J’aime la vie voyages

We will be crooning to Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again the next three weeks as we throw caution to the wind, max the plastic once more to fly out halfway across the planet, traverse the N.A. continent, at once, on a voyage and a pilgrimage.

We are giving ourselves a 66-year birthday present to visit 91-year-old Mama in Oahu, a child in Honolulu, Oakland and Chicago, a conference in old alma mater SMU Dallas before returning to the winds of Sa-i-pan to catch my breath and by the end of the month, teach English songs to oral language learners in Dong Bei China.

It really does not make sense to head back to the Marianas reefs on our way to Manchuria from the North American continent when one can fly directly across the northern route but we bought two tickets, and though both airlines are in the same Alliance, foregoing Honolulu, Guam, and Saipan on the return on our way to China requires additional fare in spite of it being a much shorter distance. Go figure!

My relationship to French, BTW, is similar to what I teach my ChEnglish students. The point is to communicate, and only secondarily, to polish syntax. My Pinay neighbor has become clear that being apologetic of her Taglish (Tagalog-English) will not make her better understood in the market. Her Chinese veggie sellers and taxi drivers can get by with their fumbled handling of William and Kate’s pillow talk, so why should she even bother? Which is to say that if you are wondering where I dug up the phrase in the title, wonder no more. I made it up. (It literally translates as, “I love life voyages.” See what I mean? Not the clearest of constructs but, hey, if you do not get the point, you’re last century.)

Nonetheless, you are welcome to wander with me in space, outer and inner. Our geo-wandering in the next three weeks will cover 10 time zones, but the inner space will be as wide as you can accommodate my meanderings plus one, and as deep as you can withstand the intensity of our occasional psychic dives into the Serena trench depths of our Marianas soul, with our without the volcanic eruptions.

Between now and the end of the month, we will be making a series of Olomwaay (our way of making our gracious exit out of the Trench to our new pedagogical incarnation in the northeast plains of Zhongguo) to persons and personages who enriched our life in the 12 years of our sojourn in the land of Maria Anna. (Not to be partial to our Carolinian bro/sisters but we will forego calling on the divine mercy of Olympic Zeus prominent in the Chamorro words of gratitude – Yu’us = Deus, Maase = merciful in Malay; we could use our own Salamat Po since its cognate of Salaam, “tranquil,” is of ancient origin, but Marianas cousins tend to brand Pinoys when we do that as just showing off again!)

So, we will just slide back to the old TY that has since become a favored texting symbol for gratitude. The next series of reflections will then include “Thank You” to readers and detractors alike, as we leave.

Gratitude is in fact a way of recognizing presence. We do not thank what does not exist, though our moralistic society often fall into thanking us for not doing what we “ought” not to do. Nothingness (nirvana), of course, is everything-ness in the Buddhist tradition and my current host has this all encompassing Taiji, more familiar to us as the yin-yang.

Historically, Taoism embraced the totality of existence, especially its physicality, while Buddhism saw that our symbols and metaphors of existence are all but mirages, and that what we perceive to be existence is an illusion. Attaining this stillness in nothingness is perceived as attaining the nothingness state of the Buddha.

The Taiji took the physical world and the spirit world, not separating the two but keeping them complementary of one another, drew a larger circle around both, the pivot point of the swirling dance between body and soul becoming the apex of human existence.

Now, if the reader thinks I am waxing metaphysical here, we probably are but in the sense of one of our early friends on island, the gregarious and affable Jesuit prelate Gary Bradley, S.J., who was wont to say: “We are religious, but are we spiritual?”

Yesterday is no more, and tomorrow is yet to come. We only have today, and that is the locus of the here-and-now, the point of eternity of every human existence. And as one of those platitudes circulating in the Internet that has crossed our screen one-too-many-times, “We are all of the same age: one day older than yesterday, one day younger than tomorrow, and as young as we are today.”

The point is, “thank you” is about accepting the presence of our showed-up-ness, and if we are unconscious of it, or try to erase what-has-been, or escape from consequent what-will-be, we are neither present nor alive today!

So our pilgrimage will not only be in space, but also in time, as we recall the past 12 years of expending our being in the Marianas, inviting those who care, and most definitely, those who dare, to undertake a similar voyage and pilgrimage this summer on the sunny and rainy contents of our lives’ journeys. Bon voyage!
[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the Saipan Tribune’s Opinion Section.[/I]