Entirely of Possibility: Casa of My Dreams

Eight years is a long time not to go to a favorite place within reach but maybe just enough time for a realization to sucker-punch its intended effect.

Casa San Miguel and I go back a long way, almost as long as its nineteen years of existence. In our youth, my architecture classmates and I organized an exhibit-event there linking music and architecture where classical compositions were performed by the pianist, Mariel Ilusorio who happens to be my sister while we mounted three installations featuring photos of buildings related to the piano pieces. Since then, I've been taking different groups of friends from mountaineers to office mates to the community arts center built by Coke Bolipata in Zambales. It's a twenty minute boat ride away from Capones Island where a beautiful Spanish lighthouse stands in a crop of dramatic landscape so we usually combine the trip with a visit there. I've introduced a theater group from Bulacan to the magic of this place and there was a time a Green Peace eco-warrior studied the corals around Capones with us. One of the my last visits was an escape I needed one New Year after a great rejection, the kind of which you've spilled your heart to someone and it gets pulverized and you just have to go somewhere far, far away from the noisy revelry. Casa was it for me and Coke and his family were there with their usual open, jovial selves.

Coke has been my idol for what he's done at Casa San Miguel. It's a dreamer's dream to do something with an impact to the community and to individual lives - children who discover their musical and artistic talents, artists who have a venue to develop their craft while sharing knowledge with others, locals who get to mingle with international performers, visitors who appreciate the color the experience brings to their day, ad infinitum. After travelling the world over giving concerts as part of the famous trio of Bolipata brothers, Coke decides to come home to the Philippines and does this incredible feat of hope and imagination that gives back to the country as much as he has been blessed by family, fortune and fate.

The night before I went back to Casa, I couldn't sleep thinking about what has happened in the span of years I haven't gone there, what I've done with my life, the twists and turns that has taken me to a place Dr. Seuss would probably term "nowhere" and I contemplated a decision I had to make that was calling me once more to get out of a comfort zone. How many times have I been called to do this and I answered affirmatively only to get led into seeming dead-ends and bumbling limbos? It made me sleepless wallowing in fear and doubt.

My husband drives my son and I to Casa the next morning using the GPS on his tablet. He takes us on the type of road he loves where ours is the only vehicle running through the rural-scape. We arrive in Casa and just as expected, it has changed tremendously in spatial orientation and lay-out with additional functions. This is no surprise from Coke since he has been toying and tweaking with Casa ever since.

Now there are three new bed and breakfast type rooms whereas before we just slept in beds in an area that is currently a gallery. The foyer to the theater has been converted into a kitchen with it's own brick oven for the Casa Backstage Cafe which serves breads, sandwiches, pizzas, pastas and paella. The concert hall lost it's balcony to an improved acoustic setting and there are new rehearsal studios. Beyond Coke's Casa is Plet Bolipata's house surrounded by her sculpture garden.

How time indeed flies and where does it find us? That night in my strangely well-appointed room so unlike the maski-paps (maski papaano; any-which-way) type of accommodation before, I couldn't sleep again. But this time, my mind did not wrestle with fears and doubts. It celebrated and was simply excited with the prospect of what was unknown.