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Articulations of the Sacred Rooted in Memory By Marjorie Evasco “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. —Laudato Si, 2nd Encyclical of Pope Francis 18 June 2015

Sometimes, earth heaves and shakes its big blue body awake and reminds us that she is liquid, and that even the seemingly solid land on which one stands can sway, lurch, split, and drift apart. When it did on October 15, 2013 on a Monday declared a national holiday in celebration of Eid l’Adha, Boholanos felt their island shake and rumble like never before for 34 interminable seconds. They quickly ran out of their houses for safety, even as they beheld their town’s stone church fall to pieces and crumble back to lime dust. It was a time that severely tested the Boholanos’ collective spirit. And in the fallow seasons that ensued, they had to plumb spiritual resources from their own depths of soul, reaching down to the bedrock source of their faith to restore themselves and their communities.

Deep down, Boholanos believe in the sentience of the universe and every living thing on earth. It is an enduring practice passed on from the past to the present generation, of elders teaching the young to heed the presences of other-than-human- beings, mga dili ingon nato, embodied in every old tree and forest, rivulet, river, stream, lake and mangrove, anthill and mountain fastness, boulder and cave, and every specie on land, water, and air. It is a belief ingrained in the Boholanos’ primal sense of mutual 2 of 12 obligation, that if one desired to conduct one’s life in great dignity and beauty, then this should be reflected in the way one treated invisible other-than-human beings in the wilderness.

This sensibility has survived the violent waves of conquest and colonial miseducation that tried, time and again, to discredit the people’s stories of enchantment as “pagan superstition” born out of ignorance. Their complex life-sustaining worldview still thrives alongside the fully-grown Catholic faith grafted onto their communal lives

500 years ago. In the heart of a Boholano, it is not a contradiction to come to church at dawn to venerate the sacred in the town patron saint’s sculpted image standing on a pedestal, and to go home at twilight through darkening paths and whisper to the invisible ones “tabi palihog, kay moagi ko.”

In our time, the living lore of enchantment that undergirds the Boholanos’ spiritual life, particularly in their relationship with the wilderness can be gleaned from the poetry of many Boholano poets, and three of them here can be taken as representatives of their kind: Anthony Incon of Loboc, Clovis Nazareno of Loon, and

Ulysses Aparece of Inabanga. Like the wizend balete, these poets have a true sense of place rooted deep in the primal loam of the peoples’ lifeways. They speak as adepts of the Boholanos’ living faith of wonder.

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Incon passed away in 2001 barely in his 30s, but already he spoke in the eloquent

Boholano language of spiritual wisdom embodied in the acts of living on this earth. In what has become his signature balak, titled “Sa Imong Pagsuroy sa Lasang,” (On your walk through the forest), Incon’s persona teaches the traveler how to mind his every 3 of 12 step into the forest. The first line of the poem consists entirely of a single word, a terse exhortation to “Stop”: Hunong/ Una ka mosulod sa lasang/ Huboa ang imong sandalyas/ Ang mga lumot na ang mosapnay sa imong mga tiil. (Stop/ Before you enter the forest/ Remove your sandals/ Let the moss now carry your feet.)

Without this all-important full stop, the traveler would not be able to mind the hairline fissure between his day-to-day self in the ordinary world and the self he could be transformed into when he communes with the holy. He would be just another trespasser who dashes around the island’s scenic places in a tour van, ignorant of the host culture whose people’s sensibility is fine-tuned to the fragility of their natural world, now being peddled to all and sundry by global eco-tourism.

Incon’s poem is replete with verbs of caution and prohibition, to show how the walk in the forest should be conducted: paghinay (be careful), ayaw paga-uyoga (don’t shake), panabi-tabi (say your respects), ayaw pag-ubog (don’t wade into). Slowing down is the attitude that embodies carefulness, which allows the traveler to pay his respects to the living beings, seen or unseen, as he passes by. The probihitive word

“ayaw” is meant for the traveler to rein in whatever strong temptation he may have to shake the trees or to wade into the cool fresh waters. In effect, it instructs the traveler to do nothing that would disturb any creature in the forest as he walks through it.

The persona also shows the traveler the right way into sacred ground: Sunda na lamang ang mga dalan nga gihimo sa mga agta/ Aron dili mapusgay ang palasyo sa mga hulmigas. (Follow only the paths made by the agta/ So the palaces of the ants will not crumble). The agta lives, a being in the magical world of the Boholano imagination.

However, to those who do not know the agta and how they look like, the paths made by 4 of 12 these invisible beings would never be discernible. Any uninformed traveler would not see the path that is right before his culturally-blind eyes as possessing the qualities of the sacred. The persona in the poem does not disclose the marks or signs by which one can know the right paths to take. Only the Boholano initiated to this realm of sacred knowledge, and who could remember what she knows, could proceed on these paths and soon come upon the central human figure in the balak, the miriko, the hermit-sage in the cave, in whom the entire forest is grounded. He is an essential part of it as he keeps the old healing arts alive, seen in the poem’s kinesthetic image of him stirring the wild honey to boil in the pot. Through this image, we also see the hives of the putyukan or honeybees high up in the branches of the primeval trees. In this wondrous natural ecology, the duende, , and agta live peaceably together with the gangis

(cicada), alimokon (mourning dove), and hulmigas (ant).

Before the poem ends, the voice of the adept hastens to warn us that our attentiveness to the sacred must be kept a little while longer. On our way back to the world of daily reality, we must continue our vigilance over the ephemeral harmony of life. This is one journey where we cannot pick the flowers growing along the path.

Everything in this natural world must be left to bloom, integral, enduring.

This is an article of faith born out of the unassailable belief that the island’s natural bounty sustains Boholanos, and that their respect for nature’s gifts in turn sustains the vitality of all life forms. That Boholanos continue to value this intimate relationship with other-than-human beings co-existing with them under the blossoming time-tree is evident in ’s still clean rivers and bodies of water, the undisturbed groves of trees in forests being true to themselves, the mountains and karst hills graceful 5 of 12 where they stand blanketed by gabun (fog) in the early mornings, the maomag (tarsier) with its huge unblinking eyes hopping from one branch to another to catch insects for his evening meal, and the tikarol (kingfisher) swooping low its blue iridescent wings into the stream early in the morning to catch fish for its sustenance.

Anthony Incon’s Loboc is largely still intact. It still has its big river which flows out to its mouth in the coastal town of Loay. Emerald clear and still alive with fishes, ducks, and vegetation, Loboc River is now frequented by travelers and tourists whose nature-deprived citified lives find a refreshing green world to enliven the senses. And while an hour’s river cruise would perhaps show them a bit of the culture of the different riverine sitios when its young and old folks dance, sing, and play their musical instruments, it would not reveal to the transient visitor that late in the month of May when their secondary patronness, the Virgin of Guadalupe of Extremadura celebrates her feast, the whole river comes alive in the sambat, a fluvial procession where young musicians mentored by the old musicians of the town band play music on the boat carrying the sacred icon downriver and up again to dock on the left flank of the old stone church.

Music is the town’s primary form of prayer on this sunset vispera procession on water. And the next day’s bolibongkingking is also prayer, the dance named onomatopoeically after the three instruments beating the rhythm for the female and male devotees who sway, in the manner of old babaylans, around the Virgin’s statue after the Pontifical Mass, where the angelic voices of the Loboc Children’s Choir had uplifted the entire mystical church to an ecstatic experience of faith. Loboc’s devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe springs from the belief that her power protects the townspeople 6 of 12 from the swelling of the river during the annual season of typhoons. In one of their often-told stories, during the worst flood of 1876, the river rose to unprecedented levels but only up to the pedestal on which she stood, her blessed feet miraculously dry.

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On the northeastern coastal town of Loon, poet Clovis Nazareno completed in

1989 a collection of poems called “Fear of the World and Other Poems,” which explored the marvelous territory of the (healer), an unseen realm of beings co-existing with humans. Among Boholanos, it is believed that should the space of one of these beings be transgressed, these beings would get angry with the transgressor and would make that person sick. Most of the time, if modern medicine fails to cure the ailment, Boholanos would not hesitate to ask the help of the mananambal, who can negotiate the visible and invisible paths and ask the unseen ones, in behalf of the transgressor, for pardon and the power to cure the ailment. To heal the sick, the mananambal should be able to ritualistically speak in beautiful language that would name the act of transgression, name the sacred being that inhabited the space that was transgressed, and name the disease and the antidote.

The first poem in the collection titled “Sigbin” refers to the magical creature with long sturdy legs much like a kangaroo’s, that allows it to leap in no time at all from visibility to invisibility and vice versa. It is said by those who claim to have seen the sigbin that it is bent double at the waist and always shows its naked behind. Nazareno’s poem begins with an epigraph from a marine source called “Visayan Log, 1969” which goes: “Half man and animal, this mysterious creature is believed to travel as swift as light.” The voice in the poem articulates the imperative of reviving the magical world 7 of 12 and the respect it once had from people: “…Within the bleak forests of defeat/ Call upon our primeval resource:/ The sigbin of mesmerity/ Which must resurrect/ A respect for .”

Nazareno’s poems assert this uncanny overlap of worldviews: that of an old world of mesmerizing creatures and that of the contemporary world of commerce and industry. For instance, in the poem “Manhak,” its epigraph is an observation that blends both worldviews as it gleans from a “1979 countryside report” that “This bird or beast of the night/ has caused innumerable miscarriages/ as vitamin-deficiency has.” The ear catches the ironic tone in the persona’s voice as he moves in one breath from the magical beast to the contemporary idiom of medical diagnosis. The manhak is female, and she preys on the unborn fetus in the womb of a pregnant woman. The pregnant woman’s fear is countered by a “bowl of onion and salt,” the antidote consisting of ingredients from her kitchen that protects her from the manhak. But what is this bird as the poem truly sees it? Nazareno’s persona declares that the manhak is “danger outside every door/ Hastening to suck the child,/ Foreclosing the future.” The shamanic voice in the poem affirms the efficacy of the antidote, in spite of the irony embedded in the poverty of rural families, who produce food from their labor but continue to live on meagre provisions: “These must be the only defences:/ Accoutrements of the ancient earth.”

Another poem called “Pungo” starts with an epigraph purportedly taken from “a guide to travelers written in 1959” which says: “This creature inhabits the forests of the

Visayas and is believed to assume the form of ferns.” In a conjectural tone, the poem constructs a personified vegetal world that is nightmarish in its vengefulness. The poem 8 of 12 locates the forest in the mind: “Suppose the claws of finger-ferns/ Reach for your eyes from the mossy/ Trunk of the forested mind:/ Suppose their pores alight/ Upon the hairs of your limping limbs.// Would your bones feign courage/ Under the untwining and stirring/ Of the whorl of fear in fern world:/ Would your skin bear fear?”

The collection closes with the poem “The Song of Kublan Sandingan, the

Invulnerable,” in memory of a mananambal of Loon’s isle of Sandingan, whose hands and feet were calloused, kubalan, from years of working the soil and the sea for sustenance. His name is invoked in the poem as a powerful ancestor-spirit, from whose genealogy one could proudly claim descent: “Toward the shout loud as your name,/ And louder than dusk, much stronger.// Belief in one’s self, the same/ As fire hovering the river, over the sea,/ Dancing, dancing still and leaping/ Over the undertows, eddies and currents,// And unwaveringly we are affirming our name,/ Bolder than the unnamed and unknown.”

Clovis Nazareno, the bard of Loon, passed away in 2003 in the prime of his life, and left behind a legacy of poetry proud of its sense of place and inspirited vision of who

Boholanos are, and how brave they can be when they remember who they are.

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North of the island in Inabanga, Bohol, Ulysses Aparece was born and raised before migrating to nearby as a young adult. In 2002, he wrote about his apprenticeship or pangabaga to Pio Añon, the sukdan or shaman-healer of Anonang, for his anthropology dissertation titled “Sukdan Curing Practices in Anonang, Inabanga,

Bohol.” Aparece posited that from the point of view of folk culture, art is seen to effect curing. In early religio-medical practices, songs and verses were performed by medicine 9 of 12 men and women in ministering to the sick. In pre-Hispanic , theatre involving verbal jousts, impersonation, imitation of nature’s objects, pantomimic dances, religious rituals and seances…took place during curing ceremonies, the curer- artists known as shamans. Aparece stands witness to the reality that for the members of the community until now, the healer or sukdan, is still the preferred first line of defence against illness.

In his apprenticeship he describes the performance of the curing rites: “The rites of healing begin at twilight with the burning of the kamanjan, a resin obtained from the almasiga or other forest trees. The sukdan, all dressed in white and wearing a red turban, calls out an invitation to the ancestral spirits and deities to partake of the offerings. He does this by striking a metal spoon on the porcelain bowl as he chants the names of his spirit-guides. Then, his whole body trembles— an indication that the spirit has entered him— and the trance begins.”

But aside from the ethnographic account, Aparece wrote poems giving heartspace to a language that would affirm the gift of learning how to measure “earth’s sacred limits” from his teacher, whose curative powers rested primarily on his impeccable ability to chant verses, sing, and dance on bare feet over live coals while striking his stomach with a pinóti or long sharp bolo without wounding himself. The poem titled

“Calling,” signals the beginning of the apprenticeship one undergoes in shamanic healing. Images of water such as “spring” and “spring’s sacred pool” are made to bring to the fore the centrality of pristine nature in the ancient art of healing. The poem asserts that to the uninitiated this spring is hidden, or in more succinct terms, it can be seen as just another spring without its sacred attributes, or worse, it can be valued only 10 of 12 as resource for human use and abuse. However, the initiate in the poem recognizes the spring’s sacredness and addresses the guide in the rites of purification at the spring:

“The water mirrors my thirst that my/ Spirit yearns even for stray sprinkles/ From your bath close to the pour./ Your chanted praises run in rhythm with nature’s/ Flowing and

I am hushed like the shadows/…”

In the poem “Sacred Groves,” Aparece’s persona pays homage to the ancestral spirits in the wilderness: “Ours is that kind of peace sown deep/ Into the woods’ heartland where groves/ Of ancient balete, molave, acacia…/ Gather in their shade the gentle taga-banwa,/ Guardians primeval, our spirits ancestral.”

The taga-banwa are the spirits of the ancestors that reside in the deepest core of the forest, and the sukdan is the community’s representative whose ritual dance of healing is primarily a dance of “full rememberings/released from tongue’s/ end… scattering in the wind of their every name.” The meeting of the shaman and the apprentice is one of healing, too. In the poem “Shaman,” this relationship is dramatically rendered: “You thus begin your shaman’s journey/ On my body, a vast geography of frightened/ Muscles, bones, nerves, joints, veins./ Your hands whisper the secrets of gabun,/ Kulavu, tanglad, kugang-kugang…/ Green residences of gentle duwendes.”

The half-woody gabun (Blumea balsamifera), kulavu or klabu (Origanum vulgare) an aromatic mint with hairy, fleshy leaves used for curing coughs and boils, tanglad (Andropogon citratus) or lemongrass, and kugang-kugang (a low-growing woody herb of waste places used to treat skin eruptions in children) constitute the 11 of 12 herbal cures for different human illnesses which make the body like a mapped landscape, “a vast geography of frightened/ Muscles, bones, nerves, joints, veins.”

After 25 years of writing poetry, Aparece completed ‘Space Speaks,’ a collection for his first volume of poetry. Its penultimate poem, “Baylan Karyapa,” is a tribute to one known among Boholano poets as the first recorded poet-healer-seer of the islands in the 16th century, at the point of Spanish contact. It was she whose prophetic chant foresaw and lamented the changes on the island wrought by strangers: “I doubt and do not understand/ What is the intent of the One/ Who created this earth doomed to destruction./ There will be changes in this land./ Strangers will take possession of it,/

Others will inherit it./ This village shall be destroyed,/ This home, this kingdom, this island.”

Addressing the figure of the baylan, the persona in Aparece’s poem sings in

Karyapa’s memory, shifting the woundedness of the world into the psyche: “Above all, it is your treating of us as homes/ Why your words soothe our disordered inner world.”

The baylan’s lineage is kept alive in the work of poets of the island, mga kaliwat ni

Karyapa, descendants of Karyapa who take on the function of patient truth-telling to create gossamer lines of symmetrical beauty out of the daily chaos of meaninglessness.

Their chosen Binisaya name kaka, refers to the spider: “This is your legacy: patient and quiet industry./ Dispersed we may be by the season’s cruel intentions// Still we stay— spinandmendandweave—/And rarely leave. Framebeingfeelingreason:// In them we find a web of a home.”

The Boholanos’ spirit has not wandered far from the paths that lead them back to this first and last ancestral home. In their island, all beings in the forest, grove or jungle, 12 of 12 in the stream, river or sea, in the air and sky, co-exist as parts of a sacred whole. This primeval faith and their mature Catholic beliefs have taught generations of Boholanos how to pause in a moment of reflection, as in the daily 6:00 p.m. Angelus when the church bells ring to mark the end of day and everyone everywhere slows down, stops, and bows the head to remind the heart of the never-ending circle of the holy mysteries of incarnation and resurrection.

In the quiet space of prayer, they remember the cardinal order of life that they should not do things that would irreparably wound another, that would tear holes into the spiritual wholeness of their island. Should they do lose their path, gimino, wandering about in the unbreathing concrete jungles of commerce, they can retreat to their natural world and retrieve from their storehouses of memory the antidote to dispel their momentary lostness, a temporary darkness. They can always turn deeper inward into the forest to find the secret paths and arrive at a still pristine waterfall, and bathe in the healing powers of their island-home.