21 Days...building a home

And so it was in 1999 when I left the hubby and the son in the Big City for twenty one days. The hubby had gallantly furnished my purse for the journey and the opus ahead. I traveled to my grandparents’ hometown to the property by the beach where a giant tamarind tree held forth.

Beneath the tree and for three weeks, I planned, structured and renovated the weather-beaten house where my grandfather used to while his weary days. When he was alive, the house was his sanctuary away from the madding crowd of his public life.

I had huge dreams for the house. I hoped to bring back the Spirit of my grandfather’s sanctuary so that, like it did to him, it would shelter my Spirit and my hubby’s for years to come. Away from the concrete jungle, our Spirits would swell to fruition so that we would become the selves we nearly lost in the fast and furious metropolis. And so it was that I painted the house orange and green, after the Mediterranean colors of life.

After those grueling twenty one days, I went back to our home in the Big City, spent and exhausted. But secretly deep inside, I was greatly eager. For I knew our lives would never be the same again.

We had started to build our own PeacePond.

4 YEARS AND SOME deciding to leave home

Four years and some. It took this much time, a work in progress by itself, for the hubby and I to finally move in to our new place by the beach.

This decision to leave our careers, family and new friends behind in the Big City came in mid-1999. Deep in our souls, we knew that we were slowly becoming the selves we saw and despised in people struggling to survive the concrete jungle of Metro Manila. We were forcing ourselves to live the metropolitan life: continuously yearning for things material. We were learning the trade of survival, crushing other people’s spirits so that ours may persevere. We were consumed with the element of time, as if there was nothing more important in the world than to live fast and furious.

The terrible feeling was gnawing at us, eating us as we looked at our lives with jaded eyes. We were living such deafening and cacophonic lives, the paradox of what we planned our lives to be. We knew if we didn’t leave the Big City, it would consume us whole and the good that we once were, would be forever lost.

We decided that for us to reinvent ourselves, we had to leave the Big City. The time to leave would be after four years and some, a little after our son had graduated from college and established himself independent of us.