The Gypsy Soul by Casiano Mayor

The essays in this book are mostly about the political and social malaise in the Philippines, the author’s home country, and the plight of the migrant Filipinos who are forced to look for greener pastures in foreign lands due to the tight economic situation in the home front.

The author, who works as an editor with the Saudi Gazette, also included in this book some personal experiences – both secular and spiritual – in his search for meaning in life that he hopes “will find echoes in the hearts of other people.”

The author throws in universal themes in most of his essays that even readers from other races and cultures could easily empathize with his writings.

Many of the 33 essays in this book, largely written in literary prose, are haunting, starting with his first essay, ”Remembering Ginablan,” a recollection of his adolescence in a small farming village in Romblon where he grew up.

Remembering, he says, was “like walking into a time machine where I found myself retracing faded footprints of a lost past,” The essay recalls a rustic life In a small village where the girls smoke cigarettes “with the lighted tip in their mouth,” the “changing hues of crimson sunsets” that he loved to watch each time he went fishing with a cousin and “a dusty road that cuts across rice fields crawling up to the foot of the hills.”

A left-of-center activist during his college days, the author did not hide his deep-seated disdain for the Filipino politicians whom he blames for the tight economic situation in his country that forced millions of Filipinos to look for greener pastures in foreign lands.

He bewails that the “thievery” of politicians in the home front and their endless wrangling to stay in power have given majority of the Filipinos a sense of hopelessness to drive thousands of them to leave the country every day.

“It is sad that our economy is in bad shape but I think it’s not the primary reason that gives us a sense of hopelessness. It is our politicians’ endless and senseless bickering because we know that they are not clawing each other for our sake … but to score political points for the next balloting,” he writes in his essay, “The Tragedy that Befalls Us.”

“The tragedy that befalls our country is that our politicians, who are supposed to lead us in solving our problems, have become our biggest problem.”

He also takes a dig at the government for its empty platitude for the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as modern-day heroes because their remittances have been propping up the ailing Philippine economy.

“I’m an OFW but I’m not a hero. I did not come here out of my sense of patriotism, but as a husband and a father who wants to see a new dawn for my family, no matter if that dawn unfolds in another country,” he riles in his essay “Strangers in Our Own Country.”

“I have come to terms with reality. Like millions of other Filipinos who sought greener pastures in foreign lands, I have hitched the family wagon to a caravan of Filipino migrant workers who have become strangers in our own country.”

Bits and pieces in the book open small windows to his past when he “strayed to atheism” after enrolling in anthropology that taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, but later returned to the Faith – after he felt a lingering “sense of emptiness” deep within him.

His spiritual journey gave him the material to write the main essay, “The Gypsy Soul,” which he first wrote for the defunct newspaper Today in Manila where he used to work as subeditor before going to Saudi Arabia.

“In my wanderings since I left Romblon, I have come to believe that man has a soul longing for home … Our soul keeps on driving us in search for meaning in our lives, no matter if we live on a craggy hill in some remote villages or in the jungles of sky crappers in mega cities, probably to remind us that this world is not our home,” he writes.

He followed it up in his essay, “Pilgrims to the Life Beyond.”

“There is an empty space in our being that we may never understand, much less manage, if we do not pause for a while to take a closer look at life until we realize that we are not pursuing life itself but its palavers, until we realize that we are not lost gypsies but homing pilgrims whose dreams ought to be lofty enough to rise beyond our graves.”

Though deeply a man of piety, he has a strong fascination with science which enabled him to write his easy “Love in the Age of Neuroscience” wherein he pokes fun at the findings of neuroscience that emotion is not a feeling oozing from the heart but neural firings in the brain. He banters, “In the age of neuroscience, can we still say, I love you from the bottom of my heart?”

In the second foreword to the book, the author professes to be a Christian who believes that “science is not an enemy of religion but a window to take a peek at the marvels of God’s infinite wisdom.”