Tubig Nga Wa Damha: A Poetic Meditation

Big-time tubig. The kind that fills dams, powers turbines, and sends engineers into meetings.The kind with budget lines, blueprints, and board resolutions.

But then—uwan. Daghan sila. Simple, soft, unbudgeted rain. Sometimes deluge, sometimes blessing.

From the sky to the ground, it travels: from taligsik padung langit—droplets that seem to rise instead of fall—to actual falls, the kind we see rise in Kawasan. From dam to ditch, from reservoir to rusted pail, from the water district’s pipeline to a time-tested poso at the back of my silingan's house, where the pump squeaks like a stubborn prayer.

And then it becomes tap water—dripping, obedient, cold in the morning. One twist of the hand and it can become Evian, bottled, imported, suddenly refined.Yet the same water boils in the tinola, mingling with tangad, fish bones, and ginger. The same water fogs the mirror sa kusina, sits afresh sa karaang banga, settles on the banggerahan, clings to the rim of a kaldero, waiting to be filled.

But water never stays the same. It dances in fountains at Bellagio, defies gravity in Hawaii’s water spouts, and hides beneath the soil where a water diviner’s rod trembles with longing. It blesses oases in deserts—a sudden mercy for the lost and the thirsty. It seeps into pigment as watercolor, powers peroxide in a salon’s bright afternoon, glimmers in an aquarium where fish rehearse the art of breathing.

It muddies, too: the pita, a shallow pool turned spa for Pedring’s kabaw, cooling its tired limbs after a day of plowing. It glistens as singot, the honest sheen of work, a home-made haplas for joints that have earned their ache. It softens the cud of mastication, that slow labor of the mouth turning dryness into life again. It spirals in laundry suds, hums through the sewers, joins the quiet flush that carries away what must be forgotten. Even the dirtied waters of our living—still they flow, still they cleanse, proving that motion is its own kind of purity.

Balde full of it beside the CR, waiting for morning.And that same word—balde—hides another: Binalde nga luha. The prayer book calls it valley of tears. Perhaps that’s where all luha return—to the great basin of remembered grief.

Plants need it; throats are dry without it. Fish breathe in it; forests stay green because of it. Icebergs are born from it, and from the same womb comes the dugá, sap of plants bleeding their quiet sorrow.

When water grows restless, it becomes baha, taob, bawod, lunop hilabihan. Then there are the endless motions of dagat, salog, and suba—all moving, all reclaiming what was once their own. When it calms, it turns to crystals of jamog, morning dew that kisses banana leaves before the sun burns them away.

Then there’s ice water—a tiny glass joy on a hot afternoon, cooling the tongue, waking the soul. The same water, when heated in Keurig, becomes init nga kape—the dark companion of farmers, teachers, fishermen—water that burns, revives, awakens.

Look closely and everything breathes in it. Fishponds in Hilongos shimmer with it; rice paddies mirror the sky because of it. Our bathtub hums with steam from it; the garden paths glisten with its traces. Padre's holy chalice waits for it. The lungs hold it—in tiny specks of vapor called ginhawa.

Despite the solidness of bodies, we are still seventy percent water—restless oceans locked in skin, moving tides disguised as men. We walk the earth carrying rivers beneath our ribs, our pulse the echo of rain’s first rhythm. Aqua finita, but infinite in form—the water that once passed through clouds, through mud, through tears, now passes through us.

And maybe that’s the sacred secret: that life itself is a water ritual. From the rain that falls, to the sweat that drips, to the tear that drops, to the breath that stays—we are all, in truth, just trying not to dry up.