It's Grief, Part Three

It Began When The Dancer Was Only a Child

Work on the Feminist Shamanic Performance Piece “It’s Grief” continues, sometimes by leaps and bounds, sometimes painfully slowly, and it certainly has been a slow process as we’ve worked to complete the story and visual boards for the work.

Shamanic apprentice and studio assistant Kristen and I completed that process this week, as regards the visual board, making decisions about the sequencing of the various panels in the triptych, and the size of the panels in the final one. We printed digital studies, pics of actual work to date, cut, pasted and rearranged, continuing to feel dissatisfied until we took the boards down into the studio and worked on them in the presence of the actual panels underway so far, which we also rearranged again and again.

When at last we were satisfied, another part of the story came to me, an excerpt from the memoir I’ve been working on for years now, which I edited for inclusion in this piece. You may recall that in the Facebook live streams we’ve been doing as this work progresses, that I mentioned that time in shamanic reality, which is informing this work, moves very differently than time in physical reality.

On February 14, in the first post about this particular project, “Creating Feminist Shamanic Performance Art: An Inside Look at the Process from Concept to Completion,” I shared what I thought at the time was the beginning narration for the first triptych in the piece, “The Dancer and the In-Between.” However, the part of the story that I’m sharing with you in this post actually precedes it, although whether or not the paintings I’ve included here to illustrate it will eventually become part of the overall piece remains to be seen. Nevertheless, after reading this, you may want to go back and read that first post again, for the sake of continuity.

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The Dancer and the In-Between: A New Beginning

Long before she began to dance through life, when she was still a child, innocent and free, the one who now grieves for herself, for you, for the earth, sought out particular secret places in the depths of the coastal forest surrounding her home...magically hidden places where the sounds of civilization were silenced by the sheer density of trees that surrounded and shielded her. The light filtering down through the trees sparkled more in those places than elsewhere, the colors were more intense, and the sounds of the forest more easily heard.

Once having entered such a place, she was transported into the mystery of the events that occurred within its hidden depths. Those depths seemed to her to be a parallel world; a separate reality that existed either below or above or beside the one she had left behind. It was a world where wind and trees sang to her and she to them; a wild and welcoming world in which the creatures of the forest spoke in their own languages, and she understood them in hers; a secret, living realm in which she felt more truly herself than she did anywhere else.

In those days, the rhythms of her life were as wild and bold as those of the waves that washed upon the granite shores of her native land, and she walked by the sea, and the white-bellied fisher hawk flew above her, crying “Kee-ahhh! Kee-ahhh!”

In those days, she was innocent, and laughter flowed easily from her simple heart, drifting away from her on the sweet summer wind, echoing through the tall dark spruce forests through which she wandered, and the creatures of the forest were pleased by its sound.

In that season, the season of her youth, her songs floated out over the blue-gray North Atlantic as it surged onto the granite coast beyond the forest, and it echoed through the currents deep beneath that sea’s wild surface, and the creatures of the sea were pleased by their sound.

In those days, the creatures of the forest and the creatures of the sea, hearing her laughter and her songs, understood her heart. In that time, she was known to them by the secret name they had given her, and the sun shone upon her.

In that season she lived freely, untroubled by remembrances of things past or by fear of things to come. Nor was she yet burdened by intellect’s or ego's preferences, for she saw that the Earth her home supported all things equally.

And beneath it all; beneath the trees, beneath the bouldered springs, beneath the deep green moss, a great red serpent lay coiled, waiting, until one day it rose up from beneath the earth and took the form of a great goddess who reached out and touched her childish heart.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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