Morning of the World; a Wild
Soul Moves On
by Tarin Chaplin
by Tarin Chaplin
A week ago today, the last
day of one of Soul Flares workshops, we prepared to exchange gifts. The sweet
things had all been laid out on a table, the directions for the exchange given,
and a gentle music filled the room as we closed our eyes. When the time was
right (ripe) each of us would go select one. Almost immediately, I found myself
getting up, eyes still closed, to be the first. Two thoughts filled my head: I don’t
need any more stuff, I have a home full of stuff, beautiful stuff gathered over
the years, antiques and artifacts and treasures of natural and human hand,
trinkets, beautiful objects of wood and brass and porcelain and leather and
glass, sinew and string, fiber and tin; and in front of me (though I hadn’t
take the time beforehand to look at them all), was more stuff feathers and clay
bowls, drawings and poems, beaded and ribboned and painted and glazed and woven
and dyed and glued and carved and molded and written and fused and waxed and
cast and hammered things, things made from resources mined or grown from or dug
up from this earth, things that required trees for paper or handles or
wrapping, that depended on oil to be converted to plastic for cellophane
packaging and to gasoline to transport them from the raw source to wherever
they were made and from there to be sold, sold as raw material and as value
added products, things to be converted into objects of art and even into things
for spiritual practice that could remind us to honor the earth that they were
mined from in the first place. So I went to the table, my eyes closed, feeling
my way, knowing I would keep them closed, hoping that when I passed my hands
over the objects and intuitively felt it was time to lay my hand down, that it
would land in an empty space, a space between things, and that would be my
gift, the holy emptiness, the sacred nothingness/everythingness of air/breath,
and not only hoping for that, but wanting it, expecting it, fervently desiring
nothingness. I let my hands roam over what I knew was the table, and let my
left one, the intuitive one, float its way blindly down over what I wholly
hoped would be an absence.
But it was far from nothing. It was feathered, and furred, and rough, and hard, and large, and the more I felt, the larger I found it to be, this object that would not fill my desire for nothingness. And I picked it up and took it, knowing it had been given to me, that I had not sought it. Keeping eyes closed, I felt my way back to the circle, to my chair, and stood facing those in the circle. Before opening my eyes, I held it up to show and heard oohs and ahhs and umms.and then chuckles and laughter as the woman who’d brought it said, it’s a dance fan, danced and gifted to me. It was made by a Native American and now its time to pass it on. I understood the irony which was more than a coincidence I am a choreographer, a dancer, and everyone there knew it. I opened my eyes and saw the fan. Fashioned from a curved stag horn handle, a variety of feathers sprouted out a securely bound fur ruff that ringed the bone like a wristlet. In the tradition of the one who made it, this is to be passed forward, the gift giver said.
I wondered how or when or to whom that would happen. It would be sooner than I expected.
Just off the next dirt road where I live is an old gate that opens its elbow onto a worn grass path that rises in a curve into a hillside pasture. On the western slope, just below the highest rise, a few huge old, haggard maples stand sentinel. The fields radiate out in a broad expanse to the east, and atop the knoll, ledge sticks out, crowned by a few firs. The deer come here in the winter; Id often found the melted patches in the snow cover, rounded depressions left from where they’d bedded down, their warm bodies and vaporous breaths melting the snow under them, which had frozen in shallow basins once they woke and picked their way off the safe high spot from which they had their 360o view. Id often comes here to pray, to do my Qi Gong. Only two weeks ago, my daughter had come at dawn to perform a ceremony for some tough things she’s facing; all in my family know and revere it.
But the piece of land has been sold for an exorbitant price -- by the farmer who is bit by bit selling off his land. A few days ago, on one of my morning runs, Id seen a crew of workers at the gate to the rise with their big Caterpillar equipment. They told me they would be blasting for the foundation of the home that was going in.
So it came to me, what to do, and last night I wrote on a piece of joss paper (which is used for prayers in the spiritual traditions of China):
Dear Morning of the World,
for 30 years I’ve been coming to you, standing on you, facing east as you open your wings to another days journey.
many many days, most days, I’ve not been here, but you, you always are.
Now, today, this day, they will blast a hole in your belly; now today, this day, they will rip a scar across your face. I cannot stop that.
But I can gift you. I can hold your hand one last time in the peace and morning murmurings of how you have been for millennium. I can make time for you. I can dance for you.
And I woke early this day and took that dance fan and went out at 5a.m., jogging down the road and up the rise and onto the cusp of that hillside. And I cuddled down in a tuft of grass within the staked out circle of where the charges would be laid. And as the sun rose, I did my dance, my offering not a beautiful swinging, leg and arm graced dance, but a grief dance, bulky and awkward, as though Id never danced before and didn’t know how to do this, an odd-looking dance (if you could even call it that, dressed as I was against the morning frost in a hat with earflaps, an woolen plaid jacket with holes in the elbows and missing buttons, my clumper shoes, and ragged mitts). I moved as I was moved to move, feeling the embarrassment and the craziness of how I might appear to anyone viewing me from afar, this old woman, waving a stout feathered fan about, quaking and spiraling and lying on the ground and rising to face the sun, and suddenly its glint was there, sparking out of a distant mountain like fire from flintstones, and for the 230 seconds it took to fully clear that ridge and begin floating its sphere across the day I witnessed and stared into it and said the prayers and sang the songs and offered my thanks. And then I placed the dance fan down, atop my little letter, placed it into the small dip of earth Id danced within, and without looking back, left, jogged down the hillside and back to my little red schoolhouse.
I leave my eternal home and come into my temporary house, I murmured as I turned the knob of my front door.
The sun is high now, and soon they will be blasting.
But it was far from nothing. It was feathered, and furred, and rough, and hard, and large, and the more I felt, the larger I found it to be, this object that would not fill my desire for nothingness. And I picked it up and took it, knowing it had been given to me, that I had not sought it. Keeping eyes closed, I felt my way back to the circle, to my chair, and stood facing those in the circle. Before opening my eyes, I held it up to show and heard oohs and ahhs and umms.and then chuckles and laughter as the woman who’d brought it said, it’s a dance fan, danced and gifted to me. It was made by a Native American and now its time to pass it on. I understood the irony which was more than a coincidence I am a choreographer, a dancer, and everyone there knew it. I opened my eyes and saw the fan. Fashioned from a curved stag horn handle, a variety of feathers sprouted out a securely bound fur ruff that ringed the bone like a wristlet. In the tradition of the one who made it, this is to be passed forward, the gift giver said.
I wondered how or when or to whom that would happen. It would be sooner than I expected.
Just off the next dirt road where I live is an old gate that opens its elbow onto a worn grass path that rises in a curve into a hillside pasture. On the western slope, just below the highest rise, a few huge old, haggard maples stand sentinel. The fields radiate out in a broad expanse to the east, and atop the knoll, ledge sticks out, crowned by a few firs. The deer come here in the winter; Id often found the melted patches in the snow cover, rounded depressions left from where they’d bedded down, their warm bodies and vaporous breaths melting the snow under them, which had frozen in shallow basins once they woke and picked their way off the safe high spot from which they had their 360o view. Id often comes here to pray, to do my Qi Gong. Only two weeks ago, my daughter had come at dawn to perform a ceremony for some tough things she’s facing; all in my family know and revere it.
But the piece of land has been sold for an exorbitant price -- by the farmer who is bit by bit selling off his land. A few days ago, on one of my morning runs, Id seen a crew of workers at the gate to the rise with their big Caterpillar equipment. They told me they would be blasting for the foundation of the home that was going in.
So it came to me, what to do, and last night I wrote on a piece of joss paper (which is used for prayers in the spiritual traditions of China):
Dear Morning of the World,
for 30 years I’ve been coming to you, standing on you, facing east as you open your wings to another days journey.
many many days, most days, I’ve not been here, but you, you always are.
Now, today, this day, they will blast a hole in your belly; now today, this day, they will rip a scar across your face. I cannot stop that.
But I can gift you. I can hold your hand one last time in the peace and morning murmurings of how you have been for millennium. I can make time for you. I can dance for you.
And I woke early this day and took that dance fan and went out at 5a.m., jogging down the road and up the rise and onto the cusp of that hillside. And I cuddled down in a tuft of grass within the staked out circle of where the charges would be laid. And as the sun rose, I did my dance, my offering not a beautiful swinging, leg and arm graced dance, but a grief dance, bulky and awkward, as though Id never danced before and didn’t know how to do this, an odd-looking dance (if you could even call it that, dressed as I was against the morning frost in a hat with earflaps, an woolen plaid jacket with holes in the elbows and missing buttons, my clumper shoes, and ragged mitts). I moved as I was moved to move, feeling the embarrassment and the craziness of how I might appear to anyone viewing me from afar, this old woman, waving a stout feathered fan about, quaking and spiraling and lying on the ground and rising to face the sun, and suddenly its glint was there, sparking out of a distant mountain like fire from flintstones, and for the 230 seconds it took to fully clear that ridge and begin floating its sphere across the day I witnessed and stared into it and said the prayers and sang the songs and offered my thanks. And then I placed the dance fan down, atop my little letter, placed it into the small dip of earth Id danced within, and without looking back, left, jogged down the hillside and back to my little red schoolhouse.
I leave my eternal home and come into my temporary house, I murmured as I turned the knob of my front door.
The sun is high now, and soon they will be blasting.
In Memorium: l. tarin chaplin (1941-2009)
It is with profound sadness that
we announce the death of our beloved flame-haired beauty, our mama, l. tarin
chaplin who died of cancer May 25, 2009. Born in 1941 in A life-long “eco-choreographer,” activist, writer and dancer, tarin sought to connect people to the earth, the elements, and the sentient and non-sentient beings that share this universe with us in all their magnificent manifestations. Embodying this perspective, her art, which was performed on both proscenium stages and in site-specific venues, was known for its piercing imagery and rich symbolism. This past winter, for example, she brought her community the twelfth annual "Ice on Fire", an outdoor event that tarin conceived and directed in which she draws on storytelling and myth to celebrate the ferocious beauty of deep winter.
