{"id":7314,"date":"2022-01-24T10:35:54","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T15:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7314"},"modified":"2022-01-24T10:35:54","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T15:35:54","slug":"beginnings-of-neskaya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7314","title":{"rendered":"Beginnings of Neskaya"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of my dancers are doing a project about the history of Neskaya, and wanted more information. \u00a0So I went back in my journal, looking for the first mention and some history about how the process happened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

October 14, 1991\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Neskaya<\/p>\n

I was too excited to sleep \u2014 filled with ideas for Neskaya, for poems, and illuminated pages, and dance\/poem\/performances.\u00a0 <\/span>This morning I wrote out a line from a\u00a0poem by Rumi: “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”<\/p>\n

I realize I haven’t written in here about Neskaya.\u00a0 <\/span>It is a project that has been slowly coming into focus for the last couple of years, first jokingly referred to as the “dance hall\/dojo”.\u00a0 <\/span>We have been imagining a big twelve sided building with a conical roof and big supportive beams, perhaps looking a little like a circus tent.\u00a0 <\/span>We drew some preliminary sketches and Dana found a piece of land between Rte 18 and the Superhighway, in Sugar Hill, which might be suitable.\u00a0 <\/span>I don’t know when it occurred to us to name it “Neskaya” but we both felt it was the right name, and I checked through The Forbidden Tower<\/a> to find that Neskaya was the Tower where Varzil the Good was Keeper, he who felt that there was no reason women couldn’t be keepers too.\u00a0 <\/span>Seemed like a good heritage.\u00a0 <\/span>The idea that Lynelle and Dana suggested in different ways, that I could pay somebody to help me construct my “dream theater”, has been incubating, and the Self Esteem workshop has pushed me over the threshold to commit to this project.<\/p>\n

This imagined building and the land were not what we ended up with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

January 1992<\/p>\n

Just write.\u00a0 <\/span>Begin from what’s in front of you.\u00a0 <\/span>No no no don’t wanna write.\u00a0 <\/span>Nothing to say.\u00a0 <\/span>I’ve been putting this off all day because nothing to say.\u00a0 <\/span>This is writing practice, practice<\/span>, dammit.\u00a0 <\/span>We sold stock yesterday for the building of Neskaya \u2014 It’s my<\/span> stock and I’ll do what I want to with it dammit DAMMIT.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Good news!\u00a0 <\/span>Marion Zimmer Bradley sends permission\/blessing to use Neskaya for a name.\u00a0 <\/span>Also wants to know more about us.\u00a0 <\/span>A nice hit of positive energy.<\/p>\n

I think of the I Ching’s response to the meaning\/purpose of my life: The Wanderer: the fire uses up the fuel and then moves on.\u00a0 <\/span>Neskaya may give some scope to do my life as vocation, spiritual practice, self-indulgence, self-expression all at the same time.\u00a0 <\/span>It will allow me to be both inward and outward at the same time.<\/p>\n

I love the notion that Neskaya will allow my life to be “vocation, spiritual practice, self-indulgence, self-expression all at the same time.” Looking back, I can see that it’s absolutely true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t want to do this.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel so sad and I have nothing to say.\u00a0 <\/span>Explore “sad”.\u00a0 <\/span>Feels like physical let-down, all the cells sinking down, damp, heavy.\u00a0 <\/span>Also a melting quality as though about to burst into tears.\u00a0 <\/span>An overall tone of sorrow \u2014 grey, smooth \u2014 like mist.\u00a0 <\/span>Why am I sad?\u00a0 <\/span>don’t know. not profitable question.\u00a0 <\/span>Sad.\u00a0 <\/span>Discouraged: that means the heart taken out.\u00a0 <\/span>Yes, a feeling of the heart taken out.\u00a0 <\/span>No heart in me, no heart for the journey.\u00a0 <\/span>I sit here beside the road, a refugee, too tired to open my pack and get out my camp stove and make tea.\u00a0 <\/span>And lonely, no friends.\u00a0 <\/span>I see people passing on the road in the grey mist, their clothes dusty, their backs laden.\u00a0 <\/span>They’ve been bombed out too, and all their energy is focussed on taking just one more step away from their gutted hopes.\u00a0 <\/span>I’m sitting here watching them, feeling sad and lonely and discouraged and exhausted.\u00a0 <\/span>I think it would be fun if I could gather a few of them around a campfire: we could make music, tell stories, we could hearten each other.\u00a0 <\/span>But I haven’t the energy to build the fire.\u00a0 <\/span>Oh yes and I’m beating on myself for not doing it \u2014 someone’s got to do it \u2014 you at least have the vision because you’re sitting by the side of the road.\u00a0 <\/span>But at this moment I’m too exhausted, too exhausted by illness dammit.\u00a0 <\/span>I have a sense of Neskaya as being more than a campfire, it’s an actual shelter to welcome the refugees and nourish them.\u00a0 <\/span>Although I don’t fully understand how we’re going to build it, I know nothing can stop us now: the money is in the bank, Greg will be our contractor.<\/p>\n

Here’s another example of “writing practice.” It started as “just keep the pen moving,” but sometimes became a way to tune in to another, deeper voice in myself. The imagery of being a refugee from a bombing actually comes from my early trauma, but I don’t know about that yet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So where am I now: big piece of motivation gone, which is the idea that I have to figure it out \u2014 there’s a sense of more trust in the process \u2014 O what was it?\u00a0 <\/span>That realization that I would of course go on changing and growing, I don’t have to keep after myself to make sure that I do it, I can ramble along, paying attention each day to what needs to be done that day, and the great dreams will come when they come, and the visions and insights will be sparked by events or workshops or therapy, and in between I’ll wash dishes and watch chickadees and do yoga and walk the dog.\u00a0 <\/span>This is my life.\u00a0 <\/span>And somehow, magically, Neskaya will get built, and Dana & I will do what it takes, and there will be difficulties and hassles and some things won’t turn out exactly right, but some time within the next year there will be that amazing space, and we will gather to do folk dance, and improvisational theater, and workshops combining movement, drawing, writing, dreams \u2014\u2014 and that will be very exciting and nourishing for me.<\/p>\n

I’m still calling it “folk dance” because that’s how I began teaching in Franconia, but by this time I know it’s “Sacred Circle Dance” and we are doing newly choreographed dances with the understanding that traditional folk dances have a spiritual dimension. This was part of why we wanted to build a special building for movement arts that are also spiritual practices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of my dancers are doing a project about the history of Neskaya, and wanted more information. \u00a0So I went back in my journal, looking for the first mention and some history about how the process happened. October 14, 1991\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circle-dance","category-journal","category-spirit","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}