Field of dreams

“If you build it, he (they) will come.”

This line from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams is one of the most memorable quotations from American cinema. In the film, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hears an ethereal voice deliver this message to him in the middle of his cornfield. After also receiving a vision of a baseball field, Kinsella proceeds to plow up his cornfield, virtually destroying his entire crop, and builds a ballpark. When he realizes the gravity of what he had done, he thinks he’s losing his mind.

Although I can’t claim that it was as dramatic as the movie, I do believe that something mystical also lured me to a mountaintop in San Mateo, Rizal a few years ago. And while Kinsella dreamt of a baseball diamond, I saw the image of a school flash before my eyes. My children’s school had been searching for years for a permanent home to no avail. One day, I decided to visit this eco-township project that I had read about in the papers. It was a last-minute kind of decision. We were on our way home from the Avilon zoo and it was getting late. But the ad promised that it was only 15 minutes away from the Batasang Pambansa in Quezon City and so I persisted. It was there amid the rolling hills and forested valleys of Timberland Heights that I knew I had found the ideal place for our dream campus. I had been hesitating for months to write this article because I did not want it to come out like a “paid political advertisement” (as my son, who has been bitten by the election bug, is wont to say nowadays) for the Manila Waldorf School. Ironically, however, and just like Kinsella in the movie, now that we are on the verge of completing the construction, I am beset with doubt. If we build it, will they really come?

As I’ve written in previous articles, I decided to come back to the Philippines in 2003 in part because I wanted to do something different, something more relevant. Frankly speaking, however, I did not really know what I wanted to do. I only knew that whatever the answer was, I was not going to find it abroad. After I got back, I helped out a bit in some non-government organizations but I was no activist. Neither did I also have the stomach for nor the patience to serve in government. And so I became a “driver” and ferried my children and their cousins to and from school several days a week. My children were still in kindergarten then and so I often hung around the school to wait for them. Slowly, I found myself getting more and more involved in the operations of the school. If there is one thing about Waldorf that parents will either like or dislike, it is the need to get involved. It is a community-run institution where parents and teachers operate the school together as partners. There are times when I wish that we had put our children in a traditional school with all its “fast-food” convenience — where all that parents need to do is to drop the kids off in the morning and to pick them up in the afternoon. In Waldorf, you have a say on how things get cooked, but you have to help out in the kitchen. It’s not for everyone and I wonder how many Filipino parents are really up to it.

But I have no choice now but to follow two other messages from Kinsella’s mysterious voice, “Go the distance” and “Ease his pain.” When the ghosts of disgraced baseball heroes from the past appear and start playing in his field, Kinsella realizes that he’s not crazy after all and becomes convinced that he had been given a mystical mission to help the ghosts redeem themselves. In doing so, he also gets to vanquish some personal demons of his own and is given the magical opportunity to briefly reunite with his dead father. Ostensibly a “baseball movie,” Field of Dreams is really a story about faith and redemption. It merely uses the sport as a backdrop to portray the lost innocence of youth and how it can still be redeemed. In the same vein, I think that my involvement with my children’s school has actually given me what I had been looking for ever since I came back. It has given me the chance to do something relevant. Many people spend most of their lives searching for their dreams. But for some lucky ones, their dreams come looking for them. I realize that this is what Waldorf is now to me.

In one of the final scenes of the movie when Ray Kinsella gets to meet his father’s ghost, his dad asks him if they’re still in heaven. Ray wryly answers that they’re in a cornfield in Iowa. His father, however, replies that he could have sworn that they’re in heaven. Ray then asks him if there is a heaven and his father says that there is such a thing and that it is a place where dreams come true. As Ray looks around and sees his wife happily playing with their daughter on their porch, he says to himself, “Maybe this is heaven.” When the school opens in its new home in June, I don’t know how many of “them” will really come. The school also still has a lot of work to do and obstacles to overcome. But the thought of one day being able to provide children with a place where they can truly find the joy of learning — their very own field of dreams — that would be my heaven.

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To know more about the Manila Waldorf School, please call 374-2923 or visit its website at www.manilawaldorfschool.edu.ph.

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