| TRIP
MAGAZINE VOL. 4
JVP Batch 1: A Ribbon
of a Memory
You know half your life is over when you
find yourself telling more stories (and inadvertently repeating
them) to younger people. Their eyes mirror the quaintness
of your memory. The pictures in your mind are perhaps a
soft blur and clutter, save for a few you have framed on
the walls of your soul. Pippin's “With You”,
a song we used to sing during those early JVP years is a
comforting refrain: “And time weaves ribbons of memory;
to sweeten life when youth is through.” Like the time
I gathered a few friends at the close of JVP year to scale
Mount Apo, using not the route of thousands of tourists,
but the more challenging climb through Digos, uncharted
through volcanic rock, quick but painfully steep yet breathtaking.
I almost did not make that climb because of the cramps that
overtook me. We did not give up even when we had to haul
each other up using our worn blankets. I no longer remember
the times I slipped and fell and gashed myself against sharp
rock. But I do well remember this montane grace: when the
setting sun cast its twilight colors on the clouds as we
stood above them, we knew then and there the climb was worth
all the doubting and falling and straining.
Do I now miss the forest for all the trees
that midlife has to tend? Some of us are now captains of
industry and government and civil society. Do we add to
the Little Prince's frustration with grownups when, tasked
with “matters of consequence,” we now see more
hats than elephants nestled inside boa constrictors? Is
our seeing now burdened with compromise and “realism”
and prudence?
Many volunteers will perhaps confess with
me that that one year marked a fork on the forest floor
that was the beginning of our lives. And the branching of
paths was not just about dramatic choices or alternative
countercultural occupations or the road less taken. (God
knows how many of us try our heroic best to live his life
within the cubicles of our careers.) Beyond that fork in
the forest of so many beginnings was a path that took us
to a climb that was fraught with much doubting and falling
and straining as much as it was drawn by desire and the
very heart of God.
When the world is too much and disheartening,
I look up at the skies, searching to remember how the sun
once cast its iridescence upon the clouds, enfolding us
in wonder and desire. That one year is now a ribbon of a
memory, quaint and true and sweet.
| During his JVP
year, Jett Villarin was assigned to the Ateneo de Davao
University as a college teacher and campus minister.
He presently heads the Climate Studies Division of the
Manila Observatory and teaches Physics at the Ateneo
de Manila University. |
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Trip Vol 01
Trip Vol 02
Trip Vol 03
Trip Vol 04
Josephine G. Maribojoc, Batch 13
Tina Pineda
Fr. Jose Ramon “Jett” T. Villarin, SJ
Nathaniel "Nikki" Hipolito
Jesus Enrique "Jay" G. Saplala
Sarah S. Balane
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