Natalita's "Hole in Her Body" calls us home
by Chloe Behan
October 5, 2020
All purchases from this year’s digital sales of “Hole in Her Body,” will be donated to Project Beacon and distributed to families afflicted by the MMIW crisis.
In the winter of 2019, I had a recurring vision that pressed itself against my stomach and pushed my feet into the frozen ground; women in red encircling the mountain, raising their smoke to the sky, crying out for their mothers and sisters. I longed for the fulfilment of this feeling until it subsided and was washed under layers of silt and new seasons. I had another image enter my mind during this time, one that I have not stopped seeing, a woman with a hole straight through her core. I have this image tattooed on my body.
“Hole in Her Body” struck me deeply and immediately.
Natalita’s work is a journey from being born to giving birth, from snow to ice, snowmelt to rain. Life giving powers of water are embodied by the mother. The mother mythmakes according to the principles of water.
“Hole in Her Body” calls us home, holds us in the beauty that we know exists within our perfect forms, brings us back to the dream of our first memory.
“They Whisper” opens this shared dreamscape by holding the listener in place. One finds their body encased in the river, frozen over, as the pressure of isolation, that bright grey sky, conjures spirits that you plead with... I am here... the wind rolls in and we are cast into the ecstasy of awareness, betrayal and forgiveness.
The myth continues to unfold summoning the mother, her names echo through a mirror of her mouth. Sacrifice begets abandonment, and yet…. We can still feel the soft edges of the love-shaped hole that we left when we entered this world. We can still hear the heartbeat that taught us life and conceived us as sacred. That old medicine, empathy, revitalizes nerves and stretches it’s limbs like a newborn fawn.
There must be something about being held within the ghost of a great lake that allows for a certain kind of reflection. In “Put Your Head On The Ground,” you feel the glacial dam cracking open all those thousands of years ago, water breaking. Glacial Lake Missoula rushes out and we are born into 2020, a year of reckoning. Time collapses as body becomes a conduit for our ancestors’ dreams, expanding to softly gather the pieces pulled away from our core by power that serves power. This sonically vast piece crests as chaos pierces through the self and innocence grasps for answers.
Curled fetal position you; humbled, sacrificed you, asks the first question and is answered in tongues of transformative love, rainfall smoothing your wholeness. The divine perfection of all that is seeps through the earth, soaking you with stillness. A seed rests and is cradled by the earth once more.
Each time we dream, we dream towards consciousness. “Hole in Her Body” carries the familiarity of re-entering my body and remembering that hope is not only a tool for survival, hope is also the bearer of new life.
cover art by Riley Teahan and Natalita