It has been a year of transitions. Before the end of our wonderful Master Apprenticeship experience, Jenny and I discussed how to teach others the art of laga. We embarked on creating a weaving circle and now it has come into fruition. Our project endeavors to train 4-6 weavers in the process of laga. We initially thought that a peer teaching method would suffice to teach our adult weavers, but in actuality, when we recruited our weavers we at first found that no one’s schedule matched. Modern society has everyone scrambling around with hectic schedules around work, school, family, community responsibilities, hobbies, etc… Matching up people’s schedule was very confusing and so we ended up adopting the very model that worked so well with me.
Each of our wonderful weavers is experiencing not only learning laga, but learning about the kindness, patience, warmth and strong Jenny Bawer Young, our Master Teacher. I have received fantastic verbal feedback from some of our weavers who are basking in the personal one-on-one relationship with our Teacher. The Bawer family in Kalinga is a strong one. They are leaders in their community of Mabilong, Lubuagan. I have come to know Jenny as having this same strengh of leadership, but she is one who works with a quiet heart, not loud, strong and direct, like how I express myself from the Ilocano side of my grandmother, Mary Calica. I am learning how being soft, yet strong helps in building community, much like the bamboo that bends with the wind.
I’ll announce our new website soon, which will have links to each of the weavers’ blogs, but I’m honored to present a few of them right now: Terry Bautista, Caroline Cabading, Mylene Cahambing, Grace Duenas, and Porling Rabara. While they are all at different stages of the weaving process, we are all delighted to be having our Laga, CA Circle meet once a month to weave and talk together, while creating a new community of weavers in the San Francisco Bay Area, inspired by the Mabilong Weavers of Lubuagan.
Mabuhay!
More to come later…