AUTOTOMY

With all the “best” lists that crowd the end of the year — the best movies, the best books — I thought I’d compile my own list. These are the best experiences I’ve had in 2008:

1. Surprised by grace. I got married. I was completely taken off-guard by this one. I didn’t expect to meet a girl, fall in love so much that I’d be willing to make that commitment, but I did. After being surprised by Juvy’s entry into my life, I fully embraced this beautiful and sweet woman.

2. Landing in the tropics. I moved around the world. On Jan 6, I touched down in the Philippines, alone and unsure of what would happen. I’ve been here nearly a year now. It’s been a life-changing experience. The tropics are hot and humid, but the people smile, laugh and are happy. And the happiness and smiles are contagious.

3. Having Exotic Island to ourselves. In June Juvy and I took a trip to one of the most remote places in the Philippines, the long stretch of an island called Palawan. It’s a tropical paradise, though you have to endure death-defying bus rides to get there. Off the coast of Palawan, you’ll find numerous uninhabited islands with beautiful beaches. I will never forget having Exotic Island all to ourselves for the day. We played on the pristine sand, swam in the clear water and soaked up the blue skies.

4. Seeing the tarsiers. On the island of Bohol, the near extinct primates are watched after in native habit. They’re small, cute and furry with big eyes. When we visited the Tarsier Conservation Center, we walked up under the brush and got right next to the palm-sized monkeys.

5. Boating through the Underground River. After a few days of island hopping in Palawan, we headed down to a town called Sabang to see the longest navigable underground river in the world. We took a boat into the cave to get an eye full of some of the most bizarre forms of rock I’ve ever seen. Disney might have made this had he been inflicted with a deranged version of the Dr. Seuss virus.

6. Seeing the stars in Port Barton. It’s a remote village in Palawan, a destination for backpackers, but we went there in the shoulder season, so there were few other tourists there. These areas only have electricity a few hours a day, so the light pollution is minimal. At night, the sky is dark and full of brilliant stars. We stood on the beach and gazed wondrously at the night sky.

7. Chasing the dolphins. They call it dolphin watching, but to be honest, it’s more like chasing. As soon as the playful groups are spotted, the boats run after them. But the dolphins are willing to entertain by jumping out of the water and swimming close to the boats. It’s amazing to see so many.

8. Eating fish on the beach on Balicasag Island. After dolphin watching, the boatmen took us over to this small island. We crossed the island, bought a fish, then brought it back to our beach where a few local women helped grill it. The beach was ours, and we had fresh fish, fresh eggplant. I felt like a king.

9. Doing nothing. One of my favorite lines from the movie “Office Space” is: “I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and is was everything I thought it could be.” Some days it’s nice just to wake up and think, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do today.

10. Having time to focus on my creativity. Taking a year off has allowed me to put all my energy into creative projects, writing, music art. When the inner creator thrives, then the outer shell grows new branches. And that’s really the bottom line, being able to have deeper, more meaningful experiences.

Community oriented. Simple fun.

We spent New Year’s Eve watching a movie — Die Hard 4.0, of all things — and then setting off some fireworks at midnight. From the family house, you could see other fireworks going off around the mountainside. A cloudy night and lights from the city below kept the hills in smoky silhouettes.

Mostly, the community celebration took place on New Year’s day at the sitio (community) basketball court where all the local kids participated in games. I watched, but since I don’t understand the Visayan language well enough, I really couldn’t tell what was going on, although everyone was laughing. The teenagers stuck to the other end of the court, shooting hoops, while many of the men sat around drinking Tanduay rum with tea or Sparkle (the local Sprite/7 Up).

The games wrapped up around 4 PM, and then we headed back down the mountain to the city, winding around the muddy roads, some of which were no wider than the truck and overlooked steep hillside into the valleys below. There was a town called Agsagnot along the way, and Juvy tried to get me to pronounce the Visayan combination of “ngo” which takes the tongue to the top and back of the throat to make. I couldn’t do it right, making her and her brother laugh.

We’ve had almost constant rain since last night. This morning it’s hitting us hard. On the brink of a new year, that’s been a welcome change, as it’s cleared the children and fireworks from the streets. The noise of explosions has been constant since before Christmas, and here you can buy fireworks that sound like cannons when they go off. At least the rain is forgiving on my eardrums, even the distant thunder.

Security guards normally stand outside an establishment, like a bank. But in the mall, I noticed two guards standing just inside the glass doors chatting with each other, belts with bullets and gun holsters. Outside on the glass a sign was posted that said: “No firearms allowed inside the Bank.”

There is no clearly defined rainy season on this island, though many of the other do have one. When it doesn’t rain, the air is still heavy and humid, and sweat beads on my brow. When it does rain, it’s like a variegated symphony of percussion, starting with small tinkling bells atop an umbrella, and rising to heavy tympani that can stretch hours over the tin rooftops.

It’s Christmas Eve here, and at 9 AM we already have people roaming the streets singing carols and setting off fireworks. The season actually started around the beginning of October with decorations going up in the malls. Since then, lights and Christmas trees have popped up in store windows, doors, on the walls that line streets. The radio stations have been playing Christmas music and announcers have been giving religious messages about the season and what it means.

We’ve taken it all in stride, observing the crowds. As we were waiting for a vacant taxi last night up on the main street in our neighborhood, a musician and singers passed by about every five minutes. The street was noisy with music and children. It’s always that way, but more so last night. It took us about a half hour before we were able to grab a taxi.

AUTOTOMY describes what a gecko does when it ejects its tail, something the little lizard can do without if it has to.

I chose that as the title for the blog because I’m exploring ways to do without things that I thought I couldn’t part with before. Blog posts mostly revolve around my mininal living conditions, but I try to relate most posts to the theme of living without certain tangible or material things in order to gain something internally, artistically, aesthetically or spiritually.

Living this way — with minimal material objects around me — I experience upsides, as well as downsides. Every choice comes with some sort of cost and some sort of benefit. Some things I’ve come to see are essential, not ejectable tails that drag behind me, like having a computer so that I can write and make art and a guitar so I can create music. When I was living in Asia I got used to going without some things, like cold showers. But I never got used to some things, like breathing polluted air or seeing street children. The benefits to going without are simple. I have more time to focus on the creative parts of life. I don’t have to bother with the upkeep and maintenance that are involved in having lots of material things.

But I hope the end of it points to growth as a human being, reaching for depths that I can’t now see, searching for an elusive, but inspiring horizon that pulls me forward.

The favorite cooking onion is a small purple bulb. You can fit five to seven of them in your palm. Tomatoes hardly get larger than a plum. Even fruits are small. There’s a baby banana called the senorita, which when ripe is about as long as your index finger. Take the calamansi as well, the national fruit. It’s sort of like a lime, or maybe a lemon, or maybe a very tart orange. It’s only a little bigger than a marble. A rare few grow to golf ball size. It has a thin, green skin, which sometimes turns a little orange around the top. The pulp is usually a yellow orange color. It’s best not to peal it, since it’s so small. Slicing off the cap seems to work best for getting the juice, but since it’s packed so full of seeds, you have to squeeze about 30 of them in order to get enough to mix a drink. But even though it’s small, it has a lot of flavor. It’s the same with the onion. Even though it’s small, it produces the same amount of tears as large white ones. And the senoritas, though they are small, are the sweetest.

Cebu is full of walls. Walls close off residential compounds, businesses, and even open lots. Usually they are made of concrete, or cinder blocks, are about six inches thick, and rise anywhere from six to ten feet. Depending on the area, they can be made from old boards, bamboo sticks or tin and have an uneven height. Some of the concrete walls are topped with rusty barbwire rising up a few feet above the wall. Others have broken glass embedded in the top of the wall so that no sane person would ever try climbing over. Your hands would be sliced up if you tried grabbing hold of the top. The glass comes from shattered coke bottles, dingy windows, whiskey bottles.

A wall along Escrario Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the Uptown area of the city, has broken glass embedded in the top, but it also used to have mural segments painted along the side. It was a religious theme, the creation. A verse from Genesis was written along the top, just below the line of broken glass. Where it was not painted, the wall was a dirty gray and spotted black from exhaust and weather. It had been there a long time and was as neglected as a garden overrun by weeds.

I once noticed a woman sitting outside that wall, under the shade of a small tree. There was probably as much residue from exhaust on her face as there was on the wall. She was probably homeless. The following week she was still there. She might have been a cat eyeing prey, except that her eyes were vacant. Then they cut down the trees along the wall. There was no longer any shade there. I haven’t seen her since.

They then painted the wall solid black. It was striking to walk by it and I wondered what possessed them to change it over, but then a mural started to appear, slowly, beginning at one end and working toward the other, greens and whites and some maroon. The theme was societal conflict, with some images of war. That one lasted about as long as the woman under the tree.

The next color on the was a bleak, flat tan. This has remained over the last few months and no other murals have gone up, though they are now selling some space for advertisements since you can see the wall without obstruction.

Yesterday on the way to the mall, our taxi got stuck at a long light. I glanced out the window to the right, where there was an empty lot. A very ragged, haggard man was standing on the corner of the lot in full view of the major streets that intersected there. He was thin, bearded and his clothes hung off him like toilet paper stuck on the end of a tree limb. And he was urinating. I turned away and started making jokes to Juvy, that at least he could have walked over to the wall on the other side of the lot and could have faced away from traffic. Public urination is common, but usually men choose walls and they turn away from traffic.

Then I heard the shing-shing sound of a stick instrument to my left. These instrument are just round branches that have pieces of metal nailed to them like stacks of coins, so that you can shake it and it sounds something like a tambourine hitting a brick wall. Some of the street kids who can’t afford a branch and metal bits resort to using plastic bottles half filled with water.

But the man shaking the stick for his jeepney audience was the same guy who’d been urinating in the lot a moment before, and then I said to Juvy, “Oh, he’s a performer. The lot was just part of his act.” He probably didn’t want to get too far away from a potential audience when he was taking a break, so that’s why he stood on the corner rather than going over to the wall. He was taking advantage of a long light.