inklingfair I’m writing this as I lie beside a napping Amy, my belly warm with white fungus boiled with Chinese red dates. We had been watching videos by Li Ziqi, a young woman living with her grandmother in idyllic rural China – vignettes of cooking for a spring festival, weaving a woolen cloak dyed purple by berries, digging up yams, smoking sausages, grinding herbs.
I told Josh they were very relaxing, the same way I said the apartment we looked at yesterday looked very promising. But later I broke down and said it made me feel restless. Trapped. I looked at the sleek gleaming counters and the range hood and felt nausea. I peeked at the greenery out the window and the empty swimming pool swarming with workers sweeping up Taal’s ash and felt my throat constricting.
Why is it that every other possible life path other than 2019 Nuvali now feels like death? Even the prospect of returning makes me shrink back in dread. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone back with Josh last week. Perhaps I’d have been spared the sight of everything transformed into a grey monochrome, a shadow of what was before. I feel like even if Nuvali’s lush green spaces grew back again, the specter of Taal would always be looming in the background, ready to snatch it all up any day. Our lot, of course, is luxury compared to those who lost everything – but death and destruction swallows us all up, in the end, won’t it?
We all already live our whole lives under that inescapable shadow. Taal only exhumed what we buried under our trappings of “life”, as we call it. No, there is only the slow inexorable march towards death and chaos.
“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:19-20)
And this hope of something beyond this life is what keeps me moving. Though all paths lead to death, it is not the Great End, but a beginning. My heart is choked with sorrow, yes. I’d be fooling myself if I didn’t acknowledge it, but I know in my bones that sorrow won’t have the last word. Do I have proof of this? No. But I have glimpsed hints, now and then.
Whenever Li Ziqi uproots ginger or garlic, she buries a few fingers, a handful of cloves in the soil again. Later a shoot pokes out of the ground, then another. Life, from death. This, I believe and hold on to.
