Amidst the dissonance of traffic noises, amidst the scream of metal grinding mountain etched around our kitchen countertops, amidst the cacophony of factory farms that still echo through the grocery isles, I swirl.
What can I do? How can I really care for the world?
Again and again I am told: “Sing things to life”. My scientific mind rolls its eyes. But I keep hearing it. I hear it in my dreams where my throat opens like a milkweed pod sending seeds swirling towards distant fields. I hear it in the quiet dark spaces of a sweatlodge. I hear it every time my mouth shuts in the silence of ancestral fears and whole worlds of creativity bubbles up ready to send the cork flying.
What does it mean to sing things to life? This question has been right by my heart, through the motions of my days, for some time.
Part of an answer reached me in the summer. I was by a stretch of unrestrained river coursing towards the coast of Vancouver Island. I pulled out my guitar and followed the river bed, to a big boulder, near the splash of a rapid, hugged by cedars. Rushing filled the spaces in my song; my voice made fuller by the drone of falling water.
An American Dipper approached. I love this bird; so unassuming, but so remarkable in her beauty beyond first noticings. A grey passerine; one’s eyes might skip over her. But then watching her, she dips below the water. Yes, a song bird that walks and flaps, in the cool, hidden liquids beyond the surface. She walks in two world, nourishing in the unseen, and bringing nutrients back up onto the land.
Here she came to sit across from me. Eyes taking me in. Bouncing her tail as Dippers do; perhaps in the glee of a belly full of water insects, or the sunlight sparkling the water. We met in the space between us. In that remarkable way, that two being with eyes and nostrils and ears can meet.
She proceeded to sing. Adding her astonishing complex melodies to the guitar, my voice and the river’s. Three songs we sang together until I took a pause just to listen to her. Rich tumbling notes, eddying, cascading, bending around corners. Did she learn her song from the river or does she sing the river itself? Does she sing the river around the rocks and up into the leaves? Does she sing things green?
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