The Philippines. Manila. Home.
Coming home is like walking through the door of some magical, enigmatic poem. The colors, the people, the temperature are different. Everything, all sensory experiences, dialed up a notch.
It feels surreal. Each time, coming home feels more and more so. Perhaps because home remains somehow constant, while each journey continues to chip away at my human landscape. Each return makes each personal revolution more apparent; the experiment in contrast to the control. Manila, my marker.
I question this place. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Already home is challenging my sensibilities: my tastes, my diet, my sense of order, my renewed love for seasons and cooler climes. It must be doing its job as motherland: to test, to inspire, two sides of the same country coin.
It's only been 3 days but I have already experienced all sorts of things since returning. I have felt a deep sense of belonging. I've also felt strangeness and difference. I have felt calm and also short-tempered frustration. How is it that I can be perfectly natural one moment and perfectly out of place the next? Everything fits, but ever so imperfectly, clothes just slightly off, a wee bit loose here, sleeves ever so slightly short, a centimeter tight in some places.
Despite all of home's strangeness, all of my fish-out-of-water sensations, what I cannot deny is that there is a certain power to being here, to coming home. I have felt this before. That as it beams its invisible rays of dissonance, it also embraces me. It welcomes its wandering, prodigal daughter. It recharges my restless spirit, which like a spec of dirt that rests on the side of the mountain becomes a part of the mountain itself and is absorbed into Mother Earth.
Coming home is like walking through the door of some magical, enigmatic poem. The colors, the people, the temperature are different. Everything, all sensory experiences, dialed up a notch.
It feels surreal. Each time, coming home feels more and more so. Perhaps because home remains somehow constant, while each journey continues to chip away at my human landscape. Each return makes each personal revolution more apparent; the experiment in contrast to the control. Manila, my marker.
I question this place. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Already home is challenging my sensibilities: my tastes, my diet, my sense of order, my renewed love for seasons and cooler climes. It must be doing its job as motherland: to test, to inspire, two sides of the same country coin.
It's only been 3 days but I have already experienced all sorts of things since returning. I have felt a deep sense of belonging. I've also felt strangeness and difference. I have felt calm and also short-tempered frustration. How is it that I can be perfectly natural one moment and perfectly out of place the next? Everything fits, but ever so imperfectly, clothes just slightly off, a wee bit loose here, sleeves ever so slightly short, a centimeter tight in some places.
Despite all of home's strangeness, all of my fish-out-of-water sensations, what I cannot deny is that there is a certain power to being here, to coming home. I have felt this before. That as it beams its invisible rays of dissonance, it also embraces me. It welcomes its wandering, prodigal daughter. It recharges my restless spirit, which like a spec of dirt that rests on the side of the mountain becomes a part of the mountain itself and is absorbed into Mother Earth.
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