Tuesday, May 01, 2007 Arinday: Requiem for loss of Nature's passion By G.H. Arinday, Jr. Sunfare
THERE IS some kind of attachment and passion about the month of May when we think of flowers and the first rain to fall over the parched earth, which occurrence is given a kind of holy bless.
The ephemeral thought about the significance of the myriad colors swaying in the breeze is something of a dance ritual awaiting the change of season-the coming of southwest monsoon.
Here the mind is hobbled by the mixture of nostalgia, the omen of the past like the ravages of the geophysical disasters, the mudslides defacing the mountain villages as well as the coastal shanties.
But the Mayflower festival precedes the unpredictability of the rest of the season where offerings are made with prayers for less destructive rainfall. Nature has its own way of setting the global weather conditions.
The capriciousness of the southwest monsoon is hardly one which would inspire the poet or a dreamer, except for the nature springs gushing the crystal tears of the Earth into water basins for the community's sake. The cool breeze of May unless forfeited by El Niño would ease and comfort the minds of those engaged in the power struggle for supremacy in the political spheres.
But unlike the full moon, which touches the hearts, engages the mind in poetic joust, the month of May, saved for the thousand blossoms is ready to wilt under the onslaught of the gusty winds, brings festivities all over land.
The seas which seem to sleep under the April searing sun become alive by the sudden breeze of May as if awakened from its stupor.
The dry and wet seasons in tropical zones symbolize no more than our lives, its highs and lows. The season could be cruel to all living creatures, some of which are also man's creations. Take the bald mountains and polluted rivers where once man took his game and enjoyed their pristine beauty.
Now even the slight breeze of May no longer carries the sweet smell of Ylang-Ylang and Sampaguita. The carbon dioxide and gas emissions lauded as man's achievements foul the air.
Descend into the valley where once your youthful hours were filled with memories of the river's murmuring and lull you to sleep amid the verdant greens with the birds and crickets competing in their afternoon concerto.
They are sadly gone. Man's superiority over other living things becomes his own fatal defeat. Life's vagaries have hidden potent poison to man's intellectual prowess. The loss of man's natural shield is by his own folly makes no better than the other beasts destroying their own haven.
The poet is angry, the philosopher is mad in the absence of any empirical object to challenge his inquiry; the scientist is totally disillusioned in the abberative use of his discoveries like the atoms for useful and peaceful advancements of life itself.
The blessed rain of May with all its significance relative to the loveliness of the flowers manifesting its infinite symbol of a beautiful life is dashed into worthless petals crumpled by man's wickedness.
The wretchedness of life is shown on how we care about living things around us. The fecundity of the fruit trees is tendered less by our wrong and sinful efforts to let the tree bear fruit even outside of its season. It is progress indeed but it is also the beginning of retrogressiveness.
Take a look at the wild tiny flowers on the hillsides untouched by human hands as the fireflies which crown the tree shrubs far from the glitzy urban life with all of its exquisiteness.
The great painter-artist Fernando Amorsolo would have cringed at the rustic countryside morphing into high class residential with all the nature's endowment having been removed. And profoundly, French painter Paul Gauguin would have angrily demonstrated against the filthy coastal areas filled with debris and drifted matters and the conversion of some into non-vibrancy for lack of bold pattern-making.
In our cell of remembrance past when the rain of May, cool as it was, we enjoyed its rhapsody. The reinvention of our environment would not give us the assured protection from the fury of the hostile weather as it has been done with Man's own quest for something ephemeral.
