That divine spark within

I used to work in the film/TV industry. For about a decade and soon after graduating from university I got involved in film and TV productions mostly with foreign outfits, and very established ones internationally, fortunately for me, as the pay was quite substantial and allowed me to travel extensively for work. This was an “anti-yoga” period of my life characterised by stress, unhealthy behaviour and eating habits, and a lack of balance and harmony with deadlines wreaking havoc on my mind and time. So wrapped up was I with my career that I had little time to spare for friends, loved ones and relatives who all could catch me mostly on TV.

I had what my superiors called “a nose for news and an artistic eye” which they said set me apart from peers and colleagues. Early on my work was marked by minimal or no voice narration and the use of interviews--or sound bites in TV jargon--and natural/ambient sound to tell a video story. Having an on-cam talent, I believed, was less effective, distracting and just bloated the production budget. Let the picture speak for itself, I used to say. It was also a plus that I could multi-task as writer, director, editor, camera person and audio (wo)man.

By the mid ‘90s, viewers worldwide began to pay more attention to financial news especially from the Asian region and its emerging tiger economies. I was hired by 2 major TV news agencies based in the US as an on-cam talent/producer. While I am thankful for this “big break”, in retrospect the experience “killed” me on many levels: physically, I was exhausted from chasing deadlines that I couldn’t afford to miss as sending a TV segment via satellite cost the network about US$10,000; mentally, I had no economics background and was constantly cramming and hit the ground running most of the time; emotionally, I felt stuck in a niche I had zero passion for. Let me explain that bit more.

When capturing footage for, say a documentary, I always look for memorable and riveting pictures. There’s no such thing in business news! How do you humanize a stock market report? That was always my predicament back then. The formula at the time was simply to show how bearish or bullish the market was by shooting the action at the trading floor at the Philippine Stock Exchange. But what I did and which wore me out eventually, was put a face, or case study for every story produced. What was the effect of the market crash for companies big and small? Instead of constantly showing numbers, I showed faces. I demanded a lot from my camera men, I wanted them to record dynamic shots and add sizzle to boring business video. I also veered away from writing scripts that made sense only to an exclusive group of viewers and wrote stories simply to make it meaningful and palpable to the man on the street. My bosses liked my work so much they gave me more assignments than reporters from other Southeast Asian countries, who eventually copied my style. Don’t mind really since I wasn’t all that crazy about business reporting. What bothered me though was that I was having less time doing the thing I loved most, producing documentaries. In time I got burned out and had to slow down and inevitably end my long-stint with TV news. Life normalized: I got married and had children. Last year, I was introduced to the beautiful practice of Ashtanga yoga. Life became a little more subdued, serene even.

So when a yogini whom I respect a great deal sent me an excerpt of “The Invocation” which was co-produced by her friend, I almost felt like bawling like a baby in frustration. Here is a subject related to what I feel is my life’s passion now and which is tackled in the way I would have produced it. Aaaaaaarrrgghh!

“The Invocation” employs interviews from popular musicians and artists like The Police drummer Stewart Copeland and Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, spiritual author Depak Chopra, and other writers and theologians to explain that spark of divinity present within everyone.

The montage of images of candles flickering inside a Buddhist temple in India, and chanting during a Shinto ceremony in Japan, a Sikh celebration in Amristar, India and in a Syrian Orthodox service in Israel was mesmerizing to watch. These visuals are accompanied by violin music played by Anne Marie who gets lost in the moment as if playing with the cosmos in a way. Dave Stewart strums along on his guitar and their collaboration becomes the soundtrack for this piece about God, oneness and the desire for peace regardless of relious denomination.

Some sound bites from “Invocation”:

“This feeling of being connected to a higher world is achieved through ritual, meditation, incantation, prayer—this spiritual force created cannot be explained by science. As an agnostic, an atheist, I’m telling you it’s THERE.” – Stewart Copeland

“Everyone has that parcel of the divine within themselves, like a spark, all you have to do is ignite it and the fire of the divine will consume the whole being.” – Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, artist/writer

“Too often we identify ourselves solely with our body, our mind, but forgetting all about the spirit which is the spark of the divine within all of us.” – Huston Smith, writer & religious scholar

“It’s within each of us and within every single people we meet, that’s what the Hindus do when they bow before each other. They acknowledge the divinity they encounter in the other.” – Karen Armstrong, historian of religion

“You are in divine consciousness. God is not difficult to find. God is impossible to avoid. God is in every object of your perception, whether it is a tree, a rose, or another human being. God shines through that filter of divine intelligence.” –Depak Chopra

To Amanda Estremera, you are brilliant. I bow to the divinity within you. Om.