Threads
It is said that life is like a tapestry. Day after day, you only see the back part, with those multicolored loose ends of strings that don’t really make sense. Once in a while, when you look back in time, you get to see the front of the piece. Those interweaving threads form a pattern after all.
Sometimes you are given a glimpse of what the tapestry could be. Your choices and your work can weave together not only a pattern but also an artwork. That part of the tapestry is not yet woven, but voices guide you on which strings to thread. You just need to listen and to trust.
In ancient mythology, this is a visitation by a muse. Modern guides for creative work still use the same imagery. They treat inspirations as beings from beyond this world whose mission in life is to be made manifest in our world. For this to happen, they need to partner with someone who lives within space and time. They search the world for the right partner. When they find the one, they present themselves. Sometimes this is a thunderous apparition. Sometimes they sprinkle our days with quiet serendipities.
~ ~ ~
Cacao has given me my clearest experience of that voice of inspiration. It was in the summer before the pandemic. I was awakened around 4:00 am, with my heart racing. I saw the entire thing. The brand—"Flowstate"—presented itself, and visions of some sort of business flowed from there. I was going to bring drinking chocolate to the modern urban aesthete.
I worked on that business with Peter. He and I pitched to coffee shops, organized chocolate tastings, and sold bottled chocolate directly to consumers. Product development was a lot of fun. (It was essentially making and drinking a lot of chocolate.) Sales, marketing, and production were a lot of work.
I needed a "technical cofounder," as they say in the startup world, because I knew my palate was terrible. I tell people that I'm the happy black sheep in a family obsessed with food: I neither cook nor bake, but I get to enjoy the delicious creations of our siblings, Mama, and the rest of our family. The superstar in the family is not our doctor cousin but his brother who trained in a Michelin-star restaurant in New York.
The biggest psychological obstacle in that entire endeavor was not anxiety from probable failure, constant rejection, or impostor syndrome. It was cringe. There was this little annoying voice in my head telling me, "Who do you think you are, creating this food business?" The cringe was the worst when I would lead chocolate-tasting events. It turns out the people most interested in chocolate are the titas of Cebu. There I was, a man brought up in the venerable traditions of Filipino machismo, entertaining ladies with fancy descriptions of flavors and stories of chocolate's history weaved with my personal journey. Fidelity to the muse and the maniacal focus on victory I got from the startup years allowed me to power through the cringe.
Peter is also a product of Filipino machismo. After all, we went to the same all-boys school. When I look back, those years remind me of Lord of the Flies, with lots of basketball, lifelong friendships, and brutal dominance hierarchies. Kids can be like animals, and some of those who did not fit any of the gangs graduated with severely damaged selves. A few lives unraveled after high school. But we loved our time there, and it seems Peter did as well. We belonged to solid barkadas who knew of our darkest secrets. These were revealed throughout the years in countless tagay sessions. This ritual was the sacred space anointed by alcohol where we were allowed to be vulnerable.
Since Peter is seven years younger than us, our tagay sessions never intersected. At home, we are manoy, the eldest; and he is Pepo, the fourth of five. We had no ritual to help us break character.
Like liquor, cacao contains a psychoactive molecule called theobromine. One cacao tita said that this substance "opens up the heart." Cringe, but perhaps there is some truth to this.
Peter and I were in the pick-up, coming from a chocolate event. Peter drove, and I rode shotgun. The black truck has a masculine exterior, something an action star would use, but is cool and cozy inside, as if it were designed for that moment. Traffic in A. S. Fortuna was bad as usual, but we were comfortably walled off from the noise and dust outside, listening to reggae from the eighties.
Our conversation led to psychedelics. Those who promote this class of drugs liken them to spreading fresh snow over your mind's deep neural furrows so that you can be free to start new patterns of thought. As we inched through the traffic, Peter told me about unearthing and healing old wounds in his mind with the help of psilocybin mushrooms.
When Papa died, Pepo was only four years old. And he has the artist's gift of internal sensitivity. We each build a model of the world using our experiences. Pepo's little model came crashing down with Papa's death. As he rebuilt his inner world, the threat of another earthquake always loomed in the background.
Peter had to go back to that boy and give him the solid ground he needed. He relayed how our ancestors appeared to him, reassuring him that they are always around. Then Jesus himself appeared, telling Peter that his suffering and death are sufficient. Peter rationalized this imagery as a result of our Catholic upbringing. In any case, he said the trip was healing.
A few months after that conversation, the entire world's model of itself came crashing down. We had to shut down our nascent business. The pandemic had begun.
~ ~ ~
In 1987, a social psychologist by the name of Daniel Wegner conducted an experiment wherein he asked participants to not think of a white bear. The results became known as the "white bear problem" in the world of psychology. The more you try to not think of a white bear, the more difficult it is to do so.
My white bear was this thought: I will die the same age Papa died.
It is completely irrational, but like in the white bear experiment, the thought gained greater momentum the more I fought it. By the time I was a few years away from that age, it already felt like a certainty.
I treated this as a gift instead of a curse. Stoics make use of skulls and other images of death as their memento mori. They have to engineer what we naturally have. It also helped that the pandemic started a year before we reached Papa's eternal age. In your future, a virus from China will spread all over the world and kill millions. You will lose some friends and relatives, but thankfully none in our immediate family. It will feel like the world is about to end. And you will be surprised to realize that the chaos of end times is your natural habitat.
Our gift was the opposite of Peter's. Perhaps the bad palate is just an extension of a general lack of flavor notes in our emotions. High school bros call out one another’s shadow in the most direct and merciless way possible. They call you manhid, the creature devoid of emotion. You think you know why, but you really don't. You have experienced only one inner life. It will take a lot of literature and psychology for you to view the world through other people's interiorities. Their flavor wheels have more notes.
You will hone this gift. You will learn to focus your energies on doing instead of feeling. You will rely on reason and grow more suspicious of emotion. You are not alone. The men who fight our wars, vie for power, and take charge of the dirty work that keeps societies chugging forward have made the same tradeoff.
People instinctively recognize this. You will be elected president in your senior class and in your college course. You will lead a team in corporate Makati. You will build your own business. People follow you because you do not bend. You sometimes break, but only a trusted few see it happen, and you quickly rebuild yourself.
You are not yet this man. You cannot yet envision a future, and then orchestrate labor, capital, and technology to turn that vision into reality. But you will learn. By the time of the pandemic, you will be ready. You will lead a global volunteer group of scientists and students to contribute to the genetic sequencing of the virus behind the pandemic. You will write your first book. For your final act, you will follow the cacao muse all the way to Mexico; and while there, you will say goodbye to Mama, before you die or the world ends.
~ ~ ~
The airports in Manila and Narita are shells of their old selves. The crowds are gone, the lounges are quiet, and most of the shops are closed. People wear hospital masks and avoid one another. As you disembark at Narita for your layover, you pass through long queues of Japanese that spill all throughout those carpeted halls with walkalators and glass walls. They are sitting with their documents, preparing for what must be a kaizen-optimized process to ensure the foreign plague is kept out of Japan. It is like entering a twilight zone between a future tech dystopia and the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate of the seventeenth century.
You arrive at Mexico City's airport. In contrast to the Japanese, the Mexicans have a kind of cavalier disinterest in the virus. You only need to fill out an online form. You line up for immigration. People wear masks, but you crowd together as if the pandemic were just a conspiracy theory. The energy of the ungovernable mass that feels too big for the space it occupies reminds you of prepandemic Manila.
As you await Mama's arrival, you can't help but appreciate the elegance of this move. When the pandemic killed Flowstate before it even made a profit, you had to reexamine the message of the muse. Perhaps you misunderstood her. Your hammer is entrepreneurship, and everything, including Flowstate, looked like a nail to you. Releasing the early prototype of your first book gave you another way of manifesting inspiration. Perhaps she wanted to be expressed in this world through a book, not a business.
You recall the serendipities that led to Flowstate. Months before that 4:00 am revelation, you spent a few weeks in La Castellana, a rural town in Negros island. It so happened that there was an experimental cacao farm nearby, so you and a couple of your buddies paid it a visit.
Most of the cacaos in the huge plantations of Davao are from varieties bred for size in the cacao labs of companies like Mars, with names like UF18, BR25, and W10. You grew up drinking older varieties. These were descendants of the cacao brought by missionaries from Nueva España, Mexico's previous incarnation, prior to the Age of Nations. By the time of our grandparents, Filipino families were growing them in their backyards for generations.
Christopher Fadriga, the owner of the farm you visited, wanted to preserve these cacao varieties. They are smaller than the agribusiness clones; they were bred by ancient Mesoamericans for flavor instead of size. Chris has been collecting cacao scions (living twigs that can bear fruit after being grafted to cacao trees) from across the country, sometimes right before the trees were bulldozed to make way for condominiums.
After giving you and our friends a tour of his farm, he let you taste the first batch of chocolate bars made from his first harvest.
That bar was a wild kaleidoscope of flavors compared to commercial chocolate. Those flavors warped the tapestry, and brought you face-to-face with your ten-year-old self, who was one lucky boy, having had a yearly supply of drinking chocolate made from beans from Lola Bess’s backyard.
You had to hold back the tears as you drove back to La Castellana with your buddies. Weeping because of chocolate is not allowed in the rules of Filipino machismo.
The cacao muse was calling you to follow her all the way to her origins. You imagined interviewing Mexicans who also heard her voice and said yes to her inspiration. You would then weave their stories with the story of cacao and your own journey into a book that you planned to entitle Flowstate Chocolate: The Story of Cacao Connecting the Philippines and Mexico.
Entrepreneurship has trained you to think probabilistically. Moves must work whichever way the dice fall. Since San Francisco is just a few hours away from Mexico City by plane, flying Mama in made a lot of sense. If your irrational expectation of impending death is correct, or if the world ends, you will have said your goodbyes. If you and the world live, you will have woven a pattern in real life while you gather threads for the book you are envisioning. It's a project management masterstroke.
Or so you think.
~ ~ ~
Your first stop is La Rifa Chocolatería. The shop occupies a building that must be at least a century old, nestled at a tree-lined corner lot in Colonia Juarez. This neighborhood was established in the late 1800s' and thrived as an upscale residential area. This might be what Malate would have looked like if the Americans did not carpet bomb Manila to the ground during the war with the Japanese.
Inside the shop, you smell the familiar aroma of chocolate. It turns out they also produce chocolate bars; and farther inside, you see personnel with hairnets and black overalls, as well as machines for roasting and grinding cacao beans. On their shelves, you find chocolate bars made with beans originating from all over Mexico. Their menu lists cacao drinks that cover the permutations of three levels of bitterness, type of processing (washed or fermented), and the base liquid (water or milk). You ask the friendly lady at the counter if Fausto, one of the owners, is around. She says not yet. You order the drink with fermented cacao, milk, and no sugar. Mama orders the most traditional variant: washed cacao with milk and sugar.
You take your chocolate drinks at one of the tables outside. It is early December, and the weather is cool. You need to wear winter clothing at night, but the temperature is perfect this sunny morning. This liminal time between meetings allows you to relax. You notice the midmorning sunlight dancing with the shadows from the canopy above you. You notice that Mama also looks contented. She still wears her hair short, but now it is mostly silver. She has taken good care of her health and looks quite fit for a seventy-year-old.
You recall that time you were also alone with Mama at the airport in Manila a decade or so ago. You've left home and worked in Manila for a number of years by then. She was on her layover on the way to the United States. That was the big move. She finally retired from the business she started after Papa died. You recall her origin story. She had been decorating cakes for friends and family as a hobby for years prior to Papa's death. When she was widowed with five kids, she had to turn that hobby into a business. Your uncles helped finance and operate it.
You've had a taste of what it is like to will a business into existence. That has been the hardest thing you have ever done. It brought you to your knees a few times. Imagine doing that while raising five kids.
You expected to not see Mama for years after that short layover, so you prepared a music video. It showed our family pictures throughout the years with "Seasons of Love" as the background music. You've sacrificed many times at the altar of cringe for entrepreneurship, so of course you'd take this hit for Mama.
What's even more cringe is that you were expecting some sort of dramatic moment as the two of you watched the video. Perhaps you'd cry together or something. Yet Mama just sat there expressionless. You eventually realized that her retirement was not a victory exit. It was a merciful end to a decades-long burden. Life broke her. While you were in college, she was already diagnosed with depression. The world during that time didn't yet have the education on mental health brought about by the pandemic. She made sure you and your siblings wouldn't experience any stigma by casually telling you about her diagnosis and her Prozac prescription. She joked about how fashionable women in the United States call this zacking.
It pains you to look back at those years. You were then a clueless teenager without the backbone and the abilities to take on the world. And you were too absorbed in your little crises to see how much Mama suffered. Perhaps to console yourself as you sip your cacao drink, you imagine what your battled-hardened self would have done to spare Mama all those difficult years.
That peaceful moment was exceptional. There's always a baseline of anxiety as you execute projects. It helps you remain vigilant to project risks. You did not expect how much higher that anxiety is when you're planning mitigation and contingencies involving your mother. What if she contracts the virus while here? What if she falls and injures herself? Is this entire trip in the middle of the pandemic imprudent? At some point, you think, This trip will be enjoyable only in hindsight. You are not wrong.
~ ~ ~
That trip is partly due to a statistic you heard in a podcast: you will have spent 93 percent of your time with your parents by the time you graduate. This number is based on Americans, who normally move out of their homes when they go to college or start working. The number also applies to you since you will move to Manila right after graduating from college.
This Mexico trip is like a last-ditch attempt to improve that statistic. Since this might be the last time you get to talk to her before you die or the world ends, you ask her all the questions you have been meaning to ask her for years.
You ask one of those questions during dinner at a Peruvian restaurant in the old part of the city. Mama had to sell some land that Papa inherited to pay off some debts incurred by her business. That was a long time ago, so you just want to confirm the details. You notice how she casts her gaze downward. She replies, “Naa pa may nahabilin.” Why did she reply by reassuring you that there is still land left? Then you realize that, of course, normal people like your mother would assume that you are concerned about your own inheritance.
You do not explain to her that you just wanted data for your theory. In your city, young entrepreneurs tend to be misled by the sexy businesses operated by the cool kids. They don't realize that many of these are secretly unprofitable. They function as status symbols or creative outlets and are subsidized behind the scenes by older, extremely profitable, and extremely unsexy businesses.
You visualize the lifetime financial statements of Mama's business. You trace the flow of debts and repayments, and you conclude that your uncle's clinic and your lolo's piggery provided the subsidies. You owe your education, food, shelter, clothing, and the occasional lechon to them more than you previously assumed.
You hear a little voice in your head. You have muffled this voice throughout your life, but since you recently got some professional chocolate-tasting training, you've improved your interoception. It turns out that gaining the mindfulness to notice flavor notes also helps in being more sensitive to your emotions. Let’s hear him out. He’s already panicking. Ungag him.
What the fuck are you doing? You're not supposed to use your weapons on your own tribe and especially not on your mother! Your classmates were right. Manhid ka. Giatay ka. Wa kay batasan. You dork. You fuck face. This pursuit of truth at all costs is already pathologic-
Whoa, my man, chill lang. I’ve got this.
~ ~ ~
Remember when Lolo Cesar died? Papa moved to his place at the head of the rectangular table. Lola Bess continued to sit to the right of that chair, and Mama moved to its left. The two mothers of the house face-to-face with each other. When Papa died, you were asked to sit in that chair, since you are the eldest and male. Imagine that: an oblivious eleven-year-old as the titular head of the household.
Mama was the one making the money and running the household, but Lola owned the house. It was a stalemate, and you were the solution. They could have just replaced the table with a round one, but that would have only ironed out one visible expression of the underlying tension.
Since you were raised by women, you think that the Philippines is a matriarchal society. This is probably true, especially relative to the West and the Islamic world. Yet as your meteoric rise in dining table politics shows, being a man comes with privileges. Let me tell you why society treats some of its boys like little chiefs.
In the early twentieth century, the Pacific islands were an anthropologist's dream. There were still some societies yet untouched by the West. Since these societies were isolated by vast seas, they were like little Petri dishes of culture that allowed comparative ethnographic studies.
These anthropologists observed a common archetype among the leaders across these societies. Since these anthropologists were all from the West, they compared these chieftains to the kings of Europe. These chieftains tended to be male, like European monarchs. However, unlike in the medieval West, succession was more of a competition than an inheritance. You need to have the capability to protect the tribe from its enemies, enrich it through slave raids and tribute collection, and preserve its peace by laying down the law.
Anthropologists called this archetype the Big Man. It is no coincidence that Cebuanos today call the powerful by its literal translation, dagkong tao. Their title, datu, is now an adjective for the wealthy. Maynglaki is what we call those with the potential to be Big Men, and it literally means "man of ability." A few blocks away from our childhood home is a statue of Humabon, the first Big Man of Cebu to appear in recorded history. In 1521, he welcomed Ferdinand Magellan and his crew to Cebu. Humabon's remembrance rode on that voyage's renown: it was the first circumnavigation of the world. Magellan's chronicler records how leaders like Humabon speak several languages and how he won Magellan's friendship and patronage. History lessons in school tend to skip the rest of his story. Humabon outplayed Magellan, leading to the conquistador's death in the Battle of Mactan. Afterward, two of Magellan's commanders and twenty-four of his crew members, still clueless about Humabon's game, accepted his invitation to a farewell dinner. They were massacred.
This archetype is not unique to the Pacific islands. Iron Age kings of Europe and Africa also gained and wielded power through a mix of charisma, capability, and ruthlessness. Proponents of evolutionary psychology trace its source further back in time. They theorize that dominating and violent males exist despite the threat they pose because they are also the ones who protect and expand the tribe.
I haven't seen studies of how societies produce these Big Men. Are they born, or are they made? Your guess is probably better than those academics from the West. After all, people around you are trying—and they will fail—to make you a Big Man.
~ ~ ~
The cacao muse leads you and Mama to Oaxaca, which is an hour-long plane ride away from Mexico City and which you discover is pronounced as gwahaka, with an almost silent but throaty g. If Mexico City is the country’s equivalent to Metro Manila, Oaxaca is like Vigan, but instead of one street of colonial-era houses, it is one entire fiesta-colored town. The people of Oaxaca are obsessed with food and flavor, so the two of you feel right at home. You interview a couple of craft chocolate makers and a social entrepreneur working with cacao farmers.
In one of your lunch conversations, you released another long-pent-up question. Did she deliberately train you to make entrepreneurial success your north star? You are thankful for this irrational obsession, as it has allowed you to easily let go of your career in corporate Makati and sustain you through the roughest days of the business. Yet you are also curious about where this desire that has guided many of your major life choices came from.
She says no, and gives you a confused look that seems to say, "What in the heavens are you talking about?"
How can that be? You distinctly remember the way she always proudly told you how she never needed to be employed because she started her first business right after college. You also recall the regret in her voice when she would talk about how her dad never achieved breakthrough entrepreneurial success and how the businesses in Papa's family had no continuity across generations. You remember little you vowing to himself not to make the same mistakes.
Let me give you an answer. Both you and Mama were formed by forces larger than any one person. When Cebu was opened to global trade, the archetypal Big Man transformed from Humabon, the tribute-collecting politician, to the entrepreneurial founders of the city's grand old families. The construction of that ladder of success in your head was never explicit. It was built through the subtext of daily conversations. If you can replay those in your head, you will hear an unmistakable reverence for the city's business leaders and a disdain for those who make money through power games.
You have the potential to be a Big Man, kid. You have the charisma of a refrigerator, but you can up for it with intense work. You excelled and will continue to excel in school. Leadership positions will be handed to you, and you will eventually learn how to manage teams and projects. That voice we heard earlier paralyzes many men and women and keeps them within the safe road of convention. You were probably born slightly deaf to it, perhaps because of mild autism, and you learned to muffle it as you grew older. Others are also chained down by self-doubt. You, in contrast, always felt that everyone was behind you. You are their boy, their manok, their bet.
Anyhow, I'm sorry to tell you that I won't fulfill that potential.
~ ~ ~
One theory about psychedelics is that they simply induce the physiology that naturally happens when you change your mind, especially when you change your mind on deeply held beliefs. Psychedelic trips can feel like an epiphany because they involve the same mechanisms in the brain.
That thing that happened to you earlier today was probably psychedelic, perhaps triggered by sleep deprivation and puberty. I've heard some descriptions of trips that resemble your experience. As you walked across the basketball courts in our high school's open quadrangle, you noticed how vivid the colors of the acacia leaves and the sky were, as if a filter were removed from your eyes. The sun's rays seemed to sparkle. For the first time in your life, you have full certainty that there is no God, and this is all there is. You feel a deep sense of relief and peace.
Soon enough, you will fall back into your usual wobbly and cynical agnosticism. You will enter the darkest days of your life. Hold on. In a few years, Lolo Ted will invite you to a volunteer camp in Bukidnon, where you will spend weeks working in service of the local community and enjoying the camaraderie of a tribe with a common mission. There will be no psychedelic imagery, but your mind will change radically. You will return to the faith of your childhood, the faith of Mama and Papa, and the faith of your ancestors since the baptism of Big Man Humabon and eight hundred of his subjects five hundred years ago. In the years after that, you will conquer your inner demons one by one, and you will eventually become more man and less animal.
Puberty, travel, and flavor are not the only natural psychedelics. I'm able to talk to you and bring you decades in the future to experience Mexico with Mama and me through the psychoactive powers of the written word and the close encounters with death that was the pandemic and the blossoming of the seed planted by Papa's passing.
I brought you with me to share with you the revelation from that trip: our desires are not our own. The specters of the Big Man, of free enterprise, and of Filipino machismo have revealed themselves and their puppet strings. We thank them for the strength and the playbooks they gave us as we figured out how to operate in this world, but we are now free of them.
Without our return to the faith, that freedom would have unmoored us from common sensibility, given our gift. That freedom could have destroyed us and hurt those around us.
This will sound cringe to you, but you will eventually understand. God is calling us to do work in parts of this tapestry far beyond where the old specters have led us and to create patterns no muse can imagine.
Some day, the embrace of our sister death will be for real, and we can finally see the entire tapestry. We will see the work of art not only from the threads of our work and our lives but also from those of Papa, Mama, and all the lives we intertwined with. We will also see the rich patterns invisible to us in this world. We will see the beauty of Papa's life before we were born, his romance with Mama, and his own journey back to the faith. We will also see the meaning and even the beauty of that part where the threads of his life fade from the tapestry.
Thanks to John Bengan, Gemma Lucero, and Sierra Lexis.