July 18, 2011
Connection with the Motherland
Summer Solstice this year was special. On this day I met and spent time with Max Dashu, the creator and keeper of the archives of The Suppressed Histories Archives, where she is “restoring women to cultural memory.” For several decades she has pioneered education about women’s spiritual roles through history, and has gathered a remarkable archive that is the basis for her current project “Woman Shaman: The Ancients.” (She is raising funds for the project here.)
We traveled to the Pinole Shoreline Park, situated along the northern section of the San Francisco East Bay. Walking across the hill and through the fields toward the shore, I felt the spirits of those who had walked the land before me. As the waves gently lapped the shore’s edge, we separated and spent time in silence.
Pebbles and shell fragments littered the beach. Then a pine cone glistened in the sunlight as the seafoam nudged it ashore.
A log jutting out from the hillside was the perfect place to stop and deposit my treasures. As I placed them, I became aware of being on one shore, here in California, and my family’s motherland far away in the Philippines, another shore, one to which I will always be tied.
At that moment, the clamshell broke in two, each half an individual piece of the whole that cradles me. I had a strong sense that we have traveled a long distance — from home, to home. We have landed on new shores, and found our way in a new land. We have brought our music, our dance, our culture, our food, our values, our very beings to these new shores. We have mixed with the prevalent culture, yet have never lost our ties, have never lost our Filipino soul.
The warm sun invited me to stretch out, to feel the sand beneath my feet. And then I began to move. Slowly at first, tracing patterns with my toes. Then the rhythm took over, and I danced. Here I share what I experienced and heard.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Here at Pinole Shores, where so many Filipinos live, I feel the pooled connections, the tides that continue to ebb and flow, unceasingly moving the flow, reshaping the rocks and the land, the ocean floor, the soul.
We come to the water and remember… we are a seafaring people, a land-based people, separated by land and water and experiences in life.
I don’t wish to focus on struggle. I wish to focus on triumph over them. Ancestors, please help me to properly honor those who have paved the way to today.
… And the ocean’s swells as we journeyed to another land, a new home, were like the feelings that welled up and rolled through unceasingly, without relenting, tears of pain and sorrow, loss and longing… when will I return to my land? My loved ones? All that has been so dear in my heart? My people, my food, my dances, my music — the smiles, oh, the gentle smiles so quick to appear. My mother, my father, oh brothers and sisters — I go so far away, yet my heart is still with you, will always be with you… as I remember your voices, the laughter, the warm embrace of home…
I am so far away, yet I hear your whispers on the water. I see your arms reaching across the waves.
We come to you, you whisper.
We love you.
We have never forgotten you.
Come home and taste the sea air,
Feel the sun on your skin,
Hear the sellers in the market.
Bagoong and bangus, lechon and pinakbet,
Sinigang and kutsinta, bulalo and
Sampalok, pusit and paksiw… we
call you… to nourish you.. body and
soul sewn together.
The water laps the shore unceasingly, over and over softening the hard edges, moving across the vast ocean. Through time, through space, across generations, the movement continues, traveling back and forth along ancient lines that tie and bind heart and soul.
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