I walked through the flatlands they were dusty until we hit some plots of grass that clustered closer and closer like little spots until they became bigger spots and formed a hill bump and other hill bumps arose to make something like a park. thick beautiful trees came about eventually and formulated little pods.
I asked what we were preparing for and learned that two of the children were taking each other as siblings that day. This was a decision they came to themselves and no particular presentation was asked of them by the community. They lived as siblings for some time and in some spaces. They built their own place eventually. Or rather, they took one of the older structures in the community and picked apart all the roots that had wedged along the walls and moss clusters. The roots were native to the land and if you scraped off the skins with these sharp spoons each person crafted you could make a sharp puncture into it with your teeth and suck on it. It tasted like Dr. Pepper almost. I noticed that each community member built specific kits that changed as their time and actions changed, but it was a kit that they would figure out a way to fasten onto their daily garments and could also dismount when they would dance.
Each kit was somewhat specific so there was not a set way they were fastened but they learned various knots, weaving, and fabrication techniques to adjust their kits accordingly to their changes in their body shapes, which changed from slightly seasonly and then more so as they aged and their movements alone and with others. In the end there wasn’t overthinking involved but a lot of doing of harnessing, and sometimes with little add-on slots to accommodate the addition of another members’ kits and clips they may attach to each other with. This was very important, because there was little to no skin to skin contact between the community members. The role of the material, its harvesting and production, was absolutely crucial and simultaneously inexplicable to me.
These materials and weaves as sensory experience and cultural signifiers shaped this community’s world like no other I have seen before, particularly because I noticed no form of spoken language in the sense of words being exchanged. movements and sometimes in points of extremity sounds would emit from places stored low, like bellies. I only realised this during one of the season changes, when they would spend the length of the change in the complete nude exposing themselves to the elements and to one another eyes. I saw their bellies gesture intensely and intricately in patterns with their noises. It seemed to be heavily related to their breathing structures, where they would shoot out a fast short breath and other times long moon-like moans that would go from back right kidney around the intestines to upper left and weave into their chest. All the while of course I am not sure if this is their anatomy in any case, I never saw their insides since they were nearly always clothed and if any health reasons came to call for operation it was done remotely through the micromicro tools that would make miniature punctures just like how my teeth did into the roots.
Their garments were exceptionally clean despite their tendencies to accumulation because they had incredible airflow, since they were often adjusting toand accommodating their kin new and old.
Mits were made sometimes for new borns or those learning again old habits or those learning new exchanges. Haptics exercising maybe.
What they included in the kit were objects that each made with each other and signified the time and spaces they inhabited with others as the construction of that day. They would leave out a sign from their kit if they were open then to kinship with others, or needing another kind of tool for their kit they were looking to co-build or borrow. They would sort of caribeaner onto each other’s kits as an initial exchange. They would eventually learn if they would continue to work together or not, clip with others. People very close would thread to each other and when they were no longer marks on their garments remained with the history of their relations.
During the seasonal escapades, they would strip completely, store their costumes away, and move to the space of ceremonies in the low grounds. These were the seasons of their material harvesting and lands shucking, ceremonies of initiations, commitments, and departures.
Costumery-Objects that combined balance, gesture, dance, and body were intricately constructed during the period of seasonal escapade by those of the community for the ceremonial figures and at the height of the escapade and commencement of the seasonal waning the costumery-object was brought forth and presented to the ceremonial figures as sacred vessel by which they perform the initiation, commitment, or departure. (I later realised that in fact each of these were as much of the one as the other and each aspect were embodied, although may be closer or farther away depending on the figures’s states, ages, intentions, desires, experiences, abilities).
The choreography of the dance was co-remembered by the community as witness and co-recalled as an architecture through the construction of a secluded space for reflections and needs for the ceremonial remembrance. The construction’s materials disintegrated over an indeterminate, unknown period and in unknowable patterns. The space could house the participants although was never constructed as a home and rarely did this occur. (story of someone inhabiting for life?).
The ceremonial object was destroyed by everyone after - the ceremonial figures for whom the object was made and by the community participants (each of the latter having contributed something, and in some capacity the scale or depth indicated the weight of meaningfulness or energy or alignment to from the community agent to the ceremonial figures. there were no single gift exchanges). The destruction of the object was completed nearly immediately after its exertion and having been worn. I only experienced a single seasonal escapade and a single ceremony and ceremonial object emergence (demarcating its livelihood and death). This was the two children who were aged something I could not understand who were taking on something like siblingship. Their names were Daffodil and Maebelline (chosen together some time prior) and from what I understood they clipped to one another while constructing a tool by the small local waters and had to manoeuver in the river which had strong enough pulls to take one adrift before they were done with their tool-making. They only removed the upon threading their kits together which was quite rare since somewhat impractical, but they made a particular patterning system whose threading almost looked like yarn because it was so thick that permitted them to stretch quite intensely away and remain attached without bothering one another too much.
The community built a ceremonial-object that had a sort of hut-hat up top that perched precariously about 4 bellies high by two sets of knobby bones knotted together popping out of two individual headpieces for Daffodil and Maebelline alike. They were deep and narrow headpieces that were hard until reaching their shoulders and then with draperies - the drapieries hanging over Daffodil’s front and back set of eyes and noses, and for Maebelline over her ears and kidney flanks. They had two hanging mitts from sides facing each other (Daffodil’s right side facing Maebelline’s left side - for Maebelline there was a hole going through its left drapery to permit her hand into the mitt. The mitts had polar magnets in it, contouring their movements that required to be near determined by the modest distance between the edges of the hut-hat top they balanced as much as it rejected small gestures near the ground of their wavering hands in balancing dance.
The elders would play amongst large tree-sized vertical gongs with slits down the centre. The elders would run around them changing from bending their knees and going to their tippy toes to have the fullest range of heights and smack the standing gongs varying between their opposing foot pads and their palm pads in rhythms I couldn’t keep up with, but the motions would get so fast to make they made patterns that looked like the weaves and stitches of their normal costumes.
Babies and the more agile youth had translucent skins stick on the outside, somehow both slimy and smooth depending on how they inched each limb together to get to a designated spot through an intricate invisible mapping of their belles and breath and thin glass-like surface lacking any distinguishing marks that was rounded and seemingly impossible to mount. These structures almost looked like giant wine glasses. The would stick and slime their ways up to the surface and once mounted, their breath moving what must be at a very certain pace, they would lick their finger pads, place them barely touching onto the top of the rounded glass edge, and spray liquids out of their ends. this allowed them to would rapidly slide in unison together around the mouth of the glass and make the most deep and glorious of sounds, like from the belly of a stand up bass.
Kids emerged at about the same time since they were implanted during times of growth with the seasons into the materials gardens. I wondered about outliers, if this would be condemned.🝏