AMERICAN writer and poet Herman Melville penned this interesting observation about our interconnectedness as human beings.
“We cannot live only for ourselves.
A thousand fibers connect us
with our fellow humans.”
I held on to the thought as we all struggled with the impact of two super typhoons: Ompong and Rosita, this past two months.
It helped me uphold the essence of humanity’s aspirations for oneness, especially during times of calamities, as we pursue our recovery and outreach activities.
As one but many individual fibers in the landscape, the vision also helps us to celebrate each other and the unique efforts and contributions that we do to help our fellow human beings in distress.
Two weeks after Super Typhoon Rosita, I still relish the images of tired and eager policemen and a man of the cloth who helped us carry the sacks of rice that our agency contributed for the victims of Super Typhoon Ompong in Itogon, Benguet.
Still reeling from the impact of Ompong’s wrath, we are yet called upon to respond to the destruction that Super Typhoon Rosita inflicted in areas that Ompong left untouched.
Both Ompong and Rosita, Angels of Hades, came and left us all suffering a permanent physical separation with many a fiber in the body landscape. Besides the death of many, both calamitous events buried homes, properties, and the dreams and perhaps the future of several hundred more, especially those who were orphaned by the landslides in Itogon, Benguet; and Natonin, Mountain Province.
Meanwhile, several farmers in Barlig, Mountain Province and Tanudan, Kalinga have lost the base of their livelihood when their rice terraces were eroded caused by rampaging silt and flash floods from above the mountain slopes.
Perhaps, it is this great need pervading the landscape that has sharpened a consciousness on my part in encountering the concept of “oneness.”
For instance, anywhere you go, you encounter the concept in how almost all animal and plant life begins.
Animals come into life in the womb of their mother, just as seed-bearing plants are formed in the fruit.
Some plants do not reproduce in the fruit but do it asexually through specialized stems called runners.
In essence, asexual plants form their daughters at the tip of their runners coming from the root.
If you visit a farmer, he can show you what a runner is and explain how it functions like an umbilical cord that connects both mother and daughter plants until the new daughter plant can survive on its own.
This phenomenon can be observed in strawberries, mint, spider plant, and Bermuda grass.
Among living things, you can discern the concept of oneness as bliss.
But as urgent as the need to be one, in birth as in life, human beings, animals, and plants keep on pulling away from each other, to separate, and be on their own.
To be one and to separate, they define the joys and pains of existence. Growing up, many of us felt how it was like leaving home for college. It fulfills a yearning to go on an adventure and standing on our own, which is bearable for as long as our parents remain reliably there when we get home.
Sometimes nature and human constructs are but constant reminders of the interconnectivity that keeps us where we are and breathing.
Among human beings, "connections" are like umbilical cords to our existence and its meaning. In this cord flow compassion and the nourishment of loving-kindness, understanding, and the commitment that makes family and community possible.
Our experts say that super calamitous typhoons like Yolanda, Ompong, and Rosita are now normal weather occurrences.
I shudder about how this can make a generation sired by OFWs and a growing number of orphaned children will populate and run the nation.
Freudians understand how isolation and the pain of perceived rejection from parents at a young age, can scar the brain. The scar can turn people into cruel beings, their tragic and shriveled lives hugging domestic and civil violence.
I do not cite that knowledge to scare people on the potential conflicts the new weather and social “normal” brings to our otherwise peaceful existence.
In spite of our different backgrounds, cultures, languages, ways and beliefs, we can yet have hope as one people - as "sympathetic fibers" and "invisible threads" stubbornly working towards harmonious relationships every day, in love.
That is both bliss and dangerous, the image of vulnerable love demonstrated in nature.