Back in Dumaguete
My first time in Dumaguete since early 2020 way, way back in when it was a shiny new year filled with the promise of work, travel, and diving. It’s my first legit travel post-COVID.
It’s a bittersweet return back to the province. I’m walking a lot, basking in Dumaguete’s provincialness, and I’m thinking about hard things that need doing.
The Life We Have Chosen
I’m here to announce the end of a program. This is the harsh side of offshore outsourcing. Programs end. Jobs end. Unless you can garner some fresh work in a hurry.
I give myself the lecture I learned at the knee of a former boss, the this-is-the-life-we-chose bloviation quoting Hymen Roth in The Godfather Part II. This version is platitudinous self-talk of taking the good with the bad, bad with the good. More often, it’s the lecture you give someone when they complain or push back on difficult or harsh directives.
Bliss & the Offshore Outsourcer
“Offshore outsourcer” can apply to the person who outsources and the entity doing the work. Maybe we need more precision: outsourcer/outsourcee. Even so…
I’m walking and thinking about how great it is to see most of our team, albeit under disappointing circumstances. I’m walking and thinking about Joseph Campbell, who had a lot to say about elemental human inclinations. His book, The Power of Myth, is a wide-ranging, endlessly entertaining, and strange book. It’s stranger because it’s a transcription of television interviews with Bill Moyers.
Anyway, I’m thinking about the chapter called Sacrifice and Bliss. If you subtract the deeper parts of this chapter, it’s an ur-text for the influencer tribe and the self-help-book cabal.
Bliss is a pretty explicit concept, Campbell tells you to find it and follow it. He says it in his elegant manner, “Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.” Somehow he links bliss to sacred sites, the power of place, what Campbell calls the “sanctification of the landscape” in mythology. Of course, the place can be conceptual, anything that evokes a sacred or the generative.
This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
Walking
Maybe in a holistic sense, Dumaguete is my place of creative incubation.
Being in Dumaguete feels correct. Wet market for fish. Wednesday market for fruit and vegetables. Fresh air. Languid, luminous sunrises and sunsets. Strangers’ greetings.
