Lenapehoking

Hours pass between the time it takes us to go from our home base at Recess Art in Brooklyn to Denniston Hill, an upstate farmland and the location for our residency over the next few days. Being born and raised in the city gave me a deep suspicion of rural areas. Too quiet, too few people, too many trees, nothing and nothing and no one for miles upon miles. I’m lucky to be in a car of equally skeptical city folks, making my anxious travel complaints seem more like reasonable observations. There is nothing out here. Yet, something is out here. Something I don’t know, something larger and more ancient than myself, waiting for us. Of course it was, we were going to take from it.

The first defining feature of Denniston Hill would have to be its road. Paved and steep, it seems like a dividing line between The Farmhouse and the backwoods from the second house. The road is like a long scar. Still, it’s a pretty place, and this pretty place's pretty face was The Farmhouse. The Farmhouse is not only cozy but well-made with a variety of items, books, games, and spices, as well as lodging for half of our twelve-person party. Then, there’s the typical nervousness that comes with sleeping under the same roof with new people. Perhaps this is the time you'll find out that you’re a bad sleep-singer or maybe that your nightly habits are weird. But that did not happen, although it would have been a safe space to do so. I ended up sleeping in the second house, which had a beautiful, large, clean, and cozy interior with a hot tub outside and a swing perfect for a ghost. The swing overlooked the fields where we would be harvesting the clay from. But we would return to The Farmhouse for our meals and our bonding.

Tonight, we begin our sculpting. But this time, not clay, we learned to shape aluminum foil filled with food in order to cook it. A creation of vessels to fill our vessels, cooked over a smoky campfire, nice for a crisp, cold night.

The next morning, the mist came lurking like the blue breath of a giant. Deers are prancing through it. Why were they even up so early? What business could they have at such a time? Maybe they've always done that, and hopefully always will. Marcela, our lead, teaches us the name ‘Lenapehoking.’ The name was given by the indigenous Lenape people who lived and tended the land along the Esopus Creek.

Again, we gather. Marcela, the artist leading the harvesting, teaches us a bit of the history of this field, and then how to find, test, and identify clay in the soil. My only fear is confusing clay with deer droppings (if they’re different at all). We wouldn’t take clay from the first stream we saw. We would go up and deeper into the fields, right next to a beaver dam, where we would find the spot of our excavation. We gathered at the bank, surrounding the spot that we would bite with our shovel. Marcela tells us to not just take from this place but to ask for permission to acknowledge this field, this land, this soil we are harvesting from. And so they offer a song in Nahuatl, the indigenous language of their homeland Mexico. We chant along as we can.

The worms burrow through me. They are the largest of the tenants of my body. They wiggle, crawl, fight, reproduce, and eat within me. Other life, smaller "lifes" as well, siblings and cousins to the worms. They devour the death inside of me, all to share the same fate. Unchanged. Over the cycles of light and dark, heat and cold, dry and wet, they look to me for shelter. Some even live on top of me, next to me, and in the water that I use to thicken. Life is an energetic thing, even when stationary, it’s so busy. They are not the water. They are not the stones. They are not the dead, they are not me. I have held their tracks, their burrows, their shapes, and in the recesses of my being, deep within me, I remember. Unlike them, I do not die. I simply get bigger, more wet, denser, and thicker.

New humans are here. Yes, I know humans. As long as I could “know,” I knew them. For it was their blood that gave me awareness of myself. Sure, I could watch, feel, and sense what was around me before, but it wasn’t until the first human lost their life's blood here that I could become aware. The humans track over the grass that stands atop my head, approaching my form next to the water. I try to pay them little mind, but there’s this song. A song unlike any I have ever heard pulls me. It pulls me from my vastness and my depth and brings me to the water. They surround me, and I am held there. I want to move, but I can’t. That is not in my nature. I wanted to resist, but that was not in my nature. I am not a life, like the stones around me. But the young naive “lives” inside me start to dance, they too love these vibrations. Even the green ones, my children more than any, release their grip on me. I want to deny the song, but it is too much, simply too much. There’s something, something, SOMETHING, standing above the humans, behind the humans. It’s silent, and distant, and watching, here and unnoticed by all but myself. And when the voices of these humans come together, I give myself up to the bite.

I sit inside the darkness. The worms that lived inside me panicked once the memory of the song had drifted. But by then, it was already too late for the protest, we were in the darkness. The darkness is a comfort to the worms. But I, in my many cycles, have never been so without warmth. Much less without light. I miss the light. I miss the water. I miss the everyday traffic of life. I miss the rest of me. My awareness slowly starts to fade from my home until I am only what is in the darkness. I sleep.

It’s their voice again. The human who started all this with their song. I wish they would sing it again. If not for the sake of myself, then for the life I bear inside of me. I’ll be fine, I cannot die, but they are just children. They start to die and feed off their dead just to die at another moment. The usual, but this time, they are unreplaced. I can feel the energy of life diminishing. I try to sing this song to them, trying to remember the vibrations as best I can, but it's difficult.

Through the darkness, the movement, the air, and the repositioning I find myself being stepped on. No, not stepped. Deliberately stomped on by this human and then more. But they seem happy… Enjoying themselves. And so I’ll endure, for I am clay. A few stomps or a step is nothing. I have been stepped on by giants and seen their ends, felt sharp blades rip out of me and impale me, I've seen wars and battles countless times. I did not fear this.

But I do fear what is to come. Humans slowly and methodically remove the life within me. They take the worm survivors, both big and small as well as the plants. They even take the stones from me, my constant companions and mentors, removed from my being until only a few remain. Then I am divided and packed into separate pieces, losing who I am to the human hands and the force of shaping. And then… Back into the light.

Piece by piece, this human arranges me. My awareness returns. Repopulated with plants I look almost myself again. I have been made into vessels of all sorts, molded by different human hands for different purposes. This form, one of my many, why did they mold me to be this? They put their hand on the gape of my being. A silent spinning, an invisible vortex that threatens to break me apart yet again. Instead it summons something, a being more eternal than I, life, the stones or the rivers, heat, or even physicality itself. “What are you?” I ask. This being does not give me an answer, instead it tells me my name, Lenapehoking, as well as stories of my loved ones. An image of the river, a creator of mine, is pressed on the wall behind me. This being uses this image to tell me of myself and my history that I have forgotten, that is until the day of ritual. The being goes silent and listens.

Humans eat food, they dance, and reminisce about the lives they led that brought them here. Some speak of their creations made from my being, and what these vessels would mean for the ones who would receive me as a gift. They wrapped their arms around the image of the river they found me on. Then they sang me many more songs, songs about me, not about me, about a human similar to me. That human even tells a story similar to the one I am telling now. And finally, after all the sharing, and speaking, and presentation that humans love so much, a song returns. The song that stole me and bound me to begin with does so once again. It’s as beautiful as it had been, and the harmonies of human voices, the rhythm of the smacks against their chest, I can do nothing but look for my new companion. This being, something, is gone but I am not empty. I simply want to go home. This is goodbye after all.

This person, Marcela, is the last to say goodbye. The being was not taking refuge within them and not I. And the next touch I feel myself expand and I am suddenly everything and everyone that exists in this world. The feeling disappears along with all traces of the being when my first brick is removed. One by one I am separated, and the final tenant, my final child, lays in my ashes, a survivor of burns, destruction and manipulation. Alone without my protection the humans pick it up, speak to it and bring it back to my parts. I want to ask the worm what it was told, but they are not as talkative as the ancient things or the humans. That’s enough, I give in.

Darkness. Then the sound of my family. The water. There’s a squish under me. Then another. Then I am placed one by one. Hard and sharp I am not as I was before but this is certainly home. I snuggle in, finally connecting with my higher self and all the goings on of my home. Life has not returned to some parts of me just yet, it’s hard and not easy to burrow through. It’ll take some time but I’ll soften up. Until then I am content with me and the worm survivor. Except I would love to ask Marcela and all their friends to hear that song one last time.