communication + connection = community

wonder | wander | women love the beauty of well applied language - painting vivid images, evoking deep sentiments, capturing the subtlest nuances - the eloquence of a story well told. 

Illustrated by Okalinichenko

Mahala is more interested and fluid when it comes to learning other languages. Issa is bound more by the native tongues we were born to and raised around - English, Hiligaynon, Tagalog. Together we thrive on a rich world of words, nourished and fed in these created universes. 

Illustrated by Okalinichenko

Reading "Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country" by gifted American author Louise Erdrich validates and vindicates our obsession. Moving to another country has magnified the ache and longing we have always had - displaced back home and more so now that we have relocated.

an eloquent and lovely memoir by Louise Erdrich

[H]ow do I go back to a language I never had? I love my first language-why complicate my life with another? I will never have the facility to really use the flexible descriptive power of this language, still, I love it. The sound comforts me. I feel as though all along this language was waiting for me with kindness. I imagine God hears this language. Perhaps my grandfather's use of the language penetrated. What the Ojibwe call the Gizhe Manidoo, the ineffable and compassionate spirit residing in all that lives, is associated for me with the flow of Ojibwemowin.

Some Bisaya Baybayin

When writing in our native badlit we are immediately aware of how much freer our script flows with local words rather than an English translation. It feels like the ancestral spirit of the language readily gives us the wings we are stammering and bumbling to grasp and understand fully. Together we reach toward a place that is home for us both.

Badlit Script [suwat bisaya]

My Catholic training touched me intellectually and symbolically, but apparently never engaged my heart. Ojibwemowin is one of the few surviving languages that evolved to the present here in North America. For an American writer, it seems crucial to at least have a passing familiarity with the language, which is adapted to the land as no other language can possibly be.

When Erdrich writes about her Catholic training our souls resonate with the same rebelliousness against a colonized past that wiped out all trace and memory of our own indigenous roots. A lost language adapted to a land no longer there and where we no longer live. Where exactly does that leave us? Loving and longing magnified by this double loss - past and current.

Baroque Church in Paoay, Ilocos Norte

Its philosophy is bound up in northern earth, lakes, rivers, forests, and plains. Its origins pertain to the animals and their particular habits, to the shades of meaning in the very placement of stones. Many of the names and songs associated with these places were revealed to people in dreams and songs - it is a language that most directly reflects a human involvement with the spirit of the land itself. It is the language of the paintings that seem to glow from within the rocks.

The terrain of our equatorial tropical rain forests were not where we grew up. That was too far removed in the post American war world of our native island. Where we were given an education divided between the extremes of strict German Catholic nuns and the new technicolor cinema of Hollywood. Leading to conflicted dreams and anthems rather than mindful revelation or reflection.

Ojibwe music board

To native speakers the language is a deeply loved entity. A spirit or an originating genius belongs to each word. Before attempting to speak this language, students petition these spirits with gifts of cloth, tobacco, and food. Anyone who attempts Ojibwemowin is engaged in something more than learning tongue twisters. However awkward my nouns, unstable my verbs, however stumbling my delivery, to engage in the language is to engage the spirit.

The pre WWII way of life of our parents was not the post war world we were born into. Neither is the pre Martial Law life remotely like the post martial law world of our children.

Tatak ni Bakunawa - traditional warrior tattoos

Words have their own innate power. It is why mantras chanted in their original form are much more powerful than their translated words. Once the original word is lost or its speakers killed off no amount of offering or sacrifice can bring back their spirit. We keep their spirit alive in the memories we hold them in - with love, honor and respect.

In our fast paced world we need this reminder. Engage the spirit before it is lost to us forever.