Wandering Stardust A speck of stardust wanting to see the rest of the world.

There are many days in my life I’d never forget; one of them was when I saw the aftermath of a violent natural disaster.

I went to Mt. Pinatubo last July 2013, and the three-hour trek had been no simple thing. First, to get to the base of the mountain, we had to ride a 4x4 truck on an extremely rocky terrain, experiencing the thrills of having your ride tilt a little too much to the side or to the front. The ground, made bumpy by debris from the 1991 eruption, was littered with rocks bigger than the wheels of our vehicle–there were even quite a number of them as big as the 4x4 itself. When it was over, I felt as if some of my organs have switched places inside my body.

Before I set out for this journey, I made the mistake of thinking that there would be a beaten path to the crater. It was that misjudgement that led me to believe it was alright to wear strappy sandals for the hike. Three hours, six blisters, and a severely eroded will-power later, I learned the hard way that the mountain was no place for first-time folks who didn’t come prepared. I thought I knew what it meant to be painfully exhausted until the day I climbed up a steep mountain in the wrong footwear.

I eventually reached the summit, taking in the sight of the stunning but dangerous lake that formed in the mountain’s crater. I put my backpack down slowly as if I were dreaming, convincing myself that it was real–that instead of rocks, soil, and magma, there was water there clear as day now. I realized that I couldn’t look away. My immediate thought was that the Mt. Pinatubo caldera looked like something pulled out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I thought I knew what it was to have your breath taken away until I laid eyes on the lake’s sapphire water glinting like a gem under the sun.

Tired, I sat down on a bench built on a cliff that overlooked the lake. There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t hurt, but taking in the beauty of my surrounding worked like an analgesic. The wind was perfectly cool; the grass green and alive under my feet; the trees, though silent in their stance, seemed to beckon visitors to seek their shade. The waves that rippled the lake’s surface finally lulled me into a tranquil rest. I closed my eyes while the wind tousled my hair. I thought I knew what it meant to be at peace until the day nature quieted me down.

It’s amazing to realize how much there’s still to learn out there. We always think we know enough until the day we realize that we don’t.