Accompaniment

Hansel Mapayo

As a Writing Fellow, I missed the day Marj sat in as a panelist during the 1992 UP Writers Workshop at Diliman. My flight from Davao was cancelled due to a nationwide strike, and I had to rebook it two days later. So I arrived at the workshop very late. I joined the 1991 Silliman Summer Workshop as an auditor the year before, but I could not recall now having met her personally.

Marj’s poetry opened its doors to me even before I met her. In 1981, my DevCom teacher at Xavier University mentioned the Caracoa, which featured poems and songs of contemporary Filipino writers. Then, in the early years of my “late-vocation” seminary years, I read the Caracoas given by Alfredo Navarro Salanga to his friend who happened to be a confrere at Saint Paul Seminary.

When I read her poems featured in the Caracoa, it was as if her poems opened their portals to me. They speak to me, even if I did not claim total comprehension of the poems’ reality. Something in me shifted or upturned. That was why I missed her during the 1992 UP Workshop. So, after that workshop, I took my sheaf of poems and visited her at De La Salle University; I cannot remember now how I arrived there. I remember she readily extended her arms to me and welcomed my poems, too. She read them, and, again, I could not recall her comments, but I was certain that it was the beginning of a friendship of accompaniment bound by the spirit of the arts.

One day, Marj asked me to help her son Marc work in publishing while preparing for his university studies. We arranged everything and got Marc to design St Paul’s Publishing book covers while writing for Teen Trivia of The Youngster Magazine that I edited. It was a task of accompaniment that Marj and I started to embark on.

Then I invited her to help us connect with our The Youngster readers, and we held writing workshops which extended to my Writing Class students in the seminary. Later, she would also bring her graduate and undergraduate students in Creative Writing to our cool seminary in Silang. For their final activity, with the scent of coffee flowers wafting around us, they would make us listen to poetry and fiction they wrote to celebrate our love for the Word. The literary fever caught some of my students, and I could count on some who proceeded to take up further studies in Creative Writing at De La Salle, Ateneo, and UP.

With other writers, I loved hanging out at her residence in Hagdanan Bato, either beside the piano or under the bamboo arch in her garden, as we celebrated the blessings of the changing season: Winter Solstice. Christmas, Spring Equinox, Chinese New Year, Summer Solstice. Easter, etc. She introduced me to her other literary and artist friends, who have also become dear to me.

If ever there is one thing that I am forever grateful to Marj, it is how I have been able to express publicly the way I see life through my paintings and my poems. My first solo exhibition, “Peace: prayers poem and paintings,” was held at the De La Salle University Art Gallery during the celebration of their Literature Week in 1996. It was made possible because of her invitation. The exhibit’s birthing was curated by her daughter Mayanne who further helped me mount my MA thesis exhibition and my latest exhibition inspired by the Mangroves of Visayas and Mindanao. All the exhibits I did in Austria, Venezuela, and the Philippines were always accompanied by poetry. Hence, the main source of my first and only poetry book, “Prayer Seasons: Paintings and Poems” Aria Edition, 2011, and the foreword she wrote out of a careful reading of my poems, was a very concise way to introduce my works to poetry readers.

Lastly, one of the early and important lessons I learned from Marj and her poetics is mindfulness, which opens to that moment when the inner eye can see a poem curling or breaking forth in the unfolding presence of the possibility of life. At the pandemic’s start, I told her I experienced panic and anxiety attacks, rattling off the many reasons I thought these caused. But she was so sharp to tell me how the many “passings on” of people close to me happened for the past two years, and the grief still hounds me. And so, during my 30-day Ignatian Retreat that started my sabbatical year, I spent moments facing and feeling the grief of a grateful heart for all the tears, laughter, fullness, and emptiness my life has had. And again, she invited me to share with her graduate students things I studied about Ecclesiastes during my master studies— how in one of Qoheleth’s poems, he says, under the sun, life is too wearisome for words. So we need to pay attention to and live in the moment. I realized that her invitation during those moments when I felt at a loss made me revisit a poem I studied and made me affirm what the pandemic has taught us: to relish the moment, to be mindful of life throbbing right in front of us, and to have a grateful heart for all the blessings of people, animals, nature and things that can bridge us together in a time when we are told to do social distancing.

I am not the only one Marj has thought about during this hard and difficult year; other people have listened to her, heard about her insights, or have read her poems through her virtual lectures and conferences and have gained the strength to face one’s life. And so with them, I kythe with Marj sending her this bliss and blessing of love and accompaniment.

Br. Hansel B. Mapayo, SSP is a member of the Society of Saint Paul and the author of Prayer Seasons (Poems and Paintings), published by Aria Edition in 2011. While contributing to the multi-media apostolate of his congregation, he writes poems. He sometimes paints in oil and acrylic, which, when given an opportunity, he mounts for an exhibition or sends these for some anthologies. He looks forward to launching Abakada ng Bibliya (Luma at Bagong Tipan), written during his furlough (Sabbath) during COVID-19.