-Ano ka ba naman anak, tingnan mo nga yang suot mo.
–Si Mama talaga, ako na naman ang nakita.
-Hay naku Judith, paano ba namang…
—Hindi ka makikita ni Nanay, eh halos makita na ang kaluluwa mo dyan sa suot mo? Mano po, nay.
-Kaawaan ka ng Diyos. John, samahan mo nga itong kapatid mong…
–MA! Ayokong kasama yan!
-At bakit hindi…
–MA!
-…matagal na ring di mo nakakasama ang kuya mong…
—Nay wag na. Alam niyo namang di na ako nagpupunta dun eh. Naaasar lang ako sa mga tao dun. Puro mga ipokrito.
–Kita niyo na Ma, wala ng pag-asa yang si kuya. Weird and…
—Anlakas naman ng amoy ng pabango mo, ansangsang.
–Masangsang ka diyan. Kaw nga tong amoy pawis kakabasketbol.
-John, magpunas ka na anak at magbihis tapos samahan mo itong kapatid mong…
–MA! —Nay!
-Sya sya. Judith, palitan mo nga yang damit mo…
–Si Mama talaga old-fashioned. Iba na ang panahon ngayon.
—Oo nga Nay. Paano nga naman magpapaligaw yang si Judith kung hindi siya maliligo ng pabango at magpapakita ng laman?
–Eeew!
-Susmaryosep John! Galangin mo naman ang kapatid mo!
—Respect is paid only where it is due.
–Paingles-ingles ka pang nalalaman dyan. UP ka nga di naman nakagraduate.
—Kung gusto mong galangin kita, galangin mo muna ang sarili mo.
-Tama na yan magkapikunan pa kayo. Judith, anak, magpalit ka na…
–MA! Anong oras na! Gusto niyo bang malate ako?
-Hay. Bahala nga kayo sa buhay niyo. John, magpalit ka na ng damit at baka magkasakit ka.
—Opo Nay.
-Judith, mag-iingat ka. At yung pinapabili ko, wag mong kakalimutan.
–Yes Ma. Tatlong tali ng Sampaguita.
.
.
.
–Sige Ma, magsisimba na ako.

Today is International Women’s Day! In addition to the usual, today’s top links were chosen because they discuss women and religion, women in science (at least for a day), and reproductive health.  I would also highly recommend the piece by Peter Hitchens and the expose on Scientology, which I know a lot of you are fascinated with.   Submit your links in The News Thread or the comments.  Theme suggestions are also welcome.

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Four Women and a Prophet – women fighting to reform their religion (via Times of India) link

Women will be staffing CERN on International Women’s Day (via Indiana University) link

Tamar Abrams: This International Women’s Day, let’s aim to end maternal deaths (via Huffington Post) link

Bishops want to debate Cabral on condoms (submitted by Justin Aquino, via gmanews.tv) link

(As a Catholic) Noynoy flip flops on RH Bill (submitted by Justin Aquino, via inquirer.net) link

Peter Hitchens: How I found peace with my atheist brother (via Daily Mail) link

On Christopher: “He often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience – which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.”

Breaking with Scientology (via nytimes.com) link

Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution (via AP) link

I was cheated. I was cheated when I was in school, not by my classmates but by the very exams that were supposed to measure my ratings and academic performance.

Grade 1: Math Subject

We were given an exam on multiplication. Part 1 was a timed exam due within 5 minutes. We were supposed to answer a set of items such as 8 multiplied by four and 7 times 51 using mental math. No calculators were allowed.

With a snap of a finger, the teacher shouted, “Finished or not finished, pass your papers.” I was hesitant to do so. I was not finished with ten items to fill up. But, hell, I had to move on to part 2.

The second part was easy. No time pressure. You just have to solve the problems given.  For example: Your father gave you a daily allowance of 100 pesos. How much will you be able to save in a week after spending 65 pesos a day?

The teacher checked the papers and after a day we were informed of our grades. I was given a perfect score for part 2 but the results of part 1 were devastating. Bottom line, I failed the test because part 1 had more items and thus had more bearing.

I was cheated that day. I felt that part 1 should have less bearing on exam. Why? Because part 1 is not a math exam. It doesn’t measure how good you are in applying mathematical principles. It just tests how good you are in memorizing the multiplication table.

I was not just cheated in math. I was consistently cheated in my other subjects due to the traditional belief that memory retention is the ultimate measure of academic success as thus success in later endeavors.

High School: History Subject

I was given an exam. The first part was enumeration. I had to write down names of Filipino Heroes. There was a question: Who was the Filipino hero who killed Magellan? I was tempted to answer Lapu Lapu because that was written in the history book that we were asked to memorize. I didn’t answer Lapu Lapu. Why? Because I believe he was not a Filipino in the first place. There was no national identity back then, only tribal identity.

This is just my opinion and I may be wrong. What bothers me is not just that we are expected to memorize what is written in our textbooks but that we are also expected to believe what’s written as if it was the ultimate truth.

I’m sure you can relate to what I am saying: that one time or another, we are expected to memorize and believe what our teachers and textbooks say. We are taught to believe that what’s written in our textbooks are ultimate truths and that memorizing these texts will make us succeed later in life. This is misleading because wrong measures lead to wrong results.

If we make our children memorize the multiplication table instead of making them understand the application of mathematical principles, we are inhibiting their learning and analyzing skills, making them good memory chips but poor mathematicians. If we strictly enforce the ideas of our social science textbooks to our children as if these were ultimate truths, we are prohibiting them to think independently.

Yes, the educational system sucks and we are all cheated. But the fact that you are reading this article right now is a proof that you keep an open mind and that you search for learning beyond the classroom walls of traditional education. You reflect on what you do and why you do it or why you believe what you believe. Instead of asking what, when and where, you ask the more important questions of how and why. How we all wish others would ask these questions too.

We are freethinkers. We were cheated once before and we do not want to be cheated again.

I remember a feature in Discovery Channel many years ago on the idea of downloading everything from a person’s mind – knowledge, memories, language, emotions, etc. – and uploading it to a supercomputer that controls a robot. This robot would then act and interact based on the whole personality of the borrowed mind, and it would keep on doing so even after the person is long dead, rendering him/her immortal.

Unfortunately, this attempt at immortality would only benefit the surviving family, friends, and colleagues because as far as the person is concerned, he/she has already ceased to exist and cannot experience or enjoy this “life” the robot is living.

Moreover, having one’s mind “transfered” to a robot’s electronic brain isn’t really very much different from distilling one’s thoughts into literature. Great minds from decades and even centuries ago continue to speak to the living and influence millions. Sure, a robot is cool, and Shakespeare might still be writing plays today if his mind was backed up in a supercomputer, but until such time that the technology becomes available, the written word is the closest one can get to immortality.

So to those who don’t believe in an afterlife, if you post your articles here at Filipino Freethinkers a part of you will become frozen in time, to be read, shared and discussed by future generations of freethinkers. By then this site might be run by Ryan’s great-great-great-grandchildren or by an FF Foundation – or by the CBCP, heaven forbid! – but as long as it exists, so will the authors, in a way.

And with this we are inviting everyone to submit articles on freethought – essays, stories, even poems.

Write up guys, and become immortal! :)

As I was seeking for answers and looking for truths regarding life, I was disappointed and dismayed when I learned that some ‘truths’ are only illusions. I learned that each and every one of us has his/her own ‘truths’ which, if anyone dares to argue with, it would be a long and tiring argument for sure.

So let me tell you my story on why I became an atheist. This is my JOURNEY TO PARADISE.

I was born in a Christian family, in an environment among what they call the ‘righteous’ and the ‘chosen ones’. But I am an individual, unique, and I have my own thoughts to follow. I realized that I don’t have to follow my family’s traditions and beliefs.

For 12 years I was in a Catholic environment because my family is a devotee of Catholicism. But by the time I was able to understand this religion and belief thing, I started questioning every little detail on why people follow such traditions like the rituals done during Holy Week, the baptism of babies, the signing of the cross, the feast of the patron saints, etc., which are actually prohibited in the Bible, as far as I know.

But instead of answering my questions they just ignored me, so I started seeking for answers. A friend of mine in high school told me that if I wanted to seek for answers to my questions regarding religion and belief, I must read the Bible. And so I did. But instead of giving me answers it created more questions, until one day a neighbor came and preached about the gospel and the “Word of God” to me. She earnestly answered each and every question I had, and although I was a little skeptical of her answers, I accepted them. And because of my eagerness to really have the answers, I decided to become a born again Christian and to study more about the Word of God.

For two years I studied and adopted the beliefs of this sect I was in. I became “The Bible Man” in my family. Sometimes I argued with my mom with regards to what the Bible says about those who don’t follow what God had commanded. But that was until I realized that I was being a freak of this Jesus and his teachings.

I could no longer accept some of the lessons in science, sociology, and philosophy that I encountered in school because of this “have faith and never doubt” thing that I learned in the Bible. Fortunately, I realized I was being illogical and unreasonable at times. I realized that “truth is never told but realized”. And so I renounced my Christian faith and beliefs to grasp freethought for me to gain the real knowledge of life and the most logical and reasonable position that man can ever be.

Christianity had been my hindrance to progress and to knowing the reality and every answer to my questions. I may not know everything in life yet but what I know for sure is that there will be answers in the future. For everything here is explainable by science and logic – maybe not yet now but sooner or later we’ll have every answer that we longed to know and waited for so long. I may no longer be alive at that time, but I’m living right now for that future to come.

I no longer believe in any deity or supernatural things now that I have realized that it’s absurd to believe in such things that have no proofs of their existence. I live my life the way I want it, free from falsehood and absurdities.

But It doesn’t mean that I live a life of nothingness just because I don’t believe in a Sky-Daddy and didn’t follow what my family has taught me. I have my own thoughts and views regarding things, so no one can say I am a lifeless being. Every individual is as unique as his/her beliefs and so we can’t just say to anyone that he/she is wrong for what he/she believes, for we don’t know yet what is true.

And so if I say that God does not exist, you can’t say I am wrong just because you have things that “prove” your claim that God exists. No, God’s existence has been the long time argument of theists and atheists and yet no one has ever proven anything of it’s existence or non-existence. So I may be an agnostic as far as my position is concerned because I don’t know anything yet. But if God exists or not, I don’t care. At the least I know what I’m doing and what I’m supposed to do.

I am an Atheist. It has been one heck of a journey for me indeed. I may not have written all of it here, but this is the best thing that happened in my journey. And though my journey is not yet over, I’ll live for it now, to finish what I started, on this Journey to Paradise.

I’ve been talking more often to a friend who works in a Christian organization.  She is born and raised Catholic, but is the typical ’seasonal’ Catholic – she only attends mass occasionally (during special occasions, or whenever she feels like it).  She works in a company dominated by members of Christian sects (e.g. Baptist, Born Again Christians).

Her job application involved her writing an essay about her relationship with God, which she had to elaborate on during her job interview.  On a daily basis, she is required to attend daily devotions, prayers before and after meetings.  She organizes and attends mandatory retreats and full-day prayer sessions on special occasions.  She is also surrounded by employees who like to quote the Bible and call each other ’sis’ and ‘bro’.  She has been asked, on occasion, to lead spontaneous prayers, share her reflections, participate in group sharing.  It’s like a full-day Jesus party where she works.

As is to be expected from a person who has a brain and thinks for herself, this environment did not suit her.  Unlike other organizations where prayer (even when organized by the company) is optional, her workplace requires attendance to all religious activities, and non-attendance has negative consequences on job evaluation.  She has been reprimanded for being unaware of the negative influence of certain activities one would think was harmless (e.g. yoga).  As a person in charge of recruitment, she has been asked to reject ‘unqualified’ candidates (specifically, candidates that are not Christian enough, such as Mormons, or immoral candidates, such as people who look like they are homosexuals).  She hides who she really is – a funny, vibrant, person who curses and says dirty jokes- because this will lead to reprimands, which may include additional prayer reflections, being prayed over, or being thought of as a sinful, bad influence.

What is even worse than working in a company whose leadership is very, very prayerful is that the same religious, bible-thumping people are hypocritical, nepotistic employers.  My friend has been working for weeks outside of her initial contract based on false promises of further employment.  “We offer you spiritual growth in addition to a good career,” they said.  By “good career”, they had actually meant further indefinite contractual employment with no benefits, on a job that they have described as “seasonal”, which was their official excuse for her contractual status (despite exceeding the 6 month period for regularization as recommended by law).  In addition, my friend learned that this practice was not consistent for all employees.  Some employees whose family shared the same church as management were actually immediately regularized, with no probationary period.  Some are having contractual status while also enjoying the benefits of regular employees.  Meanwhile, my friend met a fellow Catholic in the organization who has worked there for a couple of years on a string of short-term contracts with no benefits.  It was obvious that Catholics in the organization, while ‘tolerated’, were marginalized for their half-hearted compliance with the majority’s religious practices. While one might say that this contract inconsistency is typical of other secular organizations, I find that these discriminatory practices (which, BTW, included flat-out lying to employees’ faces) are even more damning to an organization spouting Jesus talk eight hours a day.  I thought Jesus judged dishonest, unfair people!  Apparently he only judges the gays.

What was interesting to me was the effect of this type of environment on a person who actually believes in God.  My friend told me that she actually feels like she has started to dislike God and Jesus and all that she thought it stood for, just because her officemates have fully bastardized any meaning left in it.  How could anyone feel any affinity towards a concept that now stands for judgment, hate, dishonesty, and trite, petty rules?  She described to me a hive-mind environment of people trying to out-Jesus each other with memorized bible quotes and disapproval of immoral behavior (and cheesy jokes about pastors), where people with different or dissenting beliefs hide their true colors and actually have to communicate covertly their opinions and lack of interest in ‘finding Jesus in their lives’.  It seemed like a same-Jesus-shit-different-groundhog-day scenario, which her anecdotes being more ridiculous by the day. Who knows even if these so-called Christian people actually believe what they say, or if they’re just pretending to be like this for their careers?  What is sure is that if you go all-out with your Christian-ness, you will be rewarded by Jesus (and by Jesus, I mean the bosses of this company).

Overall, she has described to me a daily experience of detachment, a little fear and a growing desire to stick immorality in their faces.  We have discussed choosing the most immoral cartoon character for Kris Kringle, or the best workplace to say she transferred to when she resigns (HR manager for a gay bar), or inserting funny, sarcastic remarks in her daily prayer.  Why did she accept it in the first place, you ask? Because the situation was too crazy-bizarre for the imagination to fathom (esp. for a person who doesn’t interact with these types of people).  Why didn’t she leave immediately?  Because she needed the cash, and her contract was supposedly short-term anyway.  Why is she still there even if her contract has ended?  Because they wouldn’t let her leave. She is planning on leaving the company soon despite the uncertain job market out there because she can’t take it anymore.

I described this experience so that we may reflect and Thank God for our secular workplaces and freedom to express ourselves in our own little corner of the internet. (I’m kidding about the God part, of course)  To some of you, all religions are created equal (as in, equally false); to some, they are not.  However, the freedom to actually choose one or none is sacred and a workplace where it is mandatory to practice only one religion is not ideal.

Storytelling is one form of art that transcends medium. Whether in books, ballads, plays, or movies – even in sculptures, photographs or paintings – someone is telling a story. Someone is talking of life. Not Life on a grand scale but life in bits and pieces; seemingly mundane moments that give us glimpses of a bigger picture. Fleeting and ephemeral, once captured by an artist they are immortalized and frozen in time, lending themselves to be shared with other lives as well.

While different stories have vastly different scopes, the time it takes to tell a story somehow falls within a relatively narrow range. Most books have a few hundred pages and most movies last a few hours, but the stories they tell could either cover decades of world history – or a single eventful night in the lives of two people. And yet a beautifully told story is never a page too long, never a minute too short. It’s just as it should be.

Since storytelling time is limited, the story has to be compromised between breadth and depth. Naturally, epic tales cannot get too much into the individual lives of the characters, just as love stories seldom wander far beyond the interaction of a few people. But the storyteller somehow manages to piece the two together in perfect balance of breadth and depth, the former a background of the latter. And while not every second of the story can be told, the storyteller speeds up time and slows it down at just the right moments so that precious minutes are neither wasted nor skimped.

Imagine telling the story of a certain civilization and how it came about. If one were not to miss out a tiny detail, the story could not be finished within the listener’s lifetime, and so the trick is to secure only the salient points. On the other hand, a story that takes place within a shorter time than it takes to read it has to have something really interesting to sustain the reader’s attention. If every single moment, every spoken word is worthy of mention, telling the story will take just as long as the story itself. Now put every deep emotion, every unspoken thought, every subtle gesture, and there you have a story bigger than how it would have been in real life.

* * * * *

This article was originally published at innerminds.wordpress.com. I re-posted it here to encourage other writers and storytellers to contribute to the FF blog, which seems to be having fewer new articles lately. In the FF Facebook Group, Ryan has been posting mostly articles from Friendly Atheist instead, so please write up guys. 

Twelve freethinkers plus the one holding the camera. Not bad for a first meet-up.

This is Harley’s P90 burger. That patty is almost 2 inches thick, made of pure lean beef, flame-broiled of course. They have a great homemade hot sauce and a nice mustard.

More beer please…

Introductions and journeys…

More food…this is Lydon’s baked scallops:

That is Sam at the center, the owner of Harley Blvd. Motor Cafe.

And Sam was kind enough to let our banner stay on his wall…

What can I say? It was awesome guys. Can’t wait for the next one.

The premise: a problem

It has been said over and over again, as a defense or even as a backlash, by religious men and women that religion has a curative and comforting utility to humankind like no other. It has also been said over and over again by secular people and rationalists that however comforting some belief or idea is, it nevertheless adds nothing to the truth value of the belief or idea. That secularism offers nothing more than a skinny comfort blanket amidst the cold and pouring rain at best. That may well be true, and indeed it leads me to believe that it all boils down to what we really want: happiness or the truth. Happiness may not necessarily be true or what’s really happening, and having the truth may not necessarily make one happy. This conflict reminds me of the doggedly proverbial “The truth hurts” and The X-Files’ “The truth is out there”. This conflict also reminds me of the struggle in the movie The Matrix, wherein to know the truth, one has to be ‘removed’ from the confines of the complacency brought about by the virtual reality of the machines who have taken over. Once one has learned the truth, which involves living as a fugitive or freedom fighter wearing mostly ragged clothing near the center of the Earth, one is left to wonder if it would have been better to have stayed in the fantasy reality, even though it’s all make-believe. I guess it wouldn’t be so surprising considering the fact that human beings, like almost every other animal, are predisposed to follow what is certain to help in the continuation of its species. After all, speaking in ageological time scale, homo sapiens are but cells that have just fertilized, and are beginning to undergo cell division to form a larger animal.

The question

So then, if you will humor my ponderings, what could secularism possibly offer as an answer to one of the most profound questions we humans have asked since the dawn of our consciousness: What is death or what happens when we die? Do we survive death in some form or is there nothing after it?

Setting the mood

Quite a mouthful of questions, and ones that have plagued thinkers or philosophers for centuries upon centuries. But I think before I even begin to give my answer to those questions, a little ‘mood setter’ is in need. Some questions are too frank or too blunt in manner, which sometimes has the effect on the listener or the questioner of making one lose focus on the more relevant and apparent details. The mood setting quote is from the book Unweaving The Rainbow by prof.Richard Dawkins. It’s his reply to people who keep on ranting or complaining or fussing about their deaths. Everytime I read it, especially when I watched and heard prof. Dawkins read it with emotions in a talk at UC Berkeley, I cannot help but be moved by it’s message, wrapped around in romantic scientific prose:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

And continuing this passage in his talk:

We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state, from which the vast majority have never stirred.

Makes one (or at least myself) wonder if we even have the right to feel anger or guilt or even sadness by our undeniable demise.

Physics on death

An episode of The X-Files has agent Mulder talking to agent Scully about starlight. He says that starlight as we see it here on Earth is already billions of years old, and has traveled unimaginable distances (light-years). Stars that are now long dead, but whose light is still traveling through time. Mulder continues that perhaps that’s where souls (our souls, after we die) reside. Today, we know from physicists that the premise is correct (that starlight is very old and still keeps on traveling), but we can’t be certain (or perhaps not at all) about the succeeding statement of Mulder (about souls). Scully, Mulder’s partner, continues Mulder’s statements by saying that the light doesn’t die, and that maybe that’s the only thing that never does. Speaking in a purely Einsteinian fashion when dealing with spirituality and such, perhaps our ’souls’ do reside in starlight, and in that sense our ’souls’ do continue on forever.

Mulder’s statement

Taking the first statement into consideration, that ’souls’ do reside in starlight, to be technical about it, we can probably say that it’s actually not starlight in our case but ‘planetlight’. We know that in order to see an object we have to shine light on it, after which the light bounces back, illuminating the object, back to our eyes. In the same sense, the Sun illuminates Earth at daytime, and at nighttime the Moon or our electrical/electronic devices light us up and our surroundings. In that sense light is shined on us, and so it is reflected back, which eventually reaches outer space and into the vast cosmos. In this way our ’souls’ which in this case means our whole lifetime under some source of light, is ‘framed’ in a ‘wave’ of light cruising the universe. If there are intelligent lifeforms out there in the universe and they can’t come here due to technological constraints (same as our case), once they try viewing our part of the universe, what they’ll be seeing is planetlight (which is reflected starlight, the star being our Sun or light from some other source) containing us, our lifetimes, and our history. What they’ll be seeing of course depends on many factors such as how far they are from us, how sensitive their viewing instruments are, what time they tried viewing us, among other things.

Scully’s statement

As for Scully’s statement, that starlight doesn’t die, technically speaking that can be true, since as long as photons don’t get smashed or absorbed, they keep on travelling in space, most likely till the edge of the universe and (our) time itself. However there is a limit to how long light can travel for one to be able to ‘reconstruct’ the data (in this case our ’souls’) it carries with it. This is because as light travels, similar to a wave, it spreads across time and space. As the light spreads, at some point in the universe very distant from the light source, it will be nearly to absolutely impossible to know what information that light brought with it. In a word, the light will be too ’stretched’ to make any sense out of it. This is similar to research being done on the Big bang. We are in an epoch of the universe where we can still study ‘cosmic background radiation’ (electromagnetic radiation, same as light) leading back to the Big bang. If we were a few millions of years late, we might not be able to analyze the data that comes along with the cosmic background radiation. And so Scully is partially correct since light can possibly not die, but the information in the light may become lost to us or someone viewing us.

Finally, physics on immortality

In essence, our ’souls’, most of our memories, achievements, feats, and other things in our light-stricken lives continue to propagate into inter-stellar space. The propagation duration many orders of magnitude longer than any of our lifetimes combined, which could be treated as practically infinity, and in some ways, immortality.

Originally posted last September 16, 2008 at f241vc15.wordpress.com.

Math can be really fun. Seriously.

This post is the 2nd in a series of posts I’m planning to have about why math is such a beautiful, useful, and awe-inspiring subject, and that a lot of us can do math (advanced/seemingly difficult math even). Math is such an integral part of humanity since our cave dwelling days, and much more so now in most of our technology driven lives. Previously I wrote about how even advanced math, particularly advanced geometry, can be easily tackled with just your imagination. This time it’s about probability. I can just imagine some of you cringe at the thought of math, let alone probability. But I’ll try to show you that often times, logical reasoning is all that it takes to wrap your head around probabilities, even the ones that confound a lot of brilliant people, even some mathematicians themselves. In fact, we’ll end this article with a simulation of a game/game show. Not bad huh?

Read the full story

…continued from Rabbits Part Two: Deeper Into The Forest

The man woke up with a headache. It was still light so he figured that he had slept for only a few hours. He knew he had to hurry and face that which scared him, for he did not come this far just to turn back and head out of the forest.

Still groggy, he took off his clothes and jumped into the stream. The sudden shock of cold water jolted his senses back to life. Reinvigorated, he got out of the water, put his clothes back on and mounted his horse.

Part of him did want to turn back, for what he was about to do he found distasteful. But he knew he had to do it, otherwise he would never find peace with himself in his new life outside the forest, and the only way for that to happen was for him to have closure in his old life.

Riding as fast as the fading light allowed, his heart too was racing because he knew that he was nearing his destination. And soon enough, he saw the clearing.

Slowing down, his chest felt heavy once more. More than that, he felt guilt, and sadness, because when he saw his village, his people, his home, he knew that he no longer lived there. Then as if that wasn’t enough, he felt a hopeless despair, because he knew in his heart that he had never really lived there at all.

He brought his horse to a walk as he entered the village of the Fenek, or what he secretly and mockingly called “The Rabbit People”.

He was first greeted by his thirteen year-old cousin Kannello, who was already running towards him. “Ghaqli!” the boy cried. “It’s Ghaqli! Ghaqli!”

Ghaqli smiled when he saw the boy, now almost a young man. He could still remember Kannello as a small kid the last time he saw him. How time had passed. “Kannello! My Ku Kannello! How you’ve grown!”

“You’re back, Ku Ghaqli! You’re finally back!” And Ghaqli alighted his horse and hugged his cousin. Kannello quickly said, “Come, come, surely the chief wants to see you.”

“And how is Chief Ka Boxxla?”

“Oh, he is well. He had been waiting everyday for your return. It’s been two years but he knew that you would come back to take your place among the Fenek. We missed your cooking. The new village cook, the one who took over from you, uses a white crystalline powder. We don’t like it because it puts too much flavor and the taste seems so artificial, and there was an increase in the number of dog poisoning and a decrease in sexual activity.”

Hmmm…missed me for my cooking, my natural way of cooking that promotes good health. You rabbits. All you care about is food and sex. No wonder why I left. “Is that so? That’s good, except for the dogs. Be sure not to feed them anything prepared by the village cook. If you can’t cook on your own that’s fine, because dogs eat raw meat.”

“But what about us? We don’t eat raw meat!”

“That’s why you have your village cook. His cooking is good for you, good for this village, good for this entire ecosystem.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Ku Ghaqli. Could you please explain?”

“Ku Kannello, better take me to Ka Boxxla. I need to talk to him in private before I address the rest of the village. My time here is very short.”

“But Ku Ghaqli…”

“Take me to Ka Boxxla, Ku Kannello. Please, let us hurry.” Kannello hesitated, but seeing the urgency in Ghaqli’s eyes, he relented and took his long-lost cousin to the chief’s house.

While they walked across the village, his old neighborhood, Ghaqli noticed that nothing much had changed especially in what he felt, or more importantly, what he did not feel around the place. He could not understand why no one else left the village, but being a fair man, he was never quick to judge. Still, he knew with all honesty that he could not live in this place for one more day.

“Ghaqli!”, cried the chief as he embraced his long-lost tribesman. I knew you’d come back! I thought it would be sooner though, much sooner than this. Nevertheless, you’re here and that’s all that matters. And it isn’t too late because my daughter Fidda is still turning twenty. She was seventeen when you left, and had you married her then, you would have had kids by now.”

“Ka Boxxla, please, let us not talk about the might-have-beens. I have a graver matter to discuss.”

“I see. What do we need to talk about then?”

“I am leaving here for good. I can’t live here anymore. I don’t want to live here. I do not feel alive in here.”

“What are you talking about? Can’t you see how happy we are, here together?”

How happy you are, here together. “I am sorry Ka Boxxla, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, and I never mean to insult you, but whatever it is that keeps you happy here, I do not see it, do not feel it. In fact, I never once experienced it in all the years that I lived here.”

The chief bowed his head and wiped a single tear from his eye. “How sad to see you leave the village again, and for good, you say?” Then Ka Boxxla lifted his head and looked hard at Ghaqli. “But infinitely sadder still is to know how empty you had been all your life here. I am sure you have your reasons, and whatever is there outside the forest that caught your heart, we respect that. You will have to explain – not justify – just explain, that to the whole village though, as a courtesy. They deserve that from you.”

“Of course. That is my intention.”

“Very well then my dear Ghaqli. But you will have to tell your story to the village tomorrow, for tonight we shall feast! You arrived at the right time, because a traveling merchant had just traded a cartload of seafood for three of our cows. You shall do the cooking tonight, so the village can savor great food one last time.”

“What kinds of seafood? Are they fresh?”

“Lobsters, scallops, squids, and some very nice but very rare fish I don’t even know what it’s called. The trader said they were caught this morning, and they were transported all the way here covered in sea salt. ”

“Then have some volunteers wash them down with fresh water, and others to prepare a fire – make that four fires side by side in a single line, and a pot above each fire.  And I need four people to help me in the preparation.”

“Very well”, said the chief, and barked out his orders. Men and women went about to wash the salt off the seafood and build the fires. After a while four women came to Ghaqli, each carrying a large basket, one for each kind of seafood.

Ghaqli taught them how clean and prepare the shells, shellfish, and fish, and when he was satisfied that they got it right he went to the village garden to get some herbs and spices.

When he came back with a bagful of leaves, roots, barks, and seeds, all the seafood had already been cleaned and readied for cooking because the other villagers had helped. The fires were now also burning, heating the pots hanging above them. Satisfied, Ghaqli instructed the women to put the seafood into their separate pots. Next he crushed some leaves and dropped them in two of the pots but not in the others. He did the same with the roots, barks, and seeds. No two pots had the same combination of the herbs and spices, and yet the smells from all four pots seemed to blend perfectly, whetting the appetites of the villagers.  He took two large wooden spoons and stirred the pots two at a time and covered them, letting the ingredients simmer for a few minutes.

“I need some of our village wine,” he told Ka Boxxla.

“Bring out the inbid!” shouted the chief, and several young men arrived, one of them Kannello, carrying jugs of inbid, the famous village wine originally concocted by Ghaqli himself.

Ghaqli took one jug with each hand and poured them into the four pots, but not evenly, as he filled some pots more than the others. Then he took two more jugs and poured them both into the pot filled with fish, and loosely covered all of them.

Now the vapors escaping into the air were driving the villagers crazy, and Ghaqli suggested that all of them first have a cup of wine to wash the tongue so that no stale taste may corrupt the flavors of the dishes. They obliged, and after a drink they lined up for the pots and started to feast on lobsters, scallops, squids, and some very nice rare fish. Ghaqli told them to wash each bite with wine especially when shifting between two kinds of seafood so that the flavors don’t overlap with one another, otherwise he might as well have cooked it all in one big pot. Again they obliged, for they knew that no one else knew more about food than Ghaqli. And how they ate and drank.

Around midnight when everyone was full and a bit drunk, some a bit more than the others, Ghaqli asked Ka Boxxla if he could address the village now.

“Can’t this wait until tomorrow morning?” said the chief. “We are having a great feast, all of our people think that you came home for good, and now you’re going to ruin it by telling them that you only came home to finally say goodbye? How cruel could you be?”

“Which is crueler,” replied Ghaqli, “to tell them now or tomorrow? If I tell them now at their drunken state their festive mood will weaken the blow. If I tell them tomorrow morning when they are hungover, the headache will make any bad news seem like the end of the world.”

“You have a point there, my wise friend.” And Ka Boxxla called the attention of the villagers. “Our friend Ghaqli has something say to all of us.” And with that he sat down and patted Ghaqli on the back, urging him to speak.

Ghaqli hesitated for a second, and hesitated for real, because although he already made up his mind on leaving this village for good, he realized that a very small part of him actually longed for this place, for these people. Then he thought of his life outside the forest, and how he felt so much more alive out there.

He took a cup and poured wine into it, and he drank deep and drank it all. He put the cup down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “My friends, I am very thankful for this great feast that we have all prepared. This is a great night, and how I wish all nights were like this.

“But my friends, we all know that all nights cannot be like this, no matter how we may wish it to be so.  And now it is with deep regret that I tell you that this will be the last night that I will sharing with you.”

The villagers gasped, and Fidda, the chief’s daughter to whom Ghaqli was betrothed, shouted “No!”, but Ka Boxxla hushed them up. “Please let Ghaqli finish,” he said, and nodded to Ghaqli.

Ghaqli nodded back, and said, “Tomorrow I shall no longer be with you. At the break of dawn I shall be heading out of the forest, back to the place where I now live, my new home.”

“But why?” asked Fidda. “Aren’t you happy here with us? What could be there outside the forest that you would choose over us?”

“Fidda, my dear Fidda, you wouldn’t understand. Even if I told you, even if I took you out there to see for yourself, you still wouldn’t understand, because you have to be me to see things through my own eyes.”

“But Ghaqli…”

“Fidda!” Ka Boxxla cut her off. “Everyone, please, let us respect Ghaqli’s decision.”

Fidda wept, and Ghaqli’s heart melted. He poured another cup of wine and drank, and noticed how his feelings were starting to numb, and he was thankful for that.

“Goodbye Fidda. Goodbye all of you. This pains me more than you could imagine. But I am just not happy here anymore.”

Everyone was sad, and Fidda continued crying. Then Ka Boxxla said, “Come on everyone. Let us all drink some more wine. Ghaqli is leaving, but that is his choice, and we cannot compel him to stay, because it is so much sadder to hold a man whose heart is far away.”

Everyone thought of what Ka Boxxla had said, including Fidda, and they all refilled their cups and drank more wine. And after a while they began to accept the reality of Ghaqli’s leaving, and slowly the spirit of gloom lifted from the air, and they continued to eat and drink through the night.

Ghaqli sat by the fire, cup in hand, and took a long look at his villagers, at Kannello, at Ka Boxxla, and finally at Fidda, who stared back at him and made an attempt to smile amid the tears.

And Ghaqli smiled back, but mostly he smiled to himself, because he knew that he was now truly free. He filled his cup once more, almost to the brim, and he drank.

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…continued from Rabbits

The man woke up at dawn.  He was a little lightheaded but his body was rejuvenated by sleep. The campfire was already out but the embers were still smoldering. He added a few twigs and the flame came back to life.

He took out a small kettle and filled it with water from his canteen. He unwrapped a piece of cloth and from it grabbed half a handful of tea leaves and dropped them into the vessel. Using two damp branches, he held the kettle over the fire to brew the tea.

He poured the hot brown liquid into a metal cup and drank. His mind began to clear and he readied himself to continue the journey. He washed his face with water and chewed on some fresh mint leaves.

He checked his horse and saw that it too had a good rest and was already munching on some grasses, seemingly preparing for the journey ahead. He petted its face and it responded with a soft contented neigh. After putting out the fire and packing his things, he mounted his horse and rode along.

As they trotted he noticed, or more likely felt, something different. He knew it was not the light although it was darker than yesterday since he was going deeper into the forest. There was something else, something unsettling that he could not describe. He could feel a certain heaviness in the air, a pervading gloom. But little did he know – or perhaps he just refused to acknowledge – that the air was fine, and that the heaviness was in his heart.

He dug his heels deeper into the sides of his horse and it ran faster. He took his weight off the saddle and transferred it all to the stirrups, leaning forward as he did so, willing the horse to give more speed. As the animal hurried its pace, the man bounced along to the rhythm of the ride, feeling the muscles of his own legs burn from the smooth rocking motion, as if it was he who was making the powerful strides.

Sweat rolled down his neck and he felt good. It was as if he could run away from whatever dark force that was weighing down on him. He closed his eyes and for a few seconds he felt at peace, and he smiled.

Satisfied, he opened his eyes and sat back on the saddle, releasing the pressure from his heels, and the horse slowed down. The heaviness in the air was gone, and his head had cleared. He thought of the reasons for this journey, of the task at hand. And with his renewed sense of purpose, even the path seemed to brighten amid the shadows.

He stopped when he saw a stream and got down to drink from it. As he was swallowing the water from his hand, the edge of his vision caught a quick glimmer and from his instincts he knew that it was a fish swimming upstream to spawn. He went back to his horse to get an old shirt and tore it. He tied the edges of the cloth to a pair of branches to make a net. Then he waded into the stream and waited for another fish. Soon enough there was one and he caught it with his makeshift net. He took out his knife and gutted the fish, cleaning it in the rushing water.

He got his iron pan and washed it in the stream and set it down. He proceeded to fillet the fish and put it inside the pan, then sliced it into thin strips. From his pouch he took a small bottle of well-aged, mellowed soy sauce which he sprinkled on the fish, and a horseradish root which he finely grated with his knife. He fashioned chopsticks from twigs, and using them to pick up a piece of the seasoned fish, he began to eat.

As soon as the first piece entered his mouth and landed on his tongue, the first thing he noticed was how soft and succulent it was, and it melted when he pushed it against his palate, releasing its creamy taste. The fish was as fresh as it could be, and spawning fish always contained lots of fat. Then the horseradish burst with its pungent aroma, rushing into his sinuses. He breathed in and closed his eyes as a few teardrops slipped from their corners. He chewed slowly, savoring all the flavors as they blended in his mouth, then swallowed. He got a bottle of home-made rice wine from one of the many pouches strapped to his horse and took a sip to wash down the fish. Then with his improvised chopsticks he picked up another piece and continued to eat slowly, enjoying the meal with every bite and every sip.

As he finished the fish and the wine (it was a large fish and he needed all the wine to wash it down), he felt full and a little drunk, so he decided to take a short nap. He sat beside the stream and leaned his back against a rock, and soon fell asleep.

To be concluded…

Rabbits Part Three: The Clearing

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