MANILA, Philippines - THIS WEEK’S WINNER
Marian Santos Abon, 29, is from Tarlac where she’s a municipal councilor and registered nurse who loves to read, write and edit articles in her spare time. Her inspiration is “my faith.”
“I don’t want to be married anymore...I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby. But I was supposed to have a baby... My husband and I — who had been together for eight years, married for six — had built our entire life around the common expectation. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence and I discovered that I did not want to get pregnant. — Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love
My life had been a series of expectations and regrets. This is why, when I first read these lines from Elizabeth Gilbert’s account of her journey to self-recovery, I was gripped with curiosity as to how it would all end. Not only because she is a woman like me and her story touched me so, but more importantly, because we are both women in search of ourselves.
Gilbert’s frustration in leaving her portrait-perfect life as a well-loved wife with a successful writing career reminded me of the times when I, too, was torn between two choices: that of remaining where I was, in the comfort of my own make-believe happiness, and that of the more pressing need to be true to myself which could complicate life as it was even more. It’s a feeling Gilbert captured when she wrote, “The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences.”
What made me identify with her even more was when Gilbert showed how she coped in her most vulnerable moment. In her hour of utter desolation, she found herself crying on the bathroom floor, not knowing where to start or how to go on. And she was not religious at all. That’s why my heart was stirred when she turned to God and casually prayed, “Hello, God. How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.” She continued, “I’m sorry to bother you so late at night… But I’m in serious trouble..” In anguish she ended, “I am in desperate need of help. I don’t know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do...”
Such familiar words and emotions. Anyone can agree with me that, in times such as this, when there is no answer, one does turn to that Being one cannot fathom, in quest of an answer so desperately desired.
In retrospect, Gilbert’s journey to Italy to revive her love for pleasure, her soul-searching in Indonesia, and finally her attempt at balancing in Bali what’s human and divine in these two travels: this, for me, is the ultimate act of prayer. For she made it a point to struggle every day in both countries to be able to connect to God by first being able to connect to herself. Until finally, when she was on the verge of securing this connection, she realized that the first step was to simply let go.
“Surrender” is a hard word to find in my vocabulary. Perhaps because I’m a Virgo with a Taurus for a mother. That is, until I stumbled upon one of Gilbert’s many interesting friends in Indonesia, Richard. He encouraged me, as he had her, to submit one’s burdens to God without holding anything back. In Gilbert’s encounter with him, he explained to her that this act of surrender would allow the universe and God to rush in and fill her with more love than she could have ever dreamt of. He was relentless in his advice and succeeded at last when Gilbert finally managed to still her mind and, in full surrender to the Sublime, as she described it: “I climb down the ladder into my own hub of stillness... I sit in silent wonder at all I understand. I am not actively praying. I have become prayer.” Meanwhile I, as the reader — who had eaten, chewed, and swallowed all that was taught to Gilbert — found myself surrendering, too, in prayer. I set a specific time each day after I’d read pages in her book to still my mind and learn how to reconcile it with the restless thumping of my heart by completely opening both to God’s infiniteness. And in my meditative state, the war that once broke loose inside of me turned into a reprieve that gave way to one question: What now? The need for radical change was overwhelming until I found myself at a loss again for an answer. However, to my relief as I read on, Gilbert gave me the answer I needed. She wrote, “God dwells within you, as you.” Needless to say, self-acceptance was her reply.
In Bali, when Gilbert gave herself some time alone to finally face her inner demons of sorrow, anger and shame, she taught me how to breathe and live in self-acceptance. A difficult task that she attributes to prayer’s most important gift — God’s unyielding love: “Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine — just imagine! — what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.”
All throughout Gilbert’s adventures, I noticed that she had subconsciously pondered what her “word” would be. Her friend Guilo in Italy told her, “Every city has a single word that defines it, that defines most people who live there.” I therefore found her utterance of attraversiamo, meaning “Let’s cross over” in the final page of her journey to self-recovery most apt.
Having traveled and learned with her, I, too, have decided that I must also have a word to describe me. To describe this city that had once been in chaos inside of the person that I was, am, and will become.
It is casa.
Meaning “home.”