Looking for Gold!

We were in a meeting discussing about a project when somebody said that we were actually having difficulty finding resources and that the people who are supposed or whom we expected to be supportive of the project turned out to be the opposite and even seemed to wish us doom. Everyone was exasperated, desperate. But I said "we'll find gold."

Gold is a precious stone which we don't easily find. In fact they're probably hiding. Not that they want to. But with all the noise in this society - " I know better than you do. I am richer and more powerful. I have political clout. I am in position and the laws are mine to use. I have puppets at the tip of my fingers and a magic wand to convert every nook and cranny of the seas and mountains of this world to whatever I want these to become." It's difficult to find them.

The golds are probably smudged in soot, lying in coffins, working back-bent in rice fields crying because they have seen other golds destroyed in front of their families and or are racially discriminated.

Yet they shine. the harshness of people and nature, rather than cover them up with mounds of soil 6 feet underground, make them even shine more.

Who are they? They're people like you and me. But they are set apart, because like gold they shine brilliantly from deep inside towards wherever their illustrious ray of light would reach. And they don't do this with effort. They just shine, naturally.

So where does all the shining, shimmering splendid come from? Well, what could be inside something that comes out but never dies and is always reaching out, but passion?

They love their work. They're so in love with what they do that they don't keep their talents, their skills, their time. They share it with whoever reaches their passionate feelings and ideas and movements be this near, across the globe or even in another galaxy.

They discover their value and work more not for material things. But for art's sake, for culture's sake, for other's sake, or for humanity's sake.

You hear of a child being burned to save her siblings. You read about a 70-year old providing shelter to whoever comes her way in her shack while wishing she would someday find her own missing daughter. You hear of an artist trekking mountains and rivers to discover IPs and humbly mimicking IP lullabyes to produce a CD for an emotionally distraught world. You get invited to a seminar whose speaker is a forensic pathologist who took this course because, as she explained, she's more patient with the dead than the undead. She was on tv and newsprint with the voluminous books to provide information to a Filipina who was raped in Subic. You encounter an ex-nun, about 60+ years old, helping human rights victims like she had not been "violated" herself. She was joined by community women during her incarceration in what looked like a pig pen because they were just too many to be placed in the town's jail.

With all the unfortunate events, and these don't come in trickles but sometimes in torrents, they've learned to laugh and laugh their happiest, love like they do not just embrace the cloth of the person but its soul which does not exist only now but also then and in the future. They think even with the limitations of their brain and produce outputs as a result of nerve endings which have wired up like you've never imagined them simply because it is necessary.

You don't see them puking seeing all the maggots (like cheese) of a dead body of a child, said to be an NPA, which they have to exhume to find out the truth. They don't easily get scared being chased by the notorious riding-in-tandem motorcycle. In fact, the chasing stopped, they retold, when their car went straight to the police station.

You read about them going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet for several times in the past they have acted in movies one of which portrayed a doctor-character which asks its audience if a doctor is actually treating his patient as a disease himself/ herself rather than as a person. You see them in class as a teacher trying to draw something on a blackboard to summarize a book of concepts discussed about Gender. And then you hear the whole class laughing at her. The teacher asked why and 1 boy says that the illustration shows that the teacher is "mahilig." And the teacher smiles and replies to the class, "Sex is good." Do you imagine the guffaws and the shrieks? Well, the teacher is me and the students were my last batch of passionate graduating Nursing students.

So where's that gold? It's still in this planet Earth. But we have to keep on looking, hope that we see their sheen and that they continue to shine even under stormy skies. Life is hard enough. But with all the gold, life becomes easier.