Septembers

The life-size dancing and saxophone-playing Santa Claus at the entrance of a bookstore reminded me that the Christmas season has started and that 2012 will soon be over. Part of me wants the year to pass slowly and allow me to catch up with the things I wanted to do in the first quarter which I still have not done (Declutter! Declutter! Declutter!) Part of me wants the year to end, if only to prove that the world will not end on 21 December 2012 (and allow more doomsayers a chance to make money with another random date—I could be one of them and make a fortune).

Maybe Septembers make us more conscious that a year passes quickly. I know that this September has inspired me to revisit goals set at the beginning of the year and evaluate if they are still worth doing for the rest of the year and years after.

When I was working at a Makati law firm, I used to write “Spend more time with my family” as my first New Year’s resolution. Things did not always work out as I planned and I used to feel very bad about missing PTA meetings and coming home very late at night. Twelve years later, I am working from home. This set-up allows me to be around when my son gets home from school and I thank God and all the persons and angels and saints who make my current life possible. I never imagined this happening in my twenties and while choosing this path had (and still has) its difficulties, I would not have it any other way. For now, at least.

This is why I no longer worry as much about the other things in my to-do list. For 2012, the first item is “Get everyone to love our forests!” It sounds crazy sometimes, even to me. When that happens, I just re-read William Henry Scott’s essays on pre-Hispanic Bisaya and remember that a little over five hundred years ago, we held the forests in reverence. We held our forests sacred, aware that all life flowed from them.

I am lucky to have friends also working on environmental issues with whom I can bounce off ideas about protecting and restoring Philippine forests. We want a rainforest caravan to travel and connect all Philippine rainforests. We want to connect forest families and urban families and create a way for them to work together to protect existing forests and restore degraded ones. We want to restore a million hectares of rainforests. We want urban forests and vegetable gardens in cities. Our plans include partnerships between indigenous cultural communities and donors working in cities to be stewards of mountains, a traveling exhibit of best practices in forest conservation, and summits for communities to meet and share these ideas.

Sometimes, we get cynical and wonder if Mother Earth healing herself with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions would be the only way to conserve the environment. Most of the time, we just brainstorm and laugh and remain hopeful. We write concept papers, identify and meet prospective partners and donors, and welcome ideas and insights from different people.

And so as September ends, I will be writing “GET PEOPLE TO LOVE OUR FORESTS!!!” again, this time in capital letters and with more exclamation points. Maybe in another twelve years I will be writing about how a million hectares of Philippine rainforests was restored.

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