Whispers of the Duwende & the Little Seer pt 2
Once Upon a Time in a World Enchanted: A Tiny Seer’s Vision and Philippine Folklore’s Magic
Read Whispers of the Duwende & the Little Seer - part 1 - first before continuing this tale…
Regeneration Through Sacred Rites
My paternal grandmother, Lola Corazon, her hands weathered by farm life and dentistry, by raising six children and welcomed three half children after WWII when my Lolo ‘Ping became sheriff after fighting alongside Americans against Japanese occupation.
Lola Corazon had the same quiet determination on her face as she did then and took my brother's shirt in the farmlands of Lambunao, where she reigned as matriarch, donating parts of land to the community to build churches, schools, & a hospital. The elders held her with deep reverence and great honor. Respect. She too, was now one of them, and greeting her was always with a blessing of her tender palm to your forehead, “mano po,” a permission for more direct connection to mana from the heavens above.
There in Lambunao, distant from the rice fields and ranches, beyond the mountain lived an albularyo, a healer who used herbs while healing with ancient songs and spirit communion. She divined that my brother had strayed into the duwende's kingdom through an anthill portal by a tree in mother’s friend’s backyard. The duwende queen, mourning her lost son, cherished my brother's playful spark, unlike his playmate who dwelt there.
In this inter-dimensional realm, the king spun feasts of starlight, tables laden with glowing fruits, but my brother, fierce at three, refused their enchanted gifts, his soul yearning for home, resisting the spell that would bind him forever. I surmised he knew he was being enticed by a spell with no return. Accept even the smallest gift, it would mean an eternal commitment across dimensions and time.
We checked for the anthill, and there it was, everything the abulario shared.
The albularyo prescribed a pag-anito: an offering and a letter of love from the matriarchs of our family.
In our lola, Mami Instek’s Oton groves, under a canopy of coconut fronds, we gathered to open portals. Mama, uncles, lola Corazon, tita Nene, and I at nine years old, clutching my rosary, its beads warm from my prayers. My mother, surrounded by our father’s mother and his sister, my mother’s brother performing the rites of the pag-anito, for the prized rooster’s passageway through the abulario’s instructions.
We offered rice, tears, his favorite yellow truck, the sacrificed rooster, the letters from our matriarchs, and songs, the nights made alive with fireflies mirroring our hope one day at dusk in our Mami Instek’s coconut groves.
Even after a blood transfusion, my brother lingered, unawakened. The sounds of beeping in machines sustaining his life kept us in a meditative blank stare, looking for answers.
I looked in awe at the mixture of medical practices, animism and religious rites being conducted, and how spirit, science and faith all coalesced, in an effort to stop at nothing to save his life. My mom, desperate in my brother’s return, frequented Sambag, the convent at Carmelite offering me up for service to God, the churches in Jaro, and back & forth between the doctor’s offices at St. Paul’s Hospital to and from St. Paul’s Cathedral. All in a chase for the relentless pursuit of answers. Morning came and back she was, hounding the pediatrician daily for results, for the right blood donors for his blood type, to re-examine the CT Scans, MRI’s, to check for more brain activity, certain that he must have missed something the neurologist shared.
Lola Corazon returned from our farmlands in Lambunao once more with news. Whispering in my ear, lola shared,
"The queen, seeing her own grief mirrored in your Mama’s tears, freed him, honoring the reciprocity of shared loss. Her guilt is beyond measure, and your brother is preparing to come home."
It was spoken in our tongue, In Ilonggo, with quiet reverence, of inner knowing. I believed lola Corazon because, well she’s grandma. The queen duwende, she must have regretted her decision to take from someone who had never harmed their home! That must be it. So, it worked, proof of contact with the other realms sung by adults, a certainty to the mystery of the unknown.
His fingers twitched, synapses sparking like tiny stars. I could go back to school without worrying. He awoke, mute, with one eye slightly wandering, a fragment of his soul left in that otherworld. Memory swiped, as if reborn back into his body.
The neurologist spoke of neuroplasticity, that there is a promising recovery for his age of three with guidance, and focusing on English, rather than confusing him with his native tongue, especially if we are moving to New York within months. Our yayas had him eating well, and the speech returned with bits of coherence. My mom got me a tutor to catch up on work missed and all started to become normal again. In between coaching alphabets and numbers, I wanted to ask what he remembered, if he truly left to the other realm. My vision at seven, so clearly foretold this journey, binding me to the unseen world in ways I was only beginning to understand…
Remembering the duwende kingdom, I became his earthly guardian, teaching him his ABCs, shielding his quiet heart in a reality harsher than the enchanted realms, each word a seed of renewal for a companion and a friend in a new opportunity at a magical life. In New York City.
All are proof of the duwende’s lesson: respect their domain, and harmony blooms.
Read Part 1 of Whispers of the Duwende & the Little Seer.
Veil of Whispers: A Poetic Talisman
I meditated on the encounters with the spirit of the duende—a primal flame igniting art’s soul. As my brother’s voice bloomed, halting but radiant, I penned Veil of Whispers in my diary, now a matured echo of wisdom, but back then a child’s hymn to duwende magic, its words a bridge between worlds.
“In twilight’s hush, where fireflies weave,
The earth chants low, a cosmic sleeve.
I stand where worlds, unmade, converge,
Where brother’s soul did briefly surge.Unseen hands spin starlight’s thread,
Guarding gates where spirits tread.
At seven, I glimpsed the shadowed vale,
A table cold, my brother’s fairy tale.Our offerings fall, soft as dawn’s breath,
To keepers of the world beneath.
Their whispers curl through root and stone,
Binding us to realms unknown.A queen who mourned, a king who dreamed,
A child’s soul their light had gleamed.
Yet mother’s tears, and kinship’s song,
Pierced the veil of realms to bring him home.In silence, we meet our radiant selves,
A truth where love’s own courage delves.
Through their gaze, we dare to see,
The eternal dance of mystery.Now brother speaks with starborn voice,
Of both worlds forged, by sacred choice.
And I, tiny seer, guards the way,
Where night and dawn entwine each day”
Veil of Whispers emerges in a vision of me as 7, 9, then 11 watching my brother re-weave his world, a hymn to duwende magic and resilient hearts. A talisman, honoring our odyssey to new worlds, while shielding us from duwende gaze.
Our yayas marked me as a seer, peering through the cosmos’s veil, with a memory, an experience of remembering and becoming that lasted a lifetime.
Duwendes: Guardians of Earth’s Heart
Envision fairies, but fiercely Filipino. Duwende, nuno sa punso, diminutive sentinels of the soil, small as a child, with luminous eyes, broad noses, and hands clasping gold or grievances, they dwell in anthills, ancient trees, rice fields, the valleys— with faces of ancient spririt.
Farmers offer rice, cigars, or rooster blood for Karanget, rice’s guardians, earning luck or cursed gold that vanishes if greed takes hold. Lola told of a farmer who gifted rice nightly, his fields blooming while others withered, a duwende’s blessing. They gift endless rice to gentle souls, fevers to the careless. Their dual nature mirroring nature’s balance. My cousin’s fever, sparked by mocking an anthill, was healed by an albularyo’s herbs, a lesson in their power.
These "spirits of the fields," kin to European elfish gnomes, glide through earth's veins guarding their treasures, guarding homes. Their shape-shifting abilities—appearing as deer in our folklore—reveals their mastery over nature's laws, teaching reverence for the unseen forces that sustain us all.
Duwende are earth’s messengers, their blessings: as endless rice in your sack; as protective beings in deer form; as curses, mysterious illness, all serve as prophecies of our bond with the Divine Mother.
We are taught a lesson in mindful coexistence. Their dual nature, benevolent yet vengeful, mirrors nature’s balance.
Their reciprocity is animism's core—a dialogue with the unseen realms—shaping our collective future. Now we discuss it as the quantum field. As guardians, the duwendes remind us of our duty to the Divine Mother’s earth. Of Sacred Reciprocity.
Their whispers, carried through roots and winds, foretell humanity’s future and warn us of precedences.
“Will we honor and listen to the land, or face it’s lessons?”
In the Philippines, I saw anthills as portals, offerings as pacts, echoing views of animism as a co-created reality where humans and spirits weave co-existence.
Read Part 1 of Whispers of the Duwende & the Little Seer.
Inner Child’s Dance of Wonder
I pirouetted between marvel and mindfulness. Anthills were duwende gateways; I tiptoed past, murmuring apologies. Whispering under my breath, “tabi..tabi.. po… daan lang” as permission to pass.
Our yard’s banana trees, coconut trees, balete trees, roots pulsing like earth’s song, hummed secrets I wanted to consume. Helpers’ tales of “Itim na Duwende” (black colored duwende were notorious at weaving tricks) or “Tianak” babies luring with cries or Kapre smoking cigars above our home, making the banana trees rustle and fall, all trained me in a heightened sensorium of imagination. Legend has it, they liked women & played perverse tricks on my yayas often back in their villages. Our Philippine folklore’s versions of a favorite book I had as a child, Where the Wild Things Are, painted my nannies as sisters of Grimm’s tales in the way they scared me at bedtime instead, yet I loved them all. All were stories of our rivers, our valleys, our mountains.
Yet I cherished duwende aiding farmers, gifting treasures to gentle souls that tended to the land, with tender quiet carabaos, in place of tractors plowing land. Leaving rice by a tree was a magic I could touch, like bracelets woven with cousins Hope, Beauty, and young Farrah Faith—each knot a prayer. Each day a wish to see if they accepted my offerings.
My family’s background on my father’s side were farmers who spilled rooster blood for the Karanget, elemental rice’s guardians who also rewards with good harvest to trade for more of the farm animals.
These were like wishing on a star, woven into the earth’s rhythm. Perhaps you tap wood or dodge black cats, all a quiet bow to the unseen, to Mother Gaia.
Duwende taught me the earth’s heartbeat is a dialogue. Their mischief in hiding objects, luring souls to their paradise, demand we acknowledge the unseen, as in to pay attention.
That we don’t become prey to our own unconsciousness.
Their lessons, etched in my soul, echo the Divine Mother’s call to live in more in harmony to the earth & all it’s beings.
Ashes to Resurrection
In 1991, as we prepared to join Papa in New York City, and my brother’s speech and mobility returned, I had just turned 10 that spring. Back in New York, Papa’s neighbor’s electric spark consumed our new home in Queens, before any of us had the chance to see it.
My father leaped from a second story high window, wounding his knee, yet rose in crutches in time to heal, just as my brother did, all in time for a long yearned for embrace.
We were all phoenixes, reborn from ashes. A whole continent now behind us.
We left Iloilo abruptly, almost too fast, and off we went, after one big beach day on my 10th birthday and one last bit of summer after school, I said goodbye to our cousins. There wasn’t a big goodbye party with everybody, no getting contacts from my elementary, no long hugs from my paternal cousins, but a swift flight, and less tears were shed.
It was an exciting time and a leap into the wild unknown. With a new life and adventure in the "Big Apple.” Bracing ourselves for a complete culture shock. We were all there for it. Fresh off Korean Airlines.
We settled into our one bedroom railroad type apartment, the only place my father could afford after the fire. It didn’t matter though that our place was small. It mattered that for the first time in two years, we were all, so close to one another again. Between islands and countries, there was our humble home, with a pullout couch that had a hump when you slept in it, and a bathroom for four the size of a motel bathroom. It was like one big slumber party night after night of a family who missed each other. It was a bittersweet memory, where peace, faith and togetherness was restored. The years we sacrificed apart, burned into the dust of the past.
The IHOP near the McDonald’s (where Eddy Murphy’s “Coming to America” was filmed in), became the All-American past time that filled our stomachs after a long immigration journey. It was a summer of 1991, I was 10 in New York City— in a culturally different landscape, eyes wide open mouth quiet in observation and adaptation. Curious, like George, summer sped fast, with Great Adventure, and camping, and Sesame Streets and Hershey’s Park.
Soon, it was our first cold winter sunset, in our cozy warm cabin-like apartment. Queens, my Mama called a friend back in Iloilo on the cordless phone (which I thought was so high-tech because in the Philippines in the late 1980s, we had to walk to the corner store to use rotary phones).
She learned her friend's son, tied to that same anthill, had passed shortly after we arrived. The news of his recent death came just as my brother awoke from his nap, not the deep slumber of a coma, but the same sort of cosmic point was made.
My mom continued her sullen conversation & learns the anthill is gone and they just buried her son. She quietly placed the phone on the counter, and hugged us, tussling little brother’s mushroom haircut, and kissed his tiny forehead.
My first thought was to ask my mom if the duwende Queen in the anthill claimed him for the forgotten “tabi tabi po,” not realizing the anthill was enchanted when destroyed.
Did their family pay a hard price losing their only son? Could the duwendes have fled elsewhere to a new home with their son’s spirit? Was it revenge?
I had so many questions at the time. There was only a long pause.
My mom let me live in the mystery of the unknown instead and let the enchantment sparkling in my eyes reside in wonder and amazement.
However, we all knew one thing for certain: how blessed we were, thanks to the life lesson of the duwende.
Like the boy whose family made mockery of duwende and faced misfortune, their lesson was clear: disrespect severs harmony.
Read Part 1 of Whispers of the Duwende & the Little Seer.
Global Context
The duwende of my childhood echo in animist traditions worldwide. What I witnessed in Iloilo's balete groves resonates in the Amazon rainforest, Australian outback, and Arctic tundra.
Diverse landscapes are united by the understanding that consciousness extends beyond humans. In Amazonian cosmology, shamans navigate relationships between humans, animals, plants, and spirits—a realm where species boundaries blur.
My brother's journey parallels this understanding that consciousness travels between worlds, that identities are fluid rather than fixed. The duwende queen's recognition of my mother's grief mirroring her own demonstrates what indigenous peoples understand globally: non-human entities demand ethical engagement.
Our offerings weren't superstition but participation in an economy of respect maintaining cosmic balance.
When my family combined modern medicine with the albularyo's rituals, we bridged worlds in a way indigenous knowledge systems have always done. The neurologist spoke of neuroplasticity; the mountain healer of spirit retrieval. Both valid, both necessary.
My childhood whispers of "Tabi tabi, po," practiced what philosophers now call "ontological pluralism" acknowledging multiple, equally valid ways of being. A philosophy that embraces diversity in how we understand existence, suggesting that no single lens—science, culture, or belief—holds a monopoly on what is real.
In a story, it’s the tension between characters who see the world through irreconcilable yet legitimate eyes, each shaping their own slice of reality. Imagine a world where a scientist’s data-driven universe, a poet’s realm of metaphor, and a mystic’s spiritual cosmos all coexist, each true in its own way, none claiming the ultimate throne. In coherence & in harmony. This wisdom belongs to countless children raised where mountains listen, trees remember and rivers weep streams of glistening tears into oceans.
Only the names differ: duwende; wakan; manitou; jinn; yokai. We share this world with many kinds of elemental beings, human, and otherwise, all in Divine Mother’s embrace.
Reflection: Regeneration. Echoes of the Earth, Whispers of the Soul
In the stillness after a storm, when wet earth breathes, regeneration begins. Seeds stir, roots reach, and life blooms through fracture, like the ocean’s tide. This is the duende—a soul-stirring force, a call to create from pain.
As a child, I dreamed my brother on an operating table, a vision that came true when he fell into a coma. Through prayers, we called him back, and as he relearned to speak, I turn to ritual, poetry and prayer, weaving grief into renewal. Like the sea, we carry scars and light, regenerating through connection to each other and the earth.
Regeneration is a mindset. Seeing loss as a seed, every ending as a beginning. It’s weaving ourselves into the earth’s tapestry, where every thread matters.
This has been a nostalgic Earth Week’s reflections… Thank you for reading this seed and offering.
What seed of renewal stirs in you?
About the Storyteller
I’m April Love, a Filipina American writer weaving stories for Echos & Ethos.
My heart lives in lola’s tales, of duwende dreams, and the divine feminine, flowing through Omavia’s wellness rituals, Vox Noctem’s gatherings, and Magical Morsels’ flavors.
Join me to weave our living altar, with food as prayer, stories rooted in Philippine folklore and the Divine Mother’s embrace—weaving dreams of regenerative interbeing.
Glossary
Anito: Celestial spirits of ancestors, nature, deities
Duwende: Tiny earth guardians with boundless dreams
Diwata: Luminous nature spirits of the wild
Karanget: Tiny guardians of harvest, especially fond of rice fields
Tianak: a vampiric creature taking the form of flying cherub babies
Tabi tabi po: “Pardon me!” for spirit abodes
Lola: Grandmother, keeper of tales
Lolo: Grandfather, provider of safe spaces
Carabao: farmer’s daily companion the water buffalo
Yaya: Nanny, guardian of secrets
Albularyo: Healer of herb and song
Pag-anito: Sacred rite for elemental spirits
Journal Prompt & Reflection: Your Dance with the Unseen
How have you offered respect to nature’s guardians, weaving reciprocity with the earth?
Share your tale, lullaby verse, or ritual experience in Echos & Ethos comments, threading our living altar of regeneration. Leave a comment below
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