Tuesday, November 13, 2007 Malilong: Retreat By Frank Malilong The Other Side
WHEN, earlier in the day, our leadership training facilitator, Jun Cantal, spoke about the need to break walls, I had no idea that I would be living the principle literally. But there I was, Friday evening last week, in dreamless state on the floor of Gabby Leyson’s wall-less Las Nubes in Taptap with only a plastic-covered mattress on my back.
My only regret, as I would later tell my friends from Gothong Southern, was that it did not pour that night. It would have been truly exhilarating: howling winds drowning out our collective snores (which reminded me of criminal law and charivari) and raindrops falling on our faces.
It wasn’t only the rains that snubbed us; the mosquitoes did, too. Friends in the lowland have tried to scare me out of the four-day live-in seminar with warnings of swarms of the dengue-carrying insects waiting to pounce on their prey. I told them that mosquitoes are picky creatures that would not waste their time on a middle-aged aspiring adventurer. Moreover, what is the threat of a decreased platelet count compared to the sheer joy of communing with nature?
As it turned out the dreaded carriers were nowhere near us or if they were, had decided to let us be. For three full hours, I slept, to quote the Beatles, like a log.
It had been like that many years ago in our little barrio in Masbate. I slept not on a mattress but on a buri mat laid out on the floor made of bamboo slats. There was no airconditioning, only fresh air blowing through the slits on the bamboo walls. Every now and then a firefly would stray into the house, sending us, children, hiding in our rolled mats, scared of the santilmo that we have associated with the fly’s tiny light.
I thought I also saw a firefly Friday night but only briefly and from a distance. Strangely, I remembered the santilmo that same instant but I was no longer afraid. I am not a child anymore and I live in the city. Times have changed.
Oh, how they have. A dreamless sleep is now hard to come by. Rarer still are beautiful dreams. And in our little barrio in Masbate, I was told, people now lock their doors and windows before they go to sleep.
Saturday night found me in a warm and more comfortable bed in the city. I slept to the drone of the newscast on BBC and the hum of the 1.5 hp National. When I woke up, I had a bad case of colds.
