Chanting in a time of madness
I woke up this morning at 4:30. The cat was resettling herself on my hip, where she likes to sleep, balanced on four needly claws, rotating with me when I roll to my side. It was still dark, and I felt calm and rested.
Just a quick peek.
I turned on my phone-- facebook scrolled. My early morning/late night softness ground into the tinnitus of screen-light anxiety.
No. Somebody dead from Covid19 at the hospital down the road, right here in Springfield. No tests available yet.
How do I mitigate this, what's the lamb's blood I need to splash across the door?
The facebook algorithm reads my mind: Buy this Jewish holiday box and learn to celebrate Jewish holidays at home.
Oi Mama.... I suddenly remember my mom's sweet crooning in her Dutch-accented Yiddish and I am crying. How I wish she was here to joke, comfort, share vision, extend healing from the spiritual power of motherhood, of cronehood. Would we blend the sacred and the silly, light the candles and braid the challah, play Irish tunes on St. Patricks and invoke the priestesshood of our pioneer ancestresses? I don't know. There's only speculation and extrapolation, because death is a greedy asshole and gives you no glimpse through that slammed shut door into what might have been
How old would she be? I have to do the math. 64?
I hate this, I hate everything.
No.
I love everything. That's why it hurts.
Liko is somehow upsidedown in the bed, soft sleeping baby face by my knees, dry little feet on the pillow, and Maile is against the wall. They've balled up the comforter between the two of them. I gather up an extra blanket from the floor. I put on a podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, to try and go back to sleep. But, I find myself holding my phone again.
Scroll, scroll. Parents panicking about homeschooling their kids, apocalypse fashion jokes, and dozens of videos of jingle dress dancers.
Beautiful young girls in their regalia, dancing in their homes, on their porches, in their yards. A dance for healing. A dance of reclaiming detritus and making it medicine for a plague. A different okague, a hundred years ago. They are the sound of tabacco healing, of offering, of prayer.
The sky is lightening through the blinds, and I can hear the traffic picking up on the highway behind our house
I finally give up and get out of bed, plug in my phone somewhere out of reach, to sit in the early morning quiet and think. Specifically to think about chanting.
There's a mad woman I keep thinking about. Kneeling in the dust, mind shattered.
A long time ago, several lifetimes ago, I was given the great gift of visiting the Kaneiolouma complex in Poipu. It's an astonishing place, hidden just out of sight right off one of the most popular beaches on Kauai. It defies categorization, because it was a temple, a sports arena, and a royal village. I wrote about it, actually, which may be why the memory is so clear to me.
I wrote: "Pele's older sister (was it Namakaokaha'i?) came to Kauai, and married her women to chiefs around the islands to establish her supremacy. Then, when she witnessed a man beating his wife, she inhabited the battered woman's body, and slaughtered the husband. But this possession experience broke the woman's mind. The goddess took the woman to the very heiau where we were standing, and taught her to chant. "Us Hawaiians," said [Randy Wichman], "we love chanting. We could chant all day and all night." The chanting, after endless days and nights, eventually healed her mind.
The Hawaiians pull the broken people inwards, he explained. Someday, he said, you all will look around and wonder how to heal the mind of someone you love. Remember this story. Heal them with chanting, with hula."
I keep thinking about this woman. She is so clear before me, kneeling on the soft earth, the waves crashing close by, just out of sight behind the trees. She is singing-- trying to sing. Her mouth is dry. There are women around here, they help her sip from an ipu. The water is salty and burns her lips. She tries to make a sound, but her voice breaks, her body breaks, like a broken vessel. Naha ka ipu. The mind is the body and the body is the mind, the gourd is broken and the water has flowed out and cannot be stitched back together-- she is in anguish. How can she breathe? How can she do anything besides rip at the air, claw at her arms, beat the earth? The women are with her. E oli-- chant. They shush and sooth her. E hanu ha a hoomaka. Take a breath and start.
She has to breathe in order to chant. Each word chokes from her like a coal. A word that begins as a song becomes a wail of pain, peeling up to the heavens, shaking the brackish pond. It threates to crack at the top, like a misbalanced wave in high wind.
E holomua-- keep going. Keep chanting. The keen becomes a word. Then another word. A gasp, a choke. A song.
Keep chanting.
The women around her have unbroken ipu, they are vessels and instruments. They can carry the water for her, they can beat the time by slapping the round bellies of the gourds and thudding them on the ground.
Chanting-- singing. Praying. Healing. One beat after the next. The slap of the hand on the ipu becomes the steady thump of her heart, the slap of her hands on her chest.
The wail rises up in her again. But the words of the chant are in it now, like seabirds carried on a high vortex breeze. It's not the scrambled tumult of a storm but a strong wind. The chant can fly, the chant can bring back the clean air of the open ocean, the salty winds of the channels. That salt spray stings and burns her eyes and salt crystals dry on her cheeks.
Keep chanting.
The goddess is there beside her-- Namaka, the great destroyer, the great mover. The one, if I'm remembering right, who caused Pele to flee and make new land. She is the terrible ocean wave, but also the builder of communities.
Day stretches into starlight and back to dawn. The mad woman-- the battered woman, the possessed woman, the woman with blood on her hands-- her voice is now a whisper, but steady. Steady. The chanting is rebuilding her body, reweaving the broken ipu of her mind. She is not what she was any longer. She is not the victim, she is not the perpetrator. She is a new thing now, something made of briny water, stinging air, and the steady thud-thud-thud of her heart-drum.
This woman hovers before me. In the dust, angry and frightened and relieved. She is learning to trust the beat of the ipu, the power of the song, to send the pain up into the air on the salty wings of the chant.
These are mad times. We are the victims and the perpetrators-- we have been possessed by the spirit of consumerism, capitalism, short-sighted self-service. We have splintered ourselves from our families and the earth. We have polluted and wasted our minds and our bodies and our planet. We are victims too-- we have also been polluted, beaten, wounded. We have been abandoned, rejected, damaged. That which we wreak on each other we have wreaked on ourselves. This is the reality.
But we can heal. Keening, wailing, grieving-- in our brokenness, we can find the rhythm of our chants, our songs, our mantras, our prayers. The words and melodies and rhythms can ground our heartblood to the earth, our salty blood to the water, our breath to the air. One breath at a time, one word at a time. We can sew a watertight vessel.
It is not easy. It is easier to protect the intact. But we have to rebuild ourselves.
At this moment, when everything is uncertainty but we can hear the rumble of Namaka's great and terrible wave-- a wave of change and destruction and new growth-- we can protect our bodies and our minds, drawing tight those weavings that connect us to each other. We can heal the brokenness of each others' vessels, and our own.
One song at a time.
He nahā ipu auaneʻi o paʻa i ka hupau humu (RC 404)? Is it a broken gourd that can be mended by drawing together and sewing?
Just a quick peek.
I turned on my phone-- facebook scrolled. My early morning/late night softness ground into the tinnitus of screen-light anxiety.
No. Somebody dead from Covid19 at the hospital down the road, right here in Springfield. No tests available yet.
How do I mitigate this, what's the lamb's blood I need to splash across the door?
The facebook algorithm reads my mind: Buy this Jewish holiday box and learn to celebrate Jewish holidays at home.
Oi Mama.... I suddenly remember my mom's sweet crooning in her Dutch-accented Yiddish and I am crying. How I wish she was here to joke, comfort, share vision, extend healing from the spiritual power of motherhood, of cronehood. Would we blend the sacred and the silly, light the candles and braid the challah, play Irish tunes on St. Patricks and invoke the priestesshood of our pioneer ancestresses? I don't know. There's only speculation and extrapolation, because death is a greedy asshole and gives you no glimpse through that slammed shut door into what might have been
How old would she be? I have to do the math. 64?
I hate this, I hate everything.
No.
I love everything. That's why it hurts.
Liko is somehow upsidedown in the bed, soft sleeping baby face by my knees, dry little feet on the pillow, and Maile is against the wall. They've balled up the comforter between the two of them. I gather up an extra blanket from the floor. I put on a podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, to try and go back to sleep. But, I find myself holding my phone again.
Scroll, scroll. Parents panicking about homeschooling their kids, apocalypse fashion jokes, and dozens of videos of jingle dress dancers.
Beautiful young girls in their regalia, dancing in their homes, on their porches, in their yards. A dance for healing. A dance of reclaiming detritus and making it medicine for a plague. A different okague, a hundred years ago. They are the sound of tabacco healing, of offering, of prayer.
The sky is lightening through the blinds, and I can hear the traffic picking up on the highway behind our house
I finally give up and get out of bed, plug in my phone somewhere out of reach, to sit in the early morning quiet and think. Specifically to think about chanting.
There's a mad woman I keep thinking about. Kneeling in the dust, mind shattered.
A long time ago, several lifetimes ago, I was given the great gift of visiting the Kaneiolouma complex in Poipu. It's an astonishing place, hidden just out of sight right off one of the most popular beaches on Kauai. It defies categorization, because it was a temple, a sports arena, and a royal village. I wrote about it, actually, which may be why the memory is so clear to me.
I wrote: "Pele's older sister (was it Namakaokaha'i?) came to Kauai, and married her women to chiefs around the islands to establish her supremacy. Then, when she witnessed a man beating his wife, she inhabited the battered woman's body, and slaughtered the husband. But this possession experience broke the woman's mind. The goddess took the woman to the very heiau where we were standing, and taught her to chant. "Us Hawaiians," said [Randy Wichman], "we love chanting. We could chant all day and all night." The chanting, after endless days and nights, eventually healed her mind.
The Hawaiians pull the broken people inwards, he explained. Someday, he said, you all will look around and wonder how to heal the mind of someone you love. Remember this story. Heal them with chanting, with hula."
I keep thinking about this woman. She is so clear before me, kneeling on the soft earth, the waves crashing close by, just out of sight behind the trees. She is singing-- trying to sing. Her mouth is dry. There are women around here, they help her sip from an ipu. The water is salty and burns her lips. She tries to make a sound, but her voice breaks, her body breaks, like a broken vessel. Naha ka ipu. The mind is the body and the body is the mind, the gourd is broken and the water has flowed out and cannot be stitched back together-- she is in anguish. How can she breathe? How can she do anything besides rip at the air, claw at her arms, beat the earth? The women are with her. E oli-- chant. They shush and sooth her. E hanu ha a hoomaka. Take a breath and start.
She has to breathe in order to chant. Each word chokes from her like a coal. A word that begins as a song becomes a wail of pain, peeling up to the heavens, shaking the brackish pond. It threates to crack at the top, like a misbalanced wave in high wind.
E holomua-- keep going. Keep chanting. The keen becomes a word. Then another word. A gasp, a choke. A song.
Keep chanting.
The women around her have unbroken ipu, they are vessels and instruments. They can carry the water for her, they can beat the time by slapping the round bellies of the gourds and thudding them on the ground.
Chanting-- singing. Praying. Healing. One beat after the next. The slap of the hand on the ipu becomes the steady thump of her heart, the slap of her hands on her chest.
The wail rises up in her again. But the words of the chant are in it now, like seabirds carried on a high vortex breeze. It's not the scrambled tumult of a storm but a strong wind. The chant can fly, the chant can bring back the clean air of the open ocean, the salty winds of the channels. That salt spray stings and burns her eyes and salt crystals dry on her cheeks.
Keep chanting.
The goddess is there beside her-- Namaka, the great destroyer, the great mover. The one, if I'm remembering right, who caused Pele to flee and make new land. She is the terrible ocean wave, but also the builder of communities.
Day stretches into starlight and back to dawn. The mad woman-- the battered woman, the possessed woman, the woman with blood on her hands-- her voice is now a whisper, but steady. Steady. The chanting is rebuilding her body, reweaving the broken ipu of her mind. She is not what she was any longer. She is not the victim, she is not the perpetrator. She is a new thing now, something made of briny water, stinging air, and the steady thud-thud-thud of her heart-drum.
This woman hovers before me. In the dust, angry and frightened and relieved. She is learning to trust the beat of the ipu, the power of the song, to send the pain up into the air on the salty wings of the chant.
These are mad times. We are the victims and the perpetrators-- we have been possessed by the spirit of consumerism, capitalism, short-sighted self-service. We have splintered ourselves from our families and the earth. We have polluted and wasted our minds and our bodies and our planet. We are victims too-- we have also been polluted, beaten, wounded. We have been abandoned, rejected, damaged. That which we wreak on each other we have wreaked on ourselves. This is the reality.
But we can heal. Keening, wailing, grieving-- in our brokenness, we can find the rhythm of our chants, our songs, our mantras, our prayers. The words and melodies and rhythms can ground our heartblood to the earth, our salty blood to the water, our breath to the air. One breath at a time, one word at a time. We can sew a watertight vessel.
It is not easy. It is easier to protect the intact. But we have to rebuild ourselves.
At this moment, when everything is uncertainty but we can hear the rumble of Namaka's great and terrible wave-- a wave of change and destruction and new growth-- we can protect our bodies and our minds, drawing tight those weavings that connect us to each other. We can heal the brokenness of each others' vessels, and our own.
One song at a time.
He nahā ipu auaneʻi o paʻa i ka hupau humu (RC 404)? Is it a broken gourd that can be mended by drawing together and sewing?
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