Right now
I’ve been having a good cry listening to a choral version of “We Let It Be” by Rickie Byars. I first heard this song at Wails, a song gathering I attended in late July. We sang it under a rain of flower petals, an event that is indelibly etched into my heart. More on that in a moment.
Since our last episode, I have moved from Orcas Island to Olympia, Washington. I was crowd-surfed off the island, which is how I wish to make all my major transitions from now on.
I was on that island seven years, a hefty chunk of my life. Having left, I sometimes wonder what took me so long. I never intended to stay after the summer job that brought me there. And I tried to leave almost every winter. Some of those winters were dark indeed.
Why did I stay? Because I had work to do. I had to crash to earth, to fall apart, and be rebuilt. On Orcas I was poor in money but rich in time. And healing takes time. I’ve come to realize that free time is a privilege that I--and few others--enjoy. And that most people are too busy to heal. Time scarcity is, I believe, one of the great evils of our time.
So I did my seven years, and find myself back on “The Mainland,” as we called it on Orcas. I’m not healed, likely never will be, but I am changed. I’m oriented differently. Just a bit more open. And I am rich now, not in money, but in more precious things like hope, trust, and love.
So I can’t regret those years, or the years prior, when I was in darkness. I have to trust the arc of this.
Right now that arc has brought me to Olympia, where I will be attending Evergreen State College in just a few weeks. If you’d like to support this transition, and my healing art work, you can contribute to my GoFundMe or join my Patreon backer community.
Thank you for walking with me.
Squirrel News
I’ve posted over 150 Squirrel videos, and all of them were recorded somewhere on the 55-square-mile island of Orcas. Until now—I’ve just posted my first video recorded on the mainland, in the wooded campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia.
The Wails Gathering
Last year, at a song circle in Bellingham, I met a person named Alexandra “Ahlay” Blakely. Ahlay is about my age, but has led several lives already (for more of her story, listen to her interview on the Bliss Is Ordinary podcast).
This summer a Tulalip elder named Johnny Moses told me a fascinating thing: That in the Samish language the word for singing and the word for crying are one and the same.
So it makes sense to me that Ahlay is both a singer and grief tender. She leads song circles and grief ceremonies with equal aplomb. And grief is present in her singing, and singing is present in her grieving.
Last year she announced plans to record an album of grief songs entitled Wails: Songs for Grief. In the subsequent months I’ve followed along, as she caught the songs and raised community support for the album. This culminated in a 200-person gathering in the Skagit River valley this summer. The gathering was a fundraiser, a community event, and the container for a series of live choral recording sessions for the album.
I had the great privilege of attending, not as a singer, but as a helper and observer (though I did sing--read on).
In the weeks following the event, I’ve spoken to a number of participants, and we all hold the gathering with a kind of reverence. Something huge happened there.
You can support Ahlay by joining her Patreon, and buying her album (when it comes out in 2024).
And now:
May my life be a song: Vignettes from the Wails gathering
I. Mermaids
I go down to the river. I walk on a winding path obscured by scrub, which opens and reveals the following tableaux: An Edenic garden of naked bodies sunning and bathing along the little creek. On the opposite shore the happy humans have found clay and are covering themselves in it. And as the clay dries, it casts green, and for all the world the humans look like mermaids. And then the mermaids begin to sing:
We are not alone,
We are not alone,
We are not alone…
And for the first of many times this weekend, I think: This is the world I want to live in.
II. The Wail
I stand at the threshold of the barn, and a tropical heat emanates, the product of the 200 humans within. I have a little radio and an earpiece and I have been asked to be a kind of sonic steward. My high sensitivity comes in handy here as I track the footsteps of a person some 100 feet distant. I make eye contact and raise a finger to my lips. They tiptoe on.
Behind me I can feel the peculiar tingle of a live performance. An electrical excitement like a coming thunderstorm. I’ve been listening to the choir practice, and to recordings of individual verses. A song is being born.
I hear Ahlay say, One more take, just voices. And then they begin, singing a song about hope and togetherness, singers surging in cohorts, fragments of the song knitting together, weaving. In its totality, the song is a bracing tsunami, irresistible, crashing through my defenses. My heart shivers in concert, tears roll down my cheeks. A hazard of this particular duty.
And then the wave crashes ashore and there is an absence of song, a nothing, a yawning space. And then: Laughter, cries, claps, shouts, which too, subside. And in that lull, I hear Ahlay speaking softly to her choir. I hear sniffles and sobs. And then an uncanny keening, an animal noise, rising, rising. My hair stands on end, the animal in me twitches, the noise keeps coming, louder, impossibly louder. It is a sound I have never heard, but I recognize it in my bones. It is a wail. It pierces me, reaches a very old part of me, wraps its paws around me… I nearly fall in. Then it fades like a falling siren.
A lull, an intake, water draining out to sea. Another wave, this one frothy and unruly. I hear individual roars, screams, soon a towering wall of sound teeters high over head. My ears want to run but I know what this is, I’m expecting this, I know this, I’ve been here before, and I survived. This is rage.
And yes, this storm, this primal roar, too, subsides. And I turn and behold another witness standing nearby, and we do what humans do in the face of overwhelming vastness. We lock owl eyes and I mouth: Holy. Shit.
III. Shireen’s circle
Shireen is small of frame but radiates an intensity that no one would confuse with smallness. She speaks with bracing vulnerability and clarity. Her songs are a reflection of her: Personal, vulnerable, moving.
Throughout the weekend we circle up in song. Not just in the studio barn but in the evenings, in the community tent.
It is here that Shireen guides us into a song about love, without telling us that she is about to walk us into the flaming heart of love.
She starts the fire by teaching us the outro to “We Let It Be” by Rickie Byars. A deceptively simple refrain, a sweet gospel vibe:
We let the love wash over us
We let, we let it be
But circle songs tend to have their own momentum, and soon our voices swell and the tent fairly bursts.
And then, and then.
Shireen gestures in certain friends and soon the center of our circle is populated by our participants of color. And she invites them to fall silent and simply receive the song. And she invites the rest of us, with our light skin and our European blood, to sing. But with a little shift:
We let the love wash over you
And then,
We let the joy wash over you
We let the peace wash over you
And on and on…
Our voices soar even as our bodies wilt in grief, in longing, in ecstasy. I’ve never sung so hard, never with such desire to convey a message. With the bellows of my lungs, the reeds of my throat, the instrument of my body, the simple refrain: I love you.
With undertones of: I am so sorry. Forgive me. Forgive us.
And I realize as this is all happening that I have wanted this so much, from my earliest days: Reunion.
And as I weep and sing I lock eyes with a human in the center of our circle and damned if they don’t smile and wink at me.
And then,
Shireen asks us to switch roles, she asks the European humans to receive, and the humans of the global majority to sing. And that’s when I fully break. Because it is too much, it is a gift unearned, it is pure senseless grace.
And they are small in number and they are surrounded by us but they sing big. They sing joyously. They sing lovingly.
Those of us who receive, what can we do but sway and weep?
Who knew love could make us this big?
And then,
Shireen unites us, we drop the separate identities, we sing as one:
We let the love wash over us,
We let, we let it be
In the crucible of that tent, on that land, under that moon: The healing I did not think I would live to see. An unquenchable fire melting wounds, incinerating tired stories, fusing human to human.
IV. Apprentice
I stand at the threshold, a diaphanous bug curtain between me and the 200 souls in that barn. On the threshold it is a pleasant August afternoon in western Washington, but the heat inside is incredible, humid, jungle, human. Smells of palo santo, sweat, tears, grief, breath.
And the sound, O the sound, I wish you could hear it. Two hundred voices lifting, dancing, harmonizing, vibrating, lifting the hairs on my neck, pulling tears from my face.
And they are singing my song, they are singing “Apprentice,” the very same song that transported me to a spiritual rebirth just a few months ago.
They are doing my favorite thing, which is “stacking,” in which verses are overlapped in a luscious babel of melody and word. I hear:
I trust//this work
this grief//is holy
will return me//soul cleansing slowly
=Again, again, again=
To hear song stacking is to be bathed in sonic ecstasy, to fall into a tapestry of human voice. I find, in these moments, my heart cracks open and my spirit sings. And my whole body says, This is the world I want to live in.
The voices abruptly stop, and there is a crackling silence, and then laughter, applause, cheering.
That’s a wrap. The final recording of the weekend, the very purpose of this gathering in the Skagit River valley. The dream of one person, Alexandra “Ahlay” Blakely, made real through her force of will, through the human bodies of her widespread song community, and through powers unknown.
But we’re not done. Ahlay asks the choir to circle up for a final recording. I overcome my timidity, my sense of unbelonging, and open the veil. I enter the studio.
Beyond the overwhelming tropical heat, there is an energy in the room, an electricity, a joy. Something massive has happened here, I can feel it and smell it. A birth, a death, a rite of passage. Something massive.
Images of whales decorate the walls. This album is to be called Wails, an intentional reference to grieving and to our cetacean relatives.
I linger at the edges, where I’ve lived all my life, but a friendly face turns to me and motions me in. The message is clear: You belong here.
I have many reasons not to step forward. I’m a novice singer, I didn’t sign up for the choir, this isn’t my community, I’m not a joiner…But my friend’s invitation is all my heart needs to propel me forward.
I join. And then I get to sing my song, my healing song, with 200 other souls. There’s a rightness to the moment, a symmetry. My doubts fall away, my unbelonging melts. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
We sing, jubilantly.
We sing, tearfully.
The sopranos soar.
The tenors hold the middle.
The basses thrum up from the earth.
In the center stands Ahlay. She is an irresistible flame around which we dance. Her body is joy incarnate, she is towering, animate, her face alight. She invites us in and we swoon and we sing for her. She will not be resisted, cannot be resisted, because it’s not just her. I see now the power of the artist, of the singer, of the leader. Through the strength of her body, through the fire of her heart, through the lightning of her spirit, she is a torch that we follow. Where does this energy come from? What birthed this ecstatic, perfect, gorgeous moment? Yes, there’s a human being at the center of this vortex, her overalls soaked through with sweat. But what’s really coming through here?
Be careful what name you give it. There’s not language large enough.
And then, the voices swell and soar to the rafters, and fall to earth.
Silence like death.
A breath. Another.
A musician speaks into the silence, Let it in Ahlay, let it in.
And Ahlay turns in a circle, her hands to her now silent mouth, and suddenly she looks so small and so human, and she, too, falls to earth. And surrounded by a mandala of humans, she finally lets it in. Which requires her to let go, to grieve, to praise, or somewhere in between. And so she weeps, surrounded by hands and hearts, and the choir responds as one with a spontaneous, lilting hum, a lullaby of sorts. Now the collective takes over, takes her in, subsumes her, and we weep, and hum, and sway, as one.
When at last she rises, her face melted in gratitude, she wordlessly points to each contributor in turn, the musicians, production helpers, the elders, and the choir sings to each in turn. In an eloquence beyond words, we give thanks.
The love in that room, I will never forget.
V. Flower Bath
There is a piece of wisdom amongst those who apprentice to grief, and it is this: That grief and praise are two sides of the same hand. That tears of sadness and tears of joy are in fact the same tears. That lamentations and cries of joy come from the same place.
How, then, to tilt a gathering of 200 wailers toward joy?
It begins in the morning of the final full day, in circles of volunteers patiently plucking flower petals. Soon there are riotous little mountains of petals in oranges, yellows, purples. We are not told what they are for.
After the final recording session, we assemble in the tent. Greta Flowers, one of our facilitators, asks us to form a circle around a ceremonial center draped in soft fabrics. Then a procession of smiling people enter the circle, carrying the petals on gilt platters. They wordlessly offer them to us. We take them in giggling fistfuls.
What unfolds is part flower fight, part ritual, for the desire to shower each other in petals is irresistible. The petals do not stop raining for the following hour. During which we are invited to enter the center and simply…receive.
Before we have begun singing, before the ceremony officially starts, people flood the center in a tangled cuddle puddle.
Oh I want this, I want this more than anything, but I hesitate. Do I belong here? Am I welcome here? Is this for me? And in hesitating I miss my moment. There’s no place for me now. So I sit on the edge as the petals begin to rain in earnest, as the laughter and cries erupt, as the song begins. I hug my knees like a lonely child, and I watch from the outside. And the feeling is very familiar and very old. In this moment I feel the pain I have always felt. On the outside, looking in. Wanting very much to come home.
Above the din of joyous humans a song arises:
I believe
that I belong
to the earth
I belong
May my life
be a song
May my song
feed the earth
The song swells into a joyous ocean rhythm, rising and falling in waves. Soon it is stacked and layered and harmonized into an angelic susurrus that will forever be etched in my heart.
-I believe that I belong-
A person rises from the puppy pile and I see my opening. I wiggle into the spot, surrounded by bodies. I am supine, my body open to the rain of petals, my hands open, my mouth grinning wide in a helpless smile. Petals fall into my open mouth.
-May my life be a song-
I am hearing song from all sides, I am bathed in the beauty, flowers are literally falling from the fucking sky, there are kind and joyous bodies snuggled all around. I am laughing uncontrollably. And then I feel a body land next to mine and I feel arms wrap around me and I feel so wanted in that moment.
-May my song feed the earth-
And I open my eyes and it is a dear and beautiful friend who I have so wanted to squeeze and be squeezed by this whole weekend and she is joyously squeezing the air out of me and what can I feel but a blooming, runaway gratitude. There are flowers in my mouth and 200 voices are singing to me and I’m surrounded by my fellows and *OOF*
-I believe-
Another body lands on my legs and a head rests on my belly and it is another sweet friend and now I am laugh-crying because it’s too much, it’s too beautiful, I am so held, I am so loved-
-that I belong-
And my whole body says, This is the world I want to live in.
-to the earth-
And the world says to me: This. Is. Happening.
-I belong-
*Singer Mo Washburn led us in “Belong.”
VI. Grief
A subdued energy now, as we clean up and pack out.
I hear a cry and I see the following vignette: One of our participants folded over in grief, fists on the grass. And standing before her, a friend in a tutu, calmly holding space. Her arms out, hands open. A posture peculiar to grief tenders, somewhere between giving and receiving.
There they stay until the grief passes.
VII. Outro
We take down the community tent, we pack up the altars, remove the signs (“You are not alone,” “clothing optional beach.”) The barn falls silent, just a barn again.
As I drive away I think, What was that?
It was the world I wanted to live in. But we are scattering to our separate lives.
It was the work I want to do in this world. But we have to pay rent somehow.
It was the community I wish to join. But I am driving back to my one-bedroom apartment.
What was it, then?
For me, that magic gathering, that long weekend was proof of what is possible. What can be had even now, in this broken world. An alchemical reaction in which we made gold from sand, just for a moment. Just for five days. And yet, when I was in it, it was enough. It was everything.
Afterwards, driving down lonely rural highways, I can still hear the singing ringing in my ears. The singing is gone, but now I know what music is possible between us. That’s what I hold in my heart, the memory of the song, the trust of future music together. Let’s just call it faith.