Facing East ~ April Tierney

Foothills of Colorado Rocky Mountains

I am not so interested in speaking these days, it is listening that enthralls me most––to the burnished hills slinging notes of salmon, peach, and violet colored rays back into the cupboard of my quaking heart. I wake every morning at dawn and go outside to greet the rising sun, my waking is a kind of listening. Birds and sunflowers know the importance of this daybreak ritual, as does every human culture whose mythologies reach beyond the severed roots of this modern world. Never for a moment did our ancestors imagine that life would continue on without their active participation, their attention to the dawn, their libations and offerings of gratitude, devotion, praise. Never did they simply roll out of bed feeling entitled to the unfolding of another blessed day.

Around the Winter Solstice, I started going outside at sunrise out of sheer desperation. It had been a grueling two-and-a-half-month-stretch of insomnia and I was on my knees. Scientists were finding that early morning light could help reset a person’s circadian rhythm, and after trying just about everything else, I had little hope but was still willing to set my feet in that eastward direction.

The first morning I got up, after spending an entire night in bed without a moment of sleep, I was haggard. I dressed quickly in the dim light of our quiet house and walked outside to stand in the cold mountain air, wrapped in a blanket and stooped over with exhaustion. As the colors spread their magnificent wings across the pale blue sky, I immediately recognized something old, yet strangely familiar, starting to stand up in my bones and sing. I did not need a scientist to tell me this was how my people had begun their days since the beginning of time.

I saw and felt and heard a dawn when the first light our ancestors witnessed upon waking was not a glowing screen, but that golden faced God who warmed their weary bones and enticed all growing things to unfurl into the luminosity of this world; when shouts of delight and songs of adoration became the only way for mouths to open themselves into the wonder of such a miracle. The sun’s reappearance in the sky each morning did not enlist apathy or boredom, instead it gave birth to awe and an insatiable longing to help sing or dance or praise a new day into being.

So I opened my tired mouth and began singing too, because we can’t always listen, now can we? There comes a time when our voices are needed in the chorus of creation, when the world begins listening in return and so we must speak, croon, howl, or intone magic to all the ones who are leaning in, who are our kin. We must give back to a world that is constantly thrusting beauty and brilliance and sustenance into our opened hands, we must make wonder bloom from our opened mouths like spring flowers unfurling beneath the blazing sun.

I have stood outside on many single digit days, I have looked east even when the horizon was cloaked in snow and fog and still I felt the sun rising as though the rising had been yoked to my soul. It is now almost the Spring Equinox, and I am still going out every morning because the ritual is set like a woven vessel in my bones––it has been filled to the brim and spills over in cycles for the beating heart of this planet.

My sleep has partially returned, but that is no longer why I go. I am delighting at the nearness of the birds landing back in our thawing hills so that our voices can sway, dip and crisscross in the dawn chorus as two species who love this world and are no less moved to act upon that love than any other. I anxiously await the first and holy day of April when other humans will rise with the sun too, when we remember our ancient ways of greeting the day, when our voices will create an emergent wave, cresting and falling over the body of this glistening world in breaths of reverie.

~~~~~ April Tierney is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories. Her work follows threads of ecopoetics, myth, culture, and lineage. She is the author of three full length collections of poetry, including her recent book, Memory Keeper (Homebound Publications, 2022). She lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her husband, young daughter, mischievous dog, and wide web of kin.

Thank you April Tierney for singing your voice here as we approach Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus on Saturday,1 April. If you find yourself resonating with April’s song, please share with one person, then if they share with another…. and they

Blackbird Song Before The Dawn - Wendy Robertson Fyfe

Morning greeting at my door

The love song of a blackbird singing before a silent dawn is carried twenty times further than during the human noise of the day; they herald the light of Imbolc. I now associate the song of a blackbird before the dawn for the first time of the year with the time to begin preparing for Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus. A blackbird begins singing before the dawn when, in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a turning flow as the long dark surrenders into stretching light in their perennial beauty rhythmic song and dance together. Their longing caresses intimately at their edges known by the moving liminal places of dawn and dusk songs around Earth through the year. A love dance of North and South as the Earth moves West to East whilst sun’s light flows East to West.

This is the sixth year of the ‘Feed the Earth’, self-organising, celebratory, praise, beauty, gratitude, ceremony of offering reciprocity with Earth by way of participating together with Earthsongs. Anyone is welcome around the world and many resources are available on the website if you would like ideas to stir with your own. The invitation is for humans to wildsing at dawn wherever we are on Earth, thereby creating a wave of song around the world. The song being a way of participating in a wild and animate Cosmic, Earth and Earth Community; of singing “YES”.

We might also wonder what could happen with such an animate conversational, call and response way. Is it possible that by participating something both in us and in the world might curiously shift in some unknown, unplanned way. What if the cosmos was birthed from frequency, sound and song? What might be birthed, emerge now? What if the sound, or currently noise, humans make everyday makes a difference? We already know the difference a quieter world made to the ‘more-than human’ world through Global Lockdown times. Perhaps the unseen connections resonate in a particular frequency whether we are aware of it or not. As Rumi noted “We rarely hear the inward music but we’re all dancing to it never-the-less”. If the frequency is ‘turned up’ together … what might transpire?

What if the unique note you bring is deeply needed at this time within community for the Earth to live generatively? What if we were born for such a mainly forgotten song?

From the roots of singing trees and the dreaming of howling coyotes Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus was born. It is not possible to track those who participate, being self-organising. However, l am aware from the website people from over 54 countries have dropped in. There are now 24 Blogs written and sung by visionary people who come with different ways of song from around Earth, listening to Earth. I invite you to take some time to read them together again, or for the first time; indeed a rich songbook. There are some sound-bites below by way of allurement that remind us of the magic and enchantment of song, a way of awakening with/remembering our being in the ‘more-than-human’ world, deep time songs; of singing with/as part of mountains, rivers, oceans, skies, trees, grasses, boar, whales, fire, wind, serpent, rainforests, the dead, moon, cosmic web, mystery, seasons, dark, imagination, grief, joy and more. You might read the sound-bies as a poem. There are blogs from Geneen Marie Haugen, Sophie Strand, Erica Rhinehart, Rebecca Wildbear and many more. We are blessed with further beauty blog songs coming our way on this approach to 2023’s 6th Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus on Saturday 1 April. There is also an article written about the ceremony in Unpsychology Magazine; July, 2019 with a direct link on the website. Of course, you can also sing in the dawn any day if not doing so already.

Finally, like the Regent Honeyeater in Australia who are losing their songs due to near extinction and the loss of their elders to teach them, we humans too have lost, or been torn, from our indigenous elders and the land, also almost extinct, from whom to learn our original cosmic songs. Mass extinction also means mass song extinction. Remembering again; listening, learning from and singing with the trees, mountains, humans and more; with indigenous elders who remember or who have made/are making the holy pilgrimage again. May Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus serve The Great Remembering and the Great Cosmic Symphony of All Beings. Or just ‘sing in’ for the sheer joy of it. Please contact us should you want to participate, offer stories, songs, blogs resources to share. It Is so.

Please share this with someone to spread the wave. There are also postings on the Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus 2023 Facebook Page

~~~~~

singing to the world and having the birds, the stream, the wind respond brings wild joy to my heart.

Jenni York (Western Australia)

Wailing sends out invisible notes, electrifying the stretches of space between and within all living beings, illuminating the web that binds us all together.

Amanda Fiorino {now Tempist Jade} (Colorado)

I feel loss as my ears attune to the quieter songs – in this season for ten years I heard the rich bubbling call of toad from beneath the yurt where he rested for winter. For the last five years there has been silence and the small splashes from the nearby pond that signify spawn arriving have left the song of this place and tadpoles no longer dart amongst the bullrushes.

Bell Selkie Lovelock (Cymru/Wales)

And before we know it, we can catch ourselves participating in the great conversation as seamlessly as all the non-humans do. We may be surprised at what we overhear ourselves expressing, and we may be even more confounded at the responses we receive from the world.

John Lynch (Arizona)

The Night spoke back in a voice full of delight, “ You know…what really turns me on, sweet woman, is you, dressed in a hooded black cloak, singing to me through the forests and the hills”.

Erica Rhinehart (Colorado)

What if this Earth and Earth Community is held by song; perhaps song of love, song of Eros, a different kind of gravity that holds us all where we can only fall in and down to some mysterious deeper place?

Wendy Robertson Fyfe (Scotland/Alba)

I want to sing the song of Lucy Sacred Earthheart - a wild hot lonely scared tender magical song. And yet my fear says: Don’t do it. You cannot afford to feel so much. What would this mean for your carefully constructed, as safe as possible, half existence.

Carin Eisen (Victoria, Australia)

Let them sing me

Wendy Robertson Fyfe (Scotland/Alba)

So many humans lost in inner and outer noise cannot hear the world sing … What if we could offer something back, reciprocate that song, sing together in a harmony to the oceans that created and birthed our wild bodies? I wonder and can only imagine what might be possible in that symphonic crescendo?

Rhonda Brandrick (Wales/Cymru)

Frequency is the practice of and remembering “the songs of the world” and of singing home parts of yourself lost in the inner wilds or frozen in time. Frequency is a healing of our forgetting, a re-membering ourselves to the great cosmic Songweb of Life.

Sara McFarland (Germany)

Everywhere there is life, there is song. The planet is always singing. Humans are meant to live in sync, our unique note resounding within the symphony. Instead, our dominant culture is killing all the other voices, one by one, as if removing instruments from an orchestra. Some birds have forgotten their song, like the once abundant regent honeyeater. Now critically endangered, they are unable to find other honeyeaters and hear their songs.

Rebecca Wildbear (Colorado)

… Sometimes human beings listen,

ears tilting in a creaturely way,

tuned to something not entirely

audible though there is no barrier

to reception, and through

this listening we might remember

how to live, hearing the old

voice that still bells forth

from the primal body

who birthed us all ,…

excerpt from Perceptual Portal

Geneen Marie Haugen (Utah)

What would it mean to reclaim a biophonic niche? What would it sound like to spend a year in a forest carefully listening, and then to, accurately, engaging your whole body, begin to whistle into collaborative, orchestrated biophony with the rest of the more-than-human world?

Sophie Strand (Hudson Valley)

Already other songs are joining in as the dawn approaches the horizon. 10 February, 2023. wrf

Find Your Biophonic Niche Sophie Strand

Southern Hemisphere Duet: Blue Mountains National Park, NSW (Wendy Robertson Fyfe)

You flicker from tree to tree, splaying your rump feathers, curling your toes around a maple branch, flushing green and flexible after rainfall. Even deep in the forest, shaggy curtains of elm bowing down to the ground, the dawn penetrates, a gilt river of crown shyness between the pines, the fir trees, and the cottonwoods. Violets blink like purple stars in the undergrowth. Spring has arrived and it is time to call for your mate. A year’s worth of liquid flight, moonlight that pierced your tiny eyes and accumulated, pooled yellow with desire in your syrinx, begins to rise, to find it’s spiraling syntax. Finally, exuberantly, you snap your beak open and vibrate into song. Nothing sounds. You sing so hard you lose your footing and catch your fall with open wings, alighting on a lower branch. Again, you strain, and then squint into the forest air, and see that it is molecular with moisture and pollen and thick with… something else. Something like a shadow that hovers and flows, running right in front of your tiny, feathered head. Water-like it seems to melt into the void, filling every empty nook. When you try to sing, the substance subsumes your voice, blocks its melody from travelling the forest, and reaching your lover. You struggle and shift pitch, shift rhythm. What if you made your song a sharpened point and like a mosquito stings through skin, you pierced the dull air. Nothing works. You will not mate. Your longing for love is mute. Your song flattens back into your breast.

This is my creative imagining of what a Swainson Thrush might feel like, as it tries to sing for mate, in the midst of anthropogenic (manmade) noise: logging, highway traffic, construction, or the roar of jet planes overhead. Sound, although you cannot hold it or weigh it, takes up space. Ecological space. The term Soundscape was first coined by Canadian naturalist and composer R. Murray Schafer and was expanded into the term Soundscape Ecology by musician and ecologist Bernie Krause to describe the acoustic relationship between beings in a shared ecosystem. Field recording next to a Kenyan waterhole at night, in the seventies, Krause realized that the combined effect of all the different animal noises was similar to the music of an orchestra. He translated the sound data into a visual graph called a spectrogram and was shocked to see that, in fact, it resembled a musical chord. The frogs were flutes. The hyenas were the oboes. Completing thousands of field recordings, often in the same place year after year, Krause developed the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis. An ecosystem is a space and every song inhabits a different part of that space. Every animal, in a shared ecosystem, evolves sounds in different pitches and rhythms so that they leave “room” for each other. They identify the clearest channel through their landscape: their acoustic niche.

Southern Night Song (Wendy Robertson Fyfe)

When you go outside at night and hear the heartbeat pulse of peeper song below the sonorous whooping of a barred owl, the streaking cackle of coyotes on the hunt somehow gliding in and out of the rush of the mountains stream, you are hearing the product of melodic, evolutionary cooperation. How can everyone sing at once without ever interrupting each other? Each being conscientiously braids through another’s sonic domain, finding the cleanest, most energy efficient way to produce their song. The end product is indeed like an orchestra. The name for this collection of vocalizations is called Biophony. Geophony refers to the elemental, non-biological layer that also informs the “orchestrated” sounds: the velveteen whisper of a brook, the rattle and whine of an old pine, flexing against the wind. But then a rumble. A guttural whine. There are cars in the distance, beyond the tree line.

Human noise is called anthrophony. And, as it exists now, it does not cooperate. Instead, it disregards the fine-tuned synchronized songscapes of Biophonic ecosystems. It takes up all the space. Noise pollution doesn’t just disturb animal populations. It can actually destroy them. Krause demonstrated how the roar of jet planes desynchronizes the song of spadefoot toads. Their synchronized song is a defense mechanism against predators, and Krause watched as, when they fell into disharmony, coyotes and great horned owls descended on the toads. The population was quickly decimated. Similarly causes life-threatening stress to frogs and blocks the song niches of birds trying to mate. While they shift their register and try to adapt to new soundscapes, the attempts usually fail. Bird populations that cannot mate, quickly fall extinct. It has been well-documented how sound pollution disturbs coral reefs and disorients whales.

Blue Mountains National Park, NSW (Wendy Robertson Fyfe)

Krause has studied thousands of soundscape ecologies, and according to a recent interview, he estimates that at least half no longer exist due to noise pollution and human development. His theory has allowed for researchers like Nick Friedman to do “quick” assessments of the biodiversity of ecosystems. Recordings that can be run through programs to assess the variety of different sounds, analyzing how many different species are present. While this technology is exciting, its results are often extremely disheartening. In his own long-duration study of Sugarloaf Ridge State park, recording on April 15th.of every year, Bernie Krause demonstrated the striking loss of birdsong, the susurrus of trees, and the murmur of streams. Drought and noise pollution took over the soundscape.

I want to offer that as biological beings, we developed inside soundscapes. We, too, once had an acoustic niche. Maybe it was the plush pad of our footfall. Personally, I believe it was song. And that song may have come before the dry click of conversation. I like to imagine we were once fluid and aware of our biophonic channels. We knew how to send melodic arrows through the forest, disturbing no one, always reaching and softly drumming the ear of our beloved. Bernie Krause advises silences. He tells us we need to listen again. And make less noise. I agree. But I also think that there is another fertile option.

What would it mean to reclaim a biophonic niche? What would it sound like to spend a year in a forest carefully listening, and then to, accurately, engaging your whole body, begin to whistle into collaborative, orchestrated biophony with the rest of the more-than-human world? Yes, we have taken up too much sonic space. We have actually driven birds and insects to extinction. But that does not mean we can’t exit anthrophony and enter biophony. Perhaps the answer is to speak less, to build less, to drive less, to do less, and to sing more.

Blue Mountains National Park, NSW (Wendy Robertson Fyfe)

Sources: https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/08/biophony/, Future Ecologies Podcast Episode The Nature of Sound, NPR Invisibilia episode The Last Sound, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0649, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology by Barry Truax.

Southern Hemisphere, NSW Australia sounds and images through Wendy Robertson Fyfe

Thank you Sophie Strand for singing your voice as we approach next week's Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus. If you find yourself resonating with Sophie's song and duet between North Hemisphere and South Hemisphere, please share widely.