vines and creepers

 

                           There's No Denying Our Souls

                                  

       When I was in gradeschool, there were two distinct images or visions in my mind that stalked my silent waking hours. It wasn't clear which one preceded the other. One was of a plainly mundane place, where there was an airy wooden house sparse of furniture, high on a wooden stairway.  This house had wide windows, some wooden santos on a small altar perched on a corner of a small bedroom, and a toilet way down the back lot.  I had a life here, and snatches of that life would come flashing like photographs in my mind, as in a dream, and yet with a sense of reality. There was a neighborhood as well - certain little muted houses and genial people - in my mind.  There were quiet paths that I trodded on to run errands for Nanay.  The feeling at these recollections was always deep nostalgia.  

        The second vision was of a more ethereal nature.  Figuratively and literally, I was high up in the sky profused with warmth and illumined by a bright, enveloping light.  I was adrift among the clouds, feeling light as a feather and totally happy - a blithe spirit! I would float down from the endless sky to hover - as if an angel or a bird - just above the window of that house conjured up in my first vision.  The feeling this second vision evoked in me was one of great warmth and love. I hadn't yet learned to ask Dad and Nanay questions, so those visions and images just stayed within me, like they were mere figments of my imagination.

       But not for very long.      

       At 13, I was in Hinunangan in the southern part of Leyte, to spend my summer vacation with my maternal grandfather, uncles, aunts, cousins.  That was my first time ever to be back in my hometown after Dad moved our family to Tacloban City when I was five.  It was in this vacation that one thing was made clear to me: my earthly vision - the first one - emanated from this place - Hinunangan - where I was born and bred for 5 years.  The scenes of that vision were of my life lived from ages 0 to 5.  The house was Lolo's all right, and indeed, the neighbors in my mind were real, as were the interior paths, the guava tree up the front yard, the spooky lake in the  middle of the serene meadows at the back of Lolo's land. It was a joyous relief to make some things lucid after all the years of secret bewilderment.                           

        But what of the second vision?  The otherwordly, supersensual one ?  Why couldn't I reconcile it with any place and event in my past? It was a  mystery I wanted to unravel, just as I had unraveled the other one.                         

       And so life went on.                            

                                                                                                                               

       Sometime in my early 30s, I came upon articles and books authored by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and other proponents of the out-of-body experience and the inviolable existence of the soul. Soon, it just made perfect sense that I finally was able to reconcile my other vision - which continued to haunt me then - with something 'tangible' at last.  The Self  that  was blissfully poised outside the window was - truly and magnificently - my soul, floating-in-wait for my physical birth.                          

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                                      ALV, 6/28/97  

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