MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
REMEMBER THIS<\/p>\n
During the 1980s, I traveled to the Philippines a dozen\u00a0times to research the famous and infamous Faith Healers. They were extremely\u00a0controversial. Some people swore they were fake, that they were money grabbers\u00a0and they never healed anyone. Others saw them as powerful, real and effective. But\u00a0either way, that isn’t the point of this blog. It\u2019s about the importance and value\u00a0of finding a way to recall the details in our lives.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a writer so I like to jot things down. I explored\u00a0healing methods across a great deal of the Philippine Islands during that ten\u00a0year period from Manila to Makati, from Cebu to Quezon City, from the inner\u00a0province of Pangasinan to Mt. Banahaw to the mountainous pine forests of Baguio.\u00a0Wherever I was, I wrote in a journal every night, not as a writing exercise but\u00a0to create a road map, a memory aid, an account of where I went, how each healer\u00a0worked and the particular strengths and weaknesses they demonstrated.<\/p>\n
An example: Manila. Alex Orbito. Performs hundreds of healings
each Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, often confronted with witchcraft\u00a0and blockages. Outdoor chapel with wooden benches. Glass walls in healing room.\u00a0Hour long prayers before every session.<\/p>\n
Those were the kinds of things I wrote. I didn’t jot down my\u00a0feelings, my doubts or beliefs. No philosophical musings. It wasn\u2019t about
writing well or turning phrases. It was about researching a mystery and no\u00a0matter what I would ultimately decide about it, I wanted a clear memory of what\u00a0I did, where I went and what happened while I was there. \u00a0<\/p>\n
When I returned home after my third trip, I had seen so much\u00a0that few westerners had privy to, I had so many questions and other worldly experiences,\u00a0I decided to write a book. Not to prove anything to anyone. Not to exert my\u00a0opinion as if I knew the answers. Some things remain a mystery, no matter how\u00a0dogged the researcher. But with the aid of my journals, I recalled the details and\u00a0made the prose come alive, describing things that would transport people to the\u00a0places I went, both mentally and spiritually.<\/p>\n
As I scanned my journals, each note I had made for myself,
each location, name and event, took me back to the exact moment it had happened.\u00a0The smell of sugar cane burning in the fields on the way from the airport to my\u00a0hotel. An \u201cEsperitista\u201d temple with an organ made exclusively from bamboo. A\u00a0dinner in the open market that offered Fish Lip Soup. (Yes, there were fish\u00a0lips floating in the broth.) Watching a woman speak in tongues and collapse into\u00a0the arms of her fellow worshippers.<\/p>\n
They say that the devil is in the details. I think the truth\u00a0is in there, too. No matter what we do, no matter how we choose to interpret it,
recalling details is a gift, not only to us, but to other people so they can\u00a0understand where we\u2019ve been and what we\u2019ve done. We gradually lose touch with particular\u00a0parts of events as time passes and jotting notes about them in present time allows\u00a0us to recall smells, textures and images that we might otherwise never bring
back into our consciousness.<\/p>\n
You don’t have to be writing a book or painting a picture to\u00a0value the details of an experience. A friend of mine lost his young son to an
untimely death and I suggested that when he was ready, I\u2019d be glad to write\u00a0down memories for him that he didn’t want to forget: how his son smiled, his\u00a0favorite shirt, movies that he loved. My friend took me up on it. For him, it\u00a0was a way to keep his lost loved one in his heart and his memory, a way to\u00a0breathe life into that which was no longer there physically.<\/p>\n
These days, people like to take pictures of things, what\u00a0they eat, what they wear, who they\u2019re with. That\u2019s a good memory jogger but when\u00a0I photograph something, I\u2019m not completely present for it and the photo often\u00a0gets lost in the myriad of pics I have on my phone. There is something about having\u00a0an experience and writing it down with my own hands that sets it apart. It creates\u00a0a different kind of imprint and rhythm, a visual trigger that wakes up my\u00a0senses and offers me a way in. I keep up with the times. I write notes on my
iPhone and I take pictures. But I\u2019m also old school. I always have a pen and\u00a0pad in my reach, and while a photo says a thousand words, for me, a note on a\u00a0piece of paper imparts a thousand feelings.<\/p>\n
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MY WEEKLY BLOG REMEMBER THIS During the 1980s, I traveled to the Philippines a dozen\u00a0times to research the famous and infamous Faith Healers. They were extremely\u00a0controversial. Some people swore they were fake, that they were money grabbers\u00a0and they never healed anyone. Others saw them as powerful, real and effective. But\u00a0either way, that isn’t the point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}