Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

IN BETWEEN is the question I am confronted with today. What happened in-between my last post and this one? Did I go through one of those interesting experiences that writers, especially the writer’s block experience? Not at all. I was busy editing my memoir for possible publication. I then realized that I have been writing from a very biased perspective, especially one with so much pain, expectations, and angst. I was feeling a lot of pain for a broken childhood and life of poverty and violence in my growing up years.   It took me 55 years to come to terms with the reality.   Flipping those years back on their head showed me another dimension of my life. One that has so much compassion, forgiveness, and deep appreciation of the family and the life we lived. A lot were glossed and buried deep within the lived memory. I looked again more consciously with an eye for the unturned stone, the unturned leaf. I asked myself what I may have missed as a resu...

If there was anything from the experience I remembered the fond memories I have of making the first plane ride from the school airstrip to Wewak over Muschu Island. It was the beginning of many flights I would make in later years as I grew up and flew across seas and continents to places I have never thought I would visit. The plane was a one engine propelled plane that was operated by the Catholic Church in Wewak. Unexpected things do happen sometimes in my life. On 14 th January 2019 I got on a dinghy with Thorsten Trimmpop and Michael, my friends from the USA heading out of Wewak town. We were heading into the open sea with the wind and sea picking up the wind and waves that saw out ride to Kairiru Island a bit rough. I was used to rough seas, but not my two friends. The trip to the Island was supposed to be about 30 minutes, but I swear it could have been more than that. Not until we came around the Muschu Island made headed into the canal separating Muschu and Kairiru ...

Last week, in my lecture for the course Literature and Politics, I read the poem “Different Histories” to the 50 plus students. It was an important poem I had written when I was an undergraduate student, just learning to write and the thoughts that went into the poem have become more real to as I explained the return to the place of my birth in the month of January, 2019. Uncle Thomas Pomala, Michael Fischer, Thorsten Trimmpop, and Daniel Hui @ Songo in Forest, Ulighembi 2019 I made an unplanned visit to the forest place in the Prince Alexander Mountain range where my umbilical cord lies buried. On a fine day, the 8 th of January 2019 I drove up to Ulighembi Village in a hired 5 doors Toyota Landcruiser.   Accompanying me were three friends who flew all the way from the USA and Singapore. Thorsten Trimpop, the award winning filmmaker based in Chicago, the anthropologist, Michael Fischer based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui, arriv...