Ivana Kupala: The Night of the Forest-Spirit (Jayne's Nature)

by Jayne Louise

  While everything was being set up, people gradually got undressed. Once I saw everyone was pretty much doing what had to get done, and quietly too, I stuffed all my things into my little backpack and strolled off past the fire pit to the water’s edge. It was actually chilly– we’d had an unusually cool weekend and though I was hoping and praying for a fine warm summer’s night for our little festivity, God had granted us only about 65 degrees and a partially-cloudy sky. But He had given us a blessing too– it was the night of a full moon, in fact the very night the moon would come closest to the earth for the whole year. I stood there ankle-deep in the chilly Pinelands water and stared up at the huge orange orb lying just above the treetops across the river. Wow– what a sensation I had then. Of course we could get used to the cool air, because everything else seemed perfect for a gathering in the wilds of nature tonight.

  Hannah hurried up beside me, her arms folded tightly in front of herself as she lowered one toe into the water. ‘Are you actually going swimming?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I have to,’ I told her. ‘There’s only one way to really check your perimeter.’

  ‘To– what?’

  I smiled at her and started forwards into the water. ‘I have to check our surroundings,’ I said softly to her, from about two yards away. The water was up to my knees. ‘We have to know who can find us and how they’ll come.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, watching me. ‘Well it’s just that it’s really cold.’

  ‘It’s not that cold,’ I said. ‘And just think of all those Russian girls who go naked till October! They would think this is a sauna!’

  Hannah nodded, still standing there ankle-deep with her arms folded in front of herself. ‘So I guess I should just get wet,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, and then, probably just to show off how bold I was, I lowered myself right down to my shoulders. Of course it was freezing! –but I was resolved to not let that stop me.

  Hannah, brave little doll that she was, dropped straight in to her shoulders right beside me, nearly splashing me. Then, without a word, I began crawling along the bottom towards deeper water.

  As expected the water was very cold down deep and dramatically warmer at the surface. I won’t say it was very comfortable, but it wasn’t bad at all. I swam out into the current, rolling onto my back and staring back into the woods where the others were. I could hear them... a little. I could see them, mostly because of the flashlights. Our little camp was far enough back that we’d only be detected from here if we did something to deserve it. That was good.

  Hannah got used to the water, probably even more than I did. She’s a pretty good swimmer and had 50 yards or more on me, heading upstream away from our camp. Abruptly she turned around and came back, doing a face-up breaststroke as I do to keep quiet. ‘Hey,’ she whispered, ‘what’s that place down there?’

  We both looked downstream. ‘Believe it or not, that is a house,’ I said. ‘With enough lights to look like a casino or something.’

  ‘My mother said there is a casino here,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s just a restaurant,’ I said. ‘Sweetwater Casino... it’s up the river some more.’

  ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Is that a boat?’

  We listened. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘They won’t even know where to look for us here.’

  That wasn’t totally true though. If they saw a fire, they could report it. That would be bad.

  We swam back to where we had waded in and tiptoed through the pine needles to the center of our little camp. Angel had organized a firewood search and they’d come up with a pretty good pile of sticks. Arabella and Sarah, the former Girl Scouts, had engineered a pretty good fire pit with plenty of sand around the outside, and they were just starting to light it when we got there.

  Jem was the only other one all naked so far. Jules had taken off everything but her panties– pink I think– and was kneeling in the sand arranging the stack of wood as Naomi and Gretel piled it on. She’ll do stuff like that, even at home. Hannah and I appeared, gleaming wet like primordial monsters, and immediately Tina stood up and peeled off her top.

  ‘Oh,’ Angel said then, ‘are we starting?’

  I smiled at her, still standing there in front of the screen room. ‘If you want. As soon as everyone’s ready we can start the service.’

  Angel nodded and stepped around behind me, going into the screen room where her sleeping bag was to undress. The others seemed to fade back, away from the little fire, to locate their stuff too. Well– it would be awful to have discarded clothes just lying around!

  In the beginning I was most worried about Arabella. She is the most conservative of all of us– I do wish she went to our church, just to have her in Youth Group! –and even after I told her what it was going to be about I was worried she would keep her clothes on or just hide in the tent with a blanket all night. But after helping set everything up, setting out snacks and drinks, really being a big help, she noticed other people taking off their clothes. She met eyes with me and suddenly said, ‘Oo, am I late?’

  I laughed. ‘It wouldn’t be possible to be,’ I said.

  ‘No, I mean–’ And she shoved her denim shorts off in front of me, just like that.

  She didn’t take off her panties though. It was the end of her period and she was embarrassed to admit it– like that was anything to be ashamed of. I just said it wouldn’t matter and promised her no one would make an issue of it. And no one did.

  * * *

  * * *

  Benedictions

  Everyone spread blankets on the ground around the fire, which was beginning to glow very nicely in the pit. Then we all joined hands for prayer. Each of us looked around the circle wondering who would start it. But all eyes seemed to land on me. ‘It was your idea,’ Angel said to me. ‘So the honor is yours.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and opened the prayer book.

  The evening service includes the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed which just about everyone knew by heart. I had picked out Psalm 121 and let Jules read that out of the Bible, because it’s about trusting that God will protect us. Jem read a piece out of Romans 15 about the happiness of living by faith. Then I read from Luke 18 about the way we must always be little children before God the Father, trusting and innocent, without any doubt that our own faith in our loving God will be all we need to keep us in His care.

  After that there came the collects for protection and peace, so I invited everyone to offer an intercession for our gathering tonight. No one was too eager to start so I started by asking for a blessing on our friendship and fellowship, and most of the others just agreed with that, but there were also a few more particular requests. I always say that God is not Santa Claus– that He doesn’t grant everything we ask for, because in God’s eyes some of the things we ask for are just stupid. But tonight we were all very sincere.

  Jem said, ‘May God grant us all strength and confidence, in the knowledge that we all love each other and that no one of us is better than any of the others.’

  Everyone said ‘Amen’ to that.

  Jules immediately put in, ‘May God keep us in mind that this is all His creation, that the forest we celebrate tonight is a gift to us from a good and loving God.’

  Everyone said ‘Amen’ to that too.

  Then Arabella added, ‘May God keep us in mind that we are His creation too.’

  That was a good one and everyone said ‘Amen’ then too.

  When everyone else was done, I passed the book to Jem for the collect for the answering of prayer. Sarah offered to read the one for protection through the night. Angel read the one for peace and health. Then Gretel read St Chrysostom and the book got passed back to me. I read the lay version of the benediction and then we all crossed ourselves and said ‘Amen.’ And I put the book away.

  ‘That was really nice,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah agreed. ‘You rock, Jayne.’

&
nbsp; People laughed. ‘I don’t know about that–’

  ‘But you do.’ Hannah smiled. She was right next to me. I guess that was to be expected, you know.

  ‘So what’s next?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘Well, I think we should start with a few stories,’ I said. ‘I know Jules has one– can you go first, Jules?’

  ‘If no one else wants to,’ she said.

  We all sat back as though to avoid that. ‘I guess you’re on,’ I said to her, and there were giggles.

  * * *

  * * *

  Telling stories

  Jule’s story was a piece of Watership Down in which no one ever believes the one neurotic rabbit till it turns out he was right to worry about the end of the world all along. ‘And the moral of the story is,’ she said, and smiled as she looked around the circle, ‘that a prophet is never accepted among his own people.’

  Most of us laughed then. ‘That’s great!’ Angel laughed, and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘But that is so true,’ I said. ‘I mean if Jesus came today, would he be any different?’

  We all thought about that, and most people added their ideas about what we would like Jesus to look like and act like if He were to come back and walk among us. Hannah– bless her heart– said she hoped he would be good-looking. Actually she said, ‘I hope he’s hot.’ We all laughed. Then Sarah started up with that dumb infatuation with Christian Bale, especially from the movie about Mary in which he played Jesus. I just groaned and called for another story then.

  Jem’s story was from Lord of the Flies. She told how the teacher made them choose one of the boys and say what you would have done in his situation and she had written a paper on how difficult it was since there were no female characters in the story at all. (Actually she picked Piggy.) So she told us about how dumb she thought the shipwrecked boys were for peeing in their own water supply, something which no woman would ever do. ‘And so the moral of that story is, give a rubber hose to a guy and he will squirt it anywhere.’

  We all laughed wildly at that. You might think that is so not Jem, since she can be such a priss sometimes, not tolerating dirty jokes or foul language, and not dating and really avoiding all boys all the time, but she is definitely not stupid and knows a lot more about boys than they think she does. Then again maybe that is only because she reads absolutely everything.

  Arabella told her story next, apologizing that it was not as intellectual as the other two. It was about her having to save the day when a window at their house blew in during a snowstorm this past winter, on a weekend when her parents were in Cancun. She called 911, she called the insurance company, and she called the repair man, and by the time her parents returned she had taken care of the whole thing herself. And they were surprised at what she was able to do without them. So she said the moral of the story was that sometimes even your own parents could underestimate you, even as far as not believing you are capable of half the stuff you really can do.

  ‘That is a really good story,’ I told her, and squeezed her hand then.

  She just looked at me and smiled. At that moment I think she felt better about herself than she ever did among any of those other friends she used to think she had.

  * * *

  * * *

  The dances

  Jules volunteered to dance first and stood up to slide off her pinkish cotton panties, and Jem and I played a little on guitars and Angel played tambourine as her accompaniment. At first it was funny– she looked so serious doing it and no one knew how to deal with it. But we’ve done goofy stuff like this at home many times. Jules was trained for ballet and is very smooth and fluid, and we were all able to appreciate how beautiful it really was to see a good routine. I’d seen it before– she had asked me to watch her a few weeks ago. I was impressed that she had actually practiced so much, but it did answer the age-old question, ‘What has she been doing thumping around in her room?’

  Jules was not long, about three minutes, and almost at once Naomi got up to dance too. Jem and I didn’t stop playing. Naomi did this thing almost like an exotic dancer, which I thought was kind of weird– I actually stopped watching her for a while. She kept squatting and grinding around like it was supposed to be sexy. Then she was reaching for the sky, stretching, extending her arms towards the heavens as though pleading with God to be accepted. Then– very suddenly– she dropped her knees beside the fire, glancing one last time up at the sky, before collapsing with her face in the sand.

  ‘Wow,’ Arabella said.

  No one had applauded Jules because Naomi had gotten up so fast, so we all clapped, not too loudly, for both of them. ‘What was that,’ Jem asked, ‘Mary Magdalene’s "Lord I am not worthy" dance?’

  People laughed. Naomi got up and looked straight at Jem. ‘But I’m not,’ she said quietly.

  Jem shrugged and picked up the guitar again. ‘None of us are,’ she said simply. ‘But you’re not Mary Magdalene either, hun.’

  Naomi nodded a little. I couldn’t tell her her face was red from blushing or from the sand.

  Others danced then too; I can’t quite remember who went before whom. (Jem wrote it all down somewhere.) Then Jules and Naomi got up again and there were about six of us dancing at once, moving slowly and gracefully round the fire, clapping hands every four with the tambourine and turning or pirouetting each clap. It was kind of cool, like some native tribal ceremony, which is exactly what we all hoped this would be like.

  There were other stories too, people telling how something out of the Bible applied to real life, or how some family issue had something to do with something we learned in school or at church, or how someone had told off some guy and later felt really good about it because it had so obviously been the right thing to do. I realized there was a lot of girl-on-girl pride here, not the bad kind that’s such a sin but the good kind that we don’t feel we have to apologize for anything. Already the whole gathering was a success– and the sun had only been down about an hour.

  The big thick moon in the eastern sky glowed bright orange for a long while into the night. With the little light from the fire we all looked much more sun-bronzed than we really were. It had not got any warmer and most of us were huddled in our beach towels. But no one ever had a thought about putting on clothes, even to escape the evening’s chill. It was simply not an issue at all.

  Arabella was sitting back to watch quietly as though she could erase herself from the party. But everyone was very understanding and no one made a point of her shyness, which only encouraged Arabella to stop worrying about it. So after she had checked that everything was all right she came back to the circle without the panties, and asked for her turn at dancing right away. And I was really impressed by what she did. I think we all were. She has great moves, very fluid, understated and laid-back, yet exotic in a very modest sort of way. It wasn’t a long dance, but it was definitely one of the most interesting ones we saw.

  Hannah was the only one without an actual story but she had joined the festival too late to prepare anything. She danced twice just to make up for it, but no one minded. Eventually it ended up that we each shared a real-life story that was ironic or funny, and the stories got shorter and as we all took turns people became more and more open with each other. A few more people danced. We sang a few songs with Jem and me, and even Sarah, accompanying on guitar. Some of them were from our stage show. Some were from the church hymnal. Some we purely nonsense, like nursery rhymes. There were no rules and no expectations, except that we were all good girls and we all had respect for each other. Once I happened to look around at everyone and I realized we’d all stopped thinking about being naked together. It just wasn’t a focal point of the whole thing at all. We were just girls having a good time by ourselves, with no drugs and no boys and nothing naughty or blasphemous going on in any way. The night was perfect.

  * * *

  * * *

  Shake, shake, shake some more

  We did break f
or food once. We all had sandwiches, celery sticks and carrots, pretzels and chips, and bottled water or soda, and Angel had brought a tall Igloo with a tap full of iced tea which was gone in like the first hour. After that people were just helping themselves by dashing off to the coolers in the screen room and hurrying back to rejoin the dancing or singing. The chill was easily forgotten– once you are up and dancing it’s not easy to stay cold. In fact most of us were sweating.

  They all called for me to dance– I was actually the last one to get up for a first dance, mainly because I had been playing guitar. So I left my guitar to Angel and she and Jem and Sarah played, just plain chords and a few notes, like some kind of country thing. I just did what I had practiced, a kind of jazz/ballet routine I have done for a free dance before, except I added a few things especially about going around the fire. People liked it, which was all I wanted. I am not really a good dancer. Then Jem got up to dance with me, both of us going around at opposite sides of the fire pit, clapping and turning like Middle Eastern harem girls or those traditional men’s dances that the Jews used to do. It was fun for us, so we each started reaching down and pulling other people to their feet, and finally it was Sarah and Angel– not the two strongest guitar players in the world! –accompanying all of us to this eight-girl Jewish hora. The girls on guitars strummed up to this big crescendo and we all ended very dramatically with our hands up in the air and our faces turned up towards the heavens. It was so dramatic and serious that we all cracked up laughing!

  So ended the music and dancing. We sat around the fire, quieter now, and told a few stories and drank juice and ate snacks. That was when Jem and Angel sat on the log. You have to watch it in the woods– you can’t brush against just anything and– especially if you are a girl– you can’t just sit down on anything either. Then again I have been dumb enough to sit right on the ground... even Indians don’t do that!