PORTABLE MAGIC
‘Book Haul’ by Cecil Robin Singalaoa, watercolor on cotton rag paper, 2020, 4×6 inches
Newly minted author Lissa Romero de Guia has always struck me as one of those highly evolved souls. I’ve seen her lend her voice as singer and actress to philanthropic causes like a benefit for Typhoon Sendong survivors in 2012, another similar fundraiser, Jazzy Little Christmas, for Baguio’s Balay Sofia and so on.
It was as a performer that I came to know her. Was I impressed with her range! She could bump and grind to Let Me Entertain You from the musical Gypsy and allow for an encore of Sondheim’s Being Alive. That last bowled over the audience at Hill Station.
The author smelling the new pages of her book. (Photo courtesy of Lissa Romero de Guia)
Not until she gave me a copy of her tiny, ring-bound, small-edition The Book of Journeys did I happen upon her prose. I wished that she would write more to a bigger readership. Now she has, with the recent launch at Mt. Cloud Bookshop of her collection of essays People I Have Been. It wasn’t just any book party attended by Baguio’s culturati. Lissa learned from the bookshop staff at the end of the afternoon that “I had broken the bookshop’s record for most sales by an author in a single day.”
Baguio Chronicle editor Frank Cimatu, who wrote the foreword, could be said to be her formal “discoverer” when he invited her to write a bi-monthly column on anything under the sun. She had been posting short familiar essays as Facebook notes. After a few moments of self-doubt, she submitted her stuff to him.
As he put it in his decision to add more women’s voices in the community media, “She wasn’t yet a Baguio girl then but she had the Baguioness in her—the ability to get lost in the fog and listen to the wisdom of the pine breeze.”
It is as a nature writer that I’ve come to admire Lissa. Her Palawan Diaries, chronicling 10 days spent with her fiancé and later husband, the filmmaker-photographer Kidlat de Guia, in the secluded (no cell phone signal, no WiFi) Barangay Kemdeng in San Vicente, Palawan, is replete with descriptions of the seascape and the rest of the natural habitat the young, so-in-love couple wallowed in.
Once, she left him “snoring into his pillow” while she walked alone. “The tide was high so I was hardly able to pick up any shells. It was lovely to simply admire the early morning light grazing the tops of coconut trees, making their fronds glisten green and stream through grass to melt cool air into dew. Even the distant islands smiled at me as they basked in the sun’s glow.”
It is not only an idyllic getaway that inspires this sort of writing. In Perfection Redefined, she reflects on the emotional repercussions of a post-divorce scenario (an earlier relationship). She goes inward to ask herself honestly if she’d ever be in a happy relationship again, or if she was destined to repeat the same drama.
She doesn’t wrap motherhood in mist and myths
She realizes how she tends to judge her life harshly, but when she sees an analogy in the blooming of flowers (“From bud to blossom, the flower is exactly as it should be at any given point in time”), that’s when gratitude seeps in. That’s when she holds herself with more gentleness and kindness.
She doesn’t wrap motherhood in mist and myths. Rather, she tells of dealing with post-partum depression, a sick child and mood swings while breastfeeding. She is thankful she has help in her parents’ house, helpers happy to carry her firstborn Kalinaw “so I can eat with both hands or take a shower. But I am still the main person who nurses him, puts him to sleep for his nap, entertains him stays supine next to him.”
Kidlat knew that his wife needed “Lissa time” when she was frazzled. (Kidlat passed away early this year.) He even used to be the one to nudge her to go to a café to enjoy solitude and undisturbed writing hours. She writes, “When I regularly care for myself and spend time just ‘being Lissa,’ then I can spiral out more generously and graciously towards those in my universe: my son, my husband, my work, my friends and family.”
Cover of Lissa Romero de Guia’s book
At the launch, her fellow healer Gang Badoy Capati quoted from memory Ani DiFranco’s lyrics to the song My IQ to describe the author and their friendship. The lyrics partly go: “For every lie I unlearn / I learn something new / I sing sometimes for the war that I fight ’cause every tool is a weapon – /If you hold it right.”
In Lissa’s world, words strung together through the daily discipline of “morning pages” (espoused by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way), plus her “mindful drawings” and art, are her weapons. Although she self-deprecatingly calls her diaries “slovenly,” she continues to pursue the habit as “spiritual practice and creative expression.” And we are all the better for it!
Copies of People I Have Been are available at Mt. Cloud Bookshop, No. 1 Yangco Street., Baguio, or order through https://atmaprema.global/pro…/people-i-have-been-pre-order
