a drug-addled man in barangay Apas who got lucky even as he failed to fulfill his plan.

Climbing a 50-foot coconut tree and reaching for his gun to kill himself, he “slipped and fell into the tangle of electrical wires and then down to the bumper of the boom truck… He survived the fall, which he had not intended, and got bruises on his forehead and body.”

Soul-stirring tales of survival, these are the stuff of tonsil-shaking anthems to gargle the gloom away. Some dreams may have become watered-down, but the wishes for a “happy new year” will never go dry even if the dreary pages of our personal and social lives from the past up to present have been sticky with tears.

The laughter of the mad may as well be sensible if we consider how sadness is best sung out loud. As if darkness, true to a poet’s stick-the-tongue-out rebuff for death to “be not proud,” can be played around like a game of hide and seek.

Find a way out, dream on. Into each benighted life, a ray of light may fall. Rise, thus the repertoire of joyful noise aroused us. Let the eyes follow the way of fireworks. Up. Right there, who cares if its flickers are nothing more than mimicry of the stars’ audacity against a blind sky?

The limit is a lie, declare the bright-side gazers. They can tell it on the rooftops of hovels, too, even if the problems of poverty loom no less than mountains. In the slums of Manila, for instance, a project by a nonprofit group called MyShelter Foundation has caught the attention of American media.

Overseeing a community outreach program called "A Liter of Light" that literally showcases Pinoy ingenuity, the foundation has mobilized its volunteers along with local government workers in dispersing the shadows of despair. Where many cannot afford to pay electric bills, plastic soda bottles discarded and gathered from the garbage have been transformed into low-tech but highly efficient solar lights.

Filled with purified water mixed with bleach and wedged in a hole at the roof, the bottles—catching sunlight and refracting it from within, glow at its bottom. "It's safer. It's healthier. It's brighter,” beamed Illac Diaz, the head of the foundation, who assured the bottled water-bulbs would benefit millions of the country’s poor.

Enriched with imagination, it’s easier to hear such hopeful yearnings and see why it can leave us with lips smacked and stretched all ears.

(geemyko@gmail.com)