Nataraja Pathu

Poetry, Dance & Spirituality

So I have to explain how I got here.
I was looking to meet Indian dance – and I found this :

I was amazed from start to finish – these young women are, for me the westerner, a dream come true.

So I wanted to know more – of course.

Please, don’t laugh, it is the totally uneducated wonder of an ignoramus that I am sharing with you.

Here is that India is not only Indiana Jones (sorry …. sincerely) and I learn that Shiva is so much more than this very caricatured god who appeared on our screens.
So I discover this quite splendid prayer, which is called, if I am not mistaken: Nataraja Pathu, translated in English – that you can find in full on the indupedia.com site.

Above all, it is a prayer – a poem in a way –

Here is an excerpt :

Deer dancing, moon dancing , streams dancing , Goddess Parvathi dancing,
Lord Vishnu dancing , books dancing , Vedas dancing , waves dancing , Brahma who gave Vedas dancing,
King dancing , all the crowd in heaven dancing , the god with elephant face dancing,
The two ear globes dancing , armlets and the tiger cloth dancing , the baby Subrahmanya dancing,
Along with Jnana Sambandar , Indra, the eighteen sages and eight direction guards dancing,
The sparse thumbai flowers dancing , the Nandi the vehicle of Shiva dancing , dancing girls dancing,
And with fate the time is running, when I sing about you, please come to me with a feast.
Oh God , Oh darling of Parvathi , Oh Nataraja of Chidambaram who gave birth to me.

And this show – absolutely extraordinary – that we understand so much better when we are foreigners once we had read this poem-prayer :

How to discover this and not dream of seeing it in real life, and seeing it shared?
It is definitely not possible.

So I share.

& I’m certainly not going to venture into a learned lesson on the subject, because it’s a subject I have absolutely no mastery of.
I will leave that to others, to those who know, love and practice.

To you, if you can & if you want.

Home Page

Featured Image : from the show above