Acts of Life

1 March 2007
Acts of Life

I live in a townhouse that stands near a turbid creek. The water that flows through it, carrying God-knows-what, sometimes turns gray or light green. We, the homeowners, don’t exactly know the cause of the water’s magical color transformation but we point our fingers at the nearby toilette factory. How convenient right? And people say BF Homes Parañaque is a nice place to live.

But this isn’t about BF Home’s bacteria culture or the toilette factory’s unsanitary waste disposal methods or about the different objects and creatures the miry creek brings to the village. It’s about a piece of land at the back of my home that lies between the creek and the townhouse.

There is a tiny piece of land that stretches along the back of each townhouse. It’s a communal back-yard, if you can call it like that, and not everyone has a piece of it. Only those townhouses built next to the creek have it. My family has a share of this piece and we didn’t know what to do with it. Until one day, my father came home from Real, Quezon and brought with him bamboo seedlings of two species – yellow and green. Hehe… I’m sorry. I don’t know the Latin names of the species but one had a green stalk and the other had yellow. Anyway, so my dad planted the seedlings and it took about two years for the bamboos to establish itself in the soil.

That was around 2002 and after five years, the result of my father’s act was breathtaking. Okay, breathtaking is an overstatement. It was amazing. It created a mini forest. Apparently soil near creeks is actually fertile land, so the bamboo was easily able to spread its roots underneath from which new bamboo trees sprouted.

Enter birdies.

Suddenly we had birds. First there was Adam or Eve, I wasn’t really sure. How can one tell? But there was one of them and it wasn’t a Maya bird. It had a fan-like tail that was white underneath and brown and black on the surface. Its breast was white and its body was a mixture of black and white. Long story short, this fan bird thingy established its family in this mini forest we had. Next thing I know there are least five of them chirping at 6 o’ clock in the morning.

Soon later, we discover different plants sprouting from the soil. No, they were not weeds, they were seedlings of trees. I’m assuming that it was the birds that brought them there. Slowly, an ecosystem was developing. We offered to plant bamboos on our neighbor’s lot but they refused. They said it would only attract snakes, but the only thing our bamboos attracted was life.

Elements of life attract life. Water in the dessert creates an oasis around it and makes it suitable for a camp site. Rivers draw near thirsty creatures and cause shrubs to grow at its lining. The water in our creek made it suitable for the bamboo to grow and spread out. The bamboos in turn created a habitat for small creatures like birds. Somehow, in their daily activities, the birds brought in new species of plants.

Human beings can either choose to be elements of life or of death. We do this in choosing our actions. The mini-ecosystem created on a land barely half of the land of our townhouse is a product of a single act of tree-planting by just one person. Imagine what the result could have been if it were an act of a community on a hectare of barren land.

GE117