Six six six
Following the recent post about the everyday thoughts of the creators is a reflection of six’s optimisms and musings about life.
Symptoms started four years ago. It came out of nowhere or maybe it came months before my diagnosis. Like I said, I always considered it as power rather than liability. Although I had a diagnosis, I never considered taking medications as I was stubborn and arrogant. So to anyone having a meltdown right not, please do not copy me. I wasn’t completely immersed in my mental imbalance at that time. I got up one morning and decided I won’t let it take control of me. I started dancing. I danced everyday until the pain started fading away. At my stable states, I would read and paint and dance non-stop. Because it became hard to sleep, I wrote every day until I completely drained all my energy. Fast forward to 2017, life became easier. Then 2018 came and life was a blissful mess.
I went to a jungle escapade. I lived in the jungle for almost four months with one of the craziest and most diverse group of people I have ever met. You cannot really have clear first judgments about these people because upon meeting them you would think they’re just a bunch of greasy, smelly, Caucasian hippies who decided to live in the deep jungles of Southeast Asia to go herping. Turns out, most of them are intellects and fellow absurdists who retreated in isolation to discover a jungle paradise. To most people, the jungle is a scary, dark, and lonely asylum for wild animals. They’re not entirely wrong. The evergreen was dark but not at all scary and lonely. As I was doing my usual tracking of tortoises, I encountered wild animals that shared incredible experiences with me. I could not have asked for a better timing. I started tracking right after the dipterocarp forest burnt. My first encounter of a natural forest fire was exhilarating. There was smoke and fire everywhere. The ground was covered with ashes. Whenever I came out of the forest, I would be covered with ashes, scratches, and burns. I would like to think I had the most dramatic entrances and exits into the jungle. I was the dirtiest animal tracker in the house and the fiercest one for going into the wild solo. I love that before going into the forest, I would speedily ride my motorbike up and the down the jungle slopes.
Every day was an adventure. I think I can write an entire book about this trip, but I think one of my favorite trips to the jungle was when I had Frank Zappa to accompany me. Seriously, everyone should listen to his albums in the wild. He’s one of the few great musicians everyone can deeply relate to. That was the trip I went too deep into the evergreen. In the dipterocarp forest there were a lot of monitor lizards and hidden tortoises. In the deepest part of the evergreen, I encountered different bird species. There were a lot of firebacks, three rare oriental pied hornbills, parakeets, warblers, swallows, and blue robins. There were some macaques, barking deer, flying squirrels, giant squirrels, and a golden jackal I saw from a distant. As I lost signal of one of my ‘fast-moving’ tortoises, I sat down by one of the massive boulders of rocks along the dried streambed. Zappa was playing as I watched the hornbills play on top of a high tree. I told myself that this was one of the most beautiful and peaceful days of my life. Unfortunately, the battery of my camera was drained. I was not able to capture the moment but whenever I retreat to darkness, I would remember that perfect day.
Night surveys are also incredibly fun. The golden-brown and green leaves of the forest turn grey and everything turns pitch black. Everything changes including the animals that come out. Nocturnal animals that come out include the small slow lorises, owls, civets and badgers. Insects come crawling and flying out to make pretty lights and sounds in the jungle. There were a lot of snakes out at night too. There were cat snakes, ratsnakes, kraits, king cobras, common cobras, and pythons. My favorite was the 5-meter-long python my friend saw near one of the fire lines. There was also a 4-meter-long female caught sleeping near the monk’s trail under a log. How can such intimidating-looking animals look so gentle and beautiful? I guess I've always been obsessed with animals that most people are afraid of.
How I wish I could write my entire jungle experience right now, but I have so much more to tell. After my four-month city escape, I flew immediately back to the Philippines to go to my 1-month dive training. Just like my jungle adventure, I lived far far far away from civilization. I stayed in a house right next to the virgin reefs of Leyte with international divers. We go diving twice a day. During our dives, we would see diverse animal species. My favorite ones were found during our deep dive. There were cuttlefishes, hawksbill turtles, whale sharks, a lawn of garden eels, flounders, sea kraits, a school of barracudas, squids, lobsters, colorful nudibranchs and butterfly fishes, and my all-time favorite, the humongous triton’s trumpet that measured about 1 meter! It was like going back to the Jurassic era where all things are big. We also went night diving which was mind-blowing. Diving at night felt like descending to the abyss of the ocean. Or going to space and seeing all bioluminescent organisms glow like millions of stars. Just like the jungle, the reef changes drastically at night. The once familiar places are transformed magically to an alien universe. The once motionless sea stars, sea cucumbers, and urchins start to move gently with the current. And the colorful cuttlefish swims gracefully and interacts curiously with a giant sea cucumber. It was so beautiful. I think I cried while I was diving. I think I cried several times when I was diving. It was a world just below us yet so unknown to many. It made me feel so insignificant and small.
After my jungle and ocean adventures, I had several other mini escapades that followed. But in between my adventures were resting periods where I would literally shut myself off from the world and absorb all the experiences. I also needed time to just sit down and recall all of them like my very long drives in the countryside of France or driving the motorbike recklessly in Thailand, getting mobbed during the water festival, getting into a ‘fun’ fight with my boy friends, getting kicked out of bars in Khao San, getting a random tattoo, dancing with a 7 feet tall stranger in a bar, dancing with a mannequin, dancing with a mannequin’s arm, chugging a bottle of whiskey without feeling drunk, ‘bug’/ jungle parties, driving a small motorbike with four big men, smoking weed with incredible scientists in Barcelona, marveling at Gaudi's masterpieces, getting serenaded by a harpist, driving really fast in the highway with a person I loved, feeding cobras, sleeping with a cat snake, getting kicked out of my flat by a grumpy lady, partying with crazy Germans, partying with a cop, getting lost in Europe, dancing in the rain in Paris, watching couples dance outside the Opera house, waking up every day in the jungle with incredibly handsome people, eating tons of good food, hiking in the Pyrenees mountains, dancing under the moonlight at the beach with fellow divers, jamming in France, hiding from a poacher with a machete in the jungle, trying to out run a monitor lizard, getting high with Thai strangers, playing sports with huge Thai lady boys who can literally crush me etc etc.
So why write a summary about my adventures and share it with people? Partly because I wanted to brag about how incredibly enriching life is when people take more risks and just forget everything. You don’t have to go to the jungle or the ocean to experience these incredible moments. You don’t need a ton of money for this. In fact, I don’t remember spending a lot during these trips. Sometimes these magical moments are right in front of us, but we fail to see them because we’re ‘too busy’ trying to get through the day. We have to stop taking everything seriously. Life’s too short. A day relapsing feels like a year missing out in life. But it’s okay to be like nine and get stuck in melancholia. Grief and despair help us see life from a different perspective. So don’t be afraid to explore your emotions and thoughts. Exploration of emotions and repressed memories free humans. Don’t be afraid of your dark place. Learn to question life and why you are alive. Learn to question your morals. Learn to fuck up a lot. Learn to love completely, relentlessly, and without expectations. If the love you give is not reciprocated, then let it be. If it is, then go dissolve your ego and be in symbiosis with this incredible human being.
All my life I’ve avoided questions like “what do you want to do when you grow up?, when are you getting married?, when do you want to settle down?, what are you going to do after grad school?”. The truth is, I don’t know what I want to do and I don’t care where I go. Maybe right now I just need to save a bit of money then go to Valencia and get my dive instructor’s license, marry the incredibly beautiful Spanish man who fell in love with me but our love remained unrequited because we hardly understood each other but I just knew that he really loved me. Maybe get a divorce after. Move back to one of the beautiful islands of the Philippines and teach diving. Buy a resto-bar in Manila and create my own niche with incredible artists and scientists. Open my own gallery. Maybe get a PhD and study planarians and their potential to have an immortal life.
All I know is, I am restless. I am always restless, and I want to die knowing that I lived a thousand lives.