We haven’t lost our connection with nature, we have just lost sight of it.
The first time I went to South and North Upi was in 2023. At the time, I worked at the Ministry of Health where my job involved talking to municipal mayors, provincial health officers, and municipal doctors across the mainland provinces to get their support for our program.
I remember being in awe of Upi’s landscape on our way there. The breeze moved through the mountains and the air was cool even in the afternoon. It’s so different from Cotabato City.
But what stayed with me was the relationship the people have with their land.
I went to the comfort room when a rural health nurse asked me if the mayor had arrived. I told her he probably wouldn’t come himself but he would send his MPDC.
Then I asked her what the thing written on the wall in their dialect meant. She told me it’s about people who still use herbs and natural remedies to heal themselves.
My first thought wasn’t, How do people survive being so far from hospitals?
It was, How much knowledge do people develop when they have to live closely with the world around them?
Although I was a Health Promotion Officer at that time and our program was working on how to make healthcare accessible to the residents, I was still amazed by how they live in sync with nature.
I’m sure they have a very unique way of life and I wish one day I would get an opportunity to return there simply to listen to their stories.
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Life came full circle because two years later, I really did return to Upi.
I was no longer working at the Ministry of Health. I was taking writing work as a consultant whenever opportunities came. So this time, I returned as a writer.
When I interview people, I usually listen without interrupting until they arrive at what they are comfortable sharing.
I think it’s also a part of the integrity and ethics of the writer not to put words in their mouth, because it’s important to me to respect their free will.
So when I interviewed people from South and North Upi, I also learned about how they understood their community, their history, and their way of life.
And they also spoke about diwata, beings and spirits that belong to an older way of understanding the world.
This concept struck a chord with me because it’s also a reminder of how close we were to our Indigenous brothers.
It was the popular story of Mamalu and Tabunaway. They are two brothers who are said to have taken different paths when Islam came to Mindanao. Tabunaway embraced Islam, while Mamalu chose to preserve his Indigenous beliefs and went uphill with his people. Despite their different choices, the two brothers promised each other to send help whenever one needed it.
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This concept is very familiar to me because my undergraduate thesis was also about the pre-Islamic beliefs of Maguindanaon and the place of the crocodile in Maguindanaon cosmology.
Ever since I wrote that paper, I have always found clues of how connected we, humans, are to nature.
And what the mountains are to the Teduray, the rivers once were to us, the Maguindanaon.
Protecting nature was once sacred to us, and not merely because of modern ideas of environmental protection and disaster prevention.
I don’t mean to devalue the coming of the Islamic faith or romanticize what came before it. The point here is how your belief system can shape how you experience the world around you.
Because you see versions of this idea everywhere, even in modern stories like Moana, where humans coexist with nature and its elements, both unseen and seen, rather than seeing ourselves above it.
You can still feel we’re at one with nature actually. Perhaps that’s why, despite all our technological advances, we still find ourselves drawn to mountains, rivers, forests, and the sea when we need to rest.
Maybe our minds have forgotten something our bodies and nature still remember each other.
