MATAASNAKAHOY, Batangas – A bamboo treehouse by Taal Lake is the first home I ever owned. Danger in the form of a hyperactive volcano was at eye level, not the safe downward view from Tagaytay. Volcanic tremors could send a tsunami to eradicate our place. 

When Taal erupted in January 2020, the fortuitous direction of the wind blew the ash in the opposite direction and saved us from obliteration. A series of typhoons before and since threatened to blow us off the map. Through all of that our bamboo treehouse survived, bending with nature’s ferocity even as it faced the vast open space of the lake unshielded. 

Then this terrible storm named Kristine happened on Thursday, October 24, 2024. It wiped out our beach and my obsessively cultivated garden, and felled heavy trees including two grown Balete studs. 

When I saw it a day later in the disaster’s aftermath, the bamboo treehouse was still intact, battered but not broken, and will be ready for occupancy again after a good cleaning. 

This is the kind of luck made with bamboo, a sturdy, flexible grass with a tensile strength comparable to steel without its weight. 

Before all of these modern materials, there was the versatile bamboo. As we build for resilience for a climate gone haywire, we could do worse than look to the wisdom of the ancients. The Filipino creation story has humans emerging from bamboo. Said to be malakas at maganda, they were also matalino.

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(Veteran Kapuso journalist H. Severino will be writing occasional reflections for this website under a column entitled, “Essay.” In 2023, he was given the Gawad Balagtas, a lifetime literary achievement award given to Filipino writers by the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL), the country's largest organization of Filipino writers. )