Wat da Wat?

 Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Lucille Austria, the true inspiration of my life.

The storm has passed but the devastation will stay for a while to heal. I don’t know how long the healing process will take but for sure it will take its own course. On the contrary, whenever it is ready to take place, I only wish that it can reinforce into its original condition.

In the natural world, it will mend and regenerate, it may take thousands of years to get to its form but the certainty is almost real. But for people, the expectation of healing is always almost hard to meet. As it is, the devastation is hard and painful but in reality it is the process of healing that is most excruciating. When talking about profound pitiless desolation, there may not even be a promise.

People’s emotions are the most delicate part of life. When we get hurt, no matter how shallow and deep it is, by nature, we have the tendency to focus on the pain and disregard why there is pain. Defying reasons of understanding, we let that pain guide us to more desolation and more pain to hurt us deeper.

For some of us, it runs through our entire life. Seemingly we are all right, but in the deepest crevice of our emotion, the hurt and pain still lingers. In our lifetime how many people have we encountered that still talk about the past unhappy experience of their childhood?  How many of us still hate our exes or even our teachers in high school?

Is true healing really subsisting?  I asked myself this question time and again and to this point I still don’t have the answer. Whenever we get hurt, how often do we associate our present pain from that of the past? Different pain in a different situation always gets the tendency to be associated to each other and as we do, the past experiences come rushing back in, exacerbating the sting of the present pain. Where is healing comes in then? Maybe lessons past are lessons gained but if it reiterates the same pain that wrecked havoc on us in the past, I don’t see where the healing takes place.

Faith in oneself to have the strength to handle the remnants of the devastations in its different shapes and degrees is maybe the only options there is to survive. But we can always experiment on where we can attain peace and contentment amidst all the atrocities we have in our lives.

Nothing is constant in this world. Everybody is bound to get hurt. Sometimes we recovered, there are times we don’t but there is always a promise of a better healing if not in this lifetime maybe the next.

Please visit my earlier post To Heal or Not To Heal, which is a reaction to this piece at the time when it was originally written.

My wife is comming back from the Philippines today. Needless to say, I cannot concentrate long enough to write down my ideas for today’s post.

To take the easy way out, I’m going to post a poem that captures the essence of my love for my wife (yes, cheese is ooozing out of me right now).

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Today my wife, my son and I are traveling to the Philippines. I wish this was a vacation but it isn’t. My brother-in-law is having a kidney transplant and my eldest niece will be the donor.

While I am comforted by the fact that I am accompanying my wife during this difficult journey, I am also worried because four of my children will be left behind. However, I’m fortunate that both of my sisters and my sister-in-law will take turns to watch my other four children.

After the operation, my wife will stay a litte longer to help her brother and niece recover from the operation. Either way you slice this I will miss somebody. I will miss my children terribly when I am in the Philippines and when I am back in the States, I will miss my wife.

On a different note, I will do my best to post as much as possible.

My next post will be in two days since it will take us one and half day to travel.

I was a little uncomfortable asking Isaac this question, but I mustered enough courage to ask him anyway.

“How did you deal with the challenges of your online intimacy?”

Before answering my question he smirked and said, “Oh, you mean “sex”?

“Yeah, that,” I said. I told him that I didn’t use the “s” word because I wanted to keep my blog Rated PG. He just smiled and began to explain.

“I don’t really remember when we started getting intimate online,” he said. “What I can remember is that it started with playful innuendos while we chat online and it moved to phone calls. You see during that time, video conferencing wasn’t how it is now. It was more of a distraction having it than not having it.”

I immediately remarked, “Man, you must have racked up quite a phone bill?”

“You can say that the phone company was pretty happy with us,” he grinned.

Isaac also stated that there were a few free phone internet service during that time and they were pretty good considering that they were in the beta stages.

I commented that it must have been very hard for both of them. He said that at first it was but, they got use to the situation. He said that there were times when he just wanted to hold Camille but couldn’t.

“Those times were specially difficult because sometimes actions do speak louder than words. Being able to hold the person you love can turn a bad day into a good day. When those times happen, you just hope for the day that the time will eventually come when you can actually be in each others arms all day and all night,” he added.

I was surprised by Isaac’s statements because I never thought that he’s the romantic type. But what struck me even more was his next comment.

He said, “The time we spent being intimate online really gave us the chance to really get to know each others needs and wants. Through our words, we were able to make the connection, which made everything more intense and satisfying. When we finally met face to face, it felt like we have been together for a long time since there were no pretentions and inhibitions. Quite interestingly, our passion waned when we were physically together because we forgot to make the connections with our minds. The physical part was so easy that we depended on this too much. But when we reconnected with the foundation of our relationship, then the intensity came back. It’s strange and I can’t explain it. When our minds and emotions are insync the physical intimacy often times become secondary.”

So it is safe to say that true passion and true love do start in the mind before it moves to the physical. We often forget this because it is much easier to focus on the physical. With Isaac and Camille’s online relationship, they were forced by the situation to communicate with their wants and needs through words, which strenghten the foundation of their relationship.

It is true then that my friend’s internet romance does support the argument that your mind and your words are the most effective and the most powerful tool you have when it comes to meaningful intimacy.