A Fragment of Hope in Moving Water

This is a small piece I wrote after visiting Siargao in the Philippines. It forms the foundation of the larger work, What the Tides Taught Us. To me, it captures Siargao as a whole—the wisdom, the energy, and the openness that flow through the island like the tide itself.

There is a persuasiveness in the undertone of freedom,

and this city’s current bellows life in the fragments of open wings.

I’ve never met a city that interlocks my humanity with the swell lines of local lives

Not like this.

Their dialect is the freedom we all swim through our days for,

the streams and currents of disconnection we ride against.

They know how to treat another;

they know, or maybe they recall the remembrance

of what it feels like to be the “other.”

Separation, polarisation,

this and that,

them and us,

truth and experience.

None are allowed to be an upwelling in the whispers of their small streets,

paralleled with the growing structures that know when to stop rising,

because the perfection of experience does not lie in the grandness of self,

but the pure simplicity of what we give.

What if it is all about the other?

The lines that travel the long ocean roads of introspection

are life’s opportunity to give freedom back

to what forever parallels us.

This and that,

them and us,

truth and experience,

freedom and our mind.

We will not know ourselves until we know how to give ourselves to the other,

absolutely.

The persuasiveness of freedom asks:

Stop. Cease allowing experience to appear as a duality of outcome.

The train tracks of the other cannot be true

when we remember what it is like to be the other.

Oh, how this city’s lines of liquid connection have given me my truth back.

Surfers Featured: Alex Day