I am You

I am You


Updated 10:39pm (Mla time) Dec 31, 2004
By Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A13 of the January 1, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


AS the number of fatalities keeps rising, the initial horror of the earthquake-tsunami disaster that has befallen South and Southeast Asian countries has turned to a numb resignation. Fourteen thousand, the initial estimate of the number of people dead from the tsunami, was mind-boggling. One hundred thousand and counting, as the official estimates now put the number of dead and missing, is just beyond imagining.

Heart-rending as the stories and survivor accounts are, and shocking as the scenes of the disaster and the rows of the dead have become, we still can't look away. One feels a compulsion to check in, to share the experience of this tragedy, to show our compassion if only by teleporting our thoughts and emotions to the places and people ravaged by the forces of nature.

Now that it's been confirmed that at least one Filipino died as a result of the tragedy, and several more Pinoys remain missing, the tsunami disaster has acquired a domestic dimension. Which makes the task of understanding its meaning, or its lessons, much more daunting. What are we to make of the number of dead, the lives destroyed, the towns and villages washed off the face of the earth? Is it possible that God is that capricious?

Here is one attempt to place the entire event within the confines of reason and feeling. Jim Paredes is better known as a performer and song writer, but he is also a person who feels deeply and finds the need to put his feelings into words. He sent the following to various e-groups and gave permission to have it reprinted for a wider audience. May these reflections help all of us face the new year with a resolve to be kinder and more human, to walk in the shoes of the other.


* * *

THE TSUNAMI-EARTHQUAKE double whammy has created a disaster of unparalleled proportions. I've been riveted in front of CNN, BBC and the Internet trying to understand what has happened and making sense of the picture that is still emerging. I have been trying to understand it in scientific as well as in economic, social, human, emotional, even cosmic levels to try and fathom what kind of response is appropriate, but instead, I just catch myself totally overwhelmed by the cataclysmic dimension of it all. Lately, I've been doing the same thing with Infanta, Iraq and other places where human tragedy has been widespread. I have caught myself in tears, praying and sending good healing thoughts and hope to people everywhere, and materially contributing in some way to the effort to try and alleviate suffering at least where it is physically closest to me - Infanta and the desperately poor that I personally encounter. Last night, I felt such a heaviness in my heart about how tragedy seems to happen so easily, and how the mustering of kindness (relief efforts, donations, etc.) to respond to it is such a gargantuan effort. I had a hard time sleeping.


* * *

TODAY, I came across a poem on the Net which I wish to share with you.

Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world
to say it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend.


* * *

THIS poem just says it for me. While this year seems to refuse to go quietly into the night, I know that each one of us can put an end to some suffering. I am learning to stop cursing the darkness and fight the cynicism of helplessness and victimhood and realizing that there is something I can do.

I suggest nothing concrete except to open our hearts to the bigger reality that is other people, in fact, that is the rest of humanity which, I am very sure, is also part of ourselves we just have to meet. When they cry, do we not cry, too? When they suffer, do we not also suffer? I know we do recognize ourselves in them, and them in us.

Years ago, I wrote a song for the Red Cross and it had a line that went something like this:

I am part of every living being in the world.

I am everyone, and everyone is I.

Each and everyone is part of one big family

The clan that is humanity

There is just one sun that shines on each and everyone

There is only us, all of us are one

We stand before one of mankind's most dramatic opportunities to understand and experience oneness. I know I am you and everyone else! I am writing because I am just so humbled to get a fleeting glimpse of this great Truth which seems so evident only on occasion. Each of us, if we just listen, already knows what to do.