Paving over our instincts

By Kristine Buenavista

As a man boarded the bus somewhere in the middle of the sugarcane fields in Anilao, he caught my gaze.

Drenched by the downpour, rain gleamed off his cheekbones, intensifying his sharp features. A deep wrinkle etched on his forehead, between his eyebrows, and a thin scar outlined his upper lip. His dripping, curly hair drooped over frail, trembling shoulders. When the conductor urged him to sit, I moved toward the window, offering the space beside me. He declined. The conductor tried once more, but the man only offered a shy smile and shook his head.

Everyone else on the bus wore dry, iron-pressed clothes and Monday uniforms.

It was only then that I looked down and noticed his clothes and feet, smeared in thick, wet mud. His quiet hesitation suddenly made sense: he was refusing because he simply did not want to soil the seat or make his fellow passengers uneasy.

It left me a bit heartbroken, because mud was once a constant in my own life.

My grandfather, Santos, was a small-scale farmer and carabao herder. My grandmother, Eduvigis, was a homemaker who also tended to our backyard and the rice paddies. In the absence of my young parents, they helped raise me by bringing me closer to the earth. Our lives were woven to the beginning of the monsoon rains in July, guided by an older, cosmic clock. Under the dark, heavy veil of the subáng (the waxing moon), we prepared the fields, waiting for the night the sky cleared enough to reveal a fragment of light. It was a sign that the earth was ready to receive the rain, and that our small, muddy lives were moving in harmony with the heavens.

So, how did we arrive at a moment where the tiller feels smaller than the concrete he steps onto?

This loss of dignity is no accident; it is the direct consequence of a landscape extracted by policy and profit.

Across the Philippines, farms are becoming increasingly small-scale: the latest 2022 Census of Agriculture and Fisheries records an average farm size of just 0.82 hectares, down from 1.29 hectares in 2012. More than half, 55.8%, of the country’s 7.73 million farms now occupy less than half a hectare.

In Panay, where smallholder farmers play an important role in local food production, agricultural communities face pressures from high production costs, livelihood insecurity, and climatic variability. Western Visayas is particularly vulnerable to the distributional consequences of climate variability, with drought and other environmental disruptions affecting household food consumption and agricultural livelihoods.

Escalating this burden is the rapid conversion of our farmlands. Driven by real estate expansion, prime croplands across our towns are continually subdivided and paved over into gated residential developments. Where wild fields dotted by carabao-carved turugban once stretched endlessly, their rugged beauty is now flattened under the weight of progress. In losing thousands of hectares of productive soil to concrete, we not only relinquish food sovereignty; we eradicate the topological contexts that sustain traditional ecological knowledge and collective biocultural memory. Society has conditioned the tiller to view the earth on their skin not as an essential tie to life, but as a stain of poverty in a world that prioritizes real property over real nourishment.

We severed this connection when market forces capitalized on our ancestral relationship to the soil.

Before land became real estate plots, Visayans, like my grandparents, fathomed agriculture in their own quiet way: as an intimate, reciprocal exchange between the human body and the cosmos. They engaged in panguma to acknowledge the dungan, the vital spirit inhabiting plants, soil, and human bodies alike.

I recently visited an old friend, Iking, along with his wife and child, in the mountain community of Aningalan in San Remigio, Antique. While staying at Balay Hilway with my friend, Tim, my daily life for five days involved walking through mud and being fully immersed in it. I felt something deeply primeval fill in, the way my bare toes instinctively understood the ground, mapping every curve, crease, and crevice of the land far better than my feet ever could on cement.

Walking barefoot in that thick Aningalan clay does something silent and radical to the spirit. It peels back the neat, sanitized logic of the hard-surfaced world and demands a wilder alignment. When our toes learn to grip, fold, and read the damp contours of the earth before our mind even logs them, we are remembering a language spoken in soil, spirit, and flesh long before we ever learned to pave over our instincts.

It makes me realize how rarely we tend to the muddy, ungoverned terrain of our own intuition.

We are taught to embody the smooth, the predictable, the ironed-flat paths that promise speed and safety. But truth sits in the marrow. It is messy, damp, and deeply alive. When we move through the world from this rooted place, how we witness other people changes completely. We stop measuring human worth by crisp uniforms, obvious titles, or performative postures. Instead, we begin to recognize the invisible landscapes everyone carries, the dungan, the hidden rivers of grief and resilience, the quiet dignity of those who remain close to the Land. We then see the world as an entangled, breathing web of memory, spirit, and belonging.

As we walked through muddy fields that led toward the verdant hills, fog-shawled mountains, and glistening mossy forest between Antique and Iloilo, we passed locals foraging, gathering wood, or simply walking from the opposite direction.

All of us had mud on our feet.

Kristine Buenavista (co-founder of Kikik Kollektive) operates within the messy, generative edges of social practice, design, and community-led story-weaving. Utilizing deep listening as a core artistic medium, she collaborates with hyperlocal communities to map intangible heritage and biocultural geographies. Manifesting through temporal gatherings, spatial interventions, and participatory frameworks, her work interrogates relational dynamics while re-enchanting the everyday imaginaries.