A Love Song to Earth~ Wendy Robertson Fyfe

Hear My Full Voice, Doug Van Houten

The writings offered in this year’s blogs are a feast of unique songs again. A feast of unique songs highlighting the different ways that each one of us brings and sings Earthsongs. How might you add your voice on Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus on Thursday morn and any other morn.

Geneen Marie Haugen noted in Blowing Open the Dusty Windows of Perception in Animas Valley Institute’s Soulcraft Musings recently:

"The more frequently individual human beings touch a felt-sense of the possible world that Arundhati Roy knows is so near, or that Charles Eisenstein has called The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, the more we seed and participate with the collective psychic field, or what has been called the noosphere 3, or the “mind-sphere” of Earth.”

This also speaks to one of the urgent core callings of Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus; to participate collectively feeling into a felt sense in the collective psychic field of Earth; to listen and sing our co-song into the field. What might we seemingly impossibly co-seed, plant together. Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus is a sacred ceremony offering resecration to Earth, a love song to Earth in sacred reciprocity, celebration, praise, prayer, gratitude, grief and more. May Earth, Sun, Moon, and Cosmos hear (and hear of) our co-song this Thursday.

You are also warmly invited to send in your co-song wildsinging experiences, art, poems, and stories from around Earth. A selection will be offered to ripple further in the human world in future blogs.

In the meantime here is my Love Song singing in Thursday morning’s dawn and more. May you sing your own Love Song for Earth too. You are welcome to borrow this one should it sing you:

A Love Song to Earth

Beloved Earth, especially now, l sing my love song to you. I know you are in trouble and therefore all life is in trouble. All your voices are moving towards extinction with so many gone already into The Great Silence.

Oh, what have l done to you dearest Earth who in deep wildsong opera with sun, moon and cosmos is continuing to give so generously in your way as part of a great and sacred reciprocal enhancement of all living death and life.

How might l listen to your ways of miracle beyond human belief. How many ways can l bless you, offer to you, sing to you wherever and whenever l can.

How many ways can l make amends

for wherever you are, l am.

How may l help you in the ways only you know, ways beyond my grandiose or be-littling and painful self survival that has been necessary in a culture where maturity has been arrested for many lifetimes.

What is your desire to sing in me that flourishing be so.

I listen, discern, for your voice; longing for you to sing me in the ways only you can; like a reed rooted through soil and water, like a great thunder roar and lightening strike, like a wayward lost child finding her way home again;

for the way l am uniquely born to sing in these eons of The Great Forgetting;

may l remember.

How may l open evermore deeply to loving and serving you mighty Earth with your great and expressive deep oceans, blue skies, soil creating worms, hummingbird nectar, ancient wisdom trees, imaginal interspecies and diverse humankind; your colours like the dazzling yellow of the daffodils and black of dark matter; coronavirus, wild mountains, vast continents, pollinating honeybees, sweet and potent scents, green grasses, antlered stags, deep canyons, wide rivers, bubbling pebbles, single cell ones, intricate patterns, and strange wonder dreams, to mention just a mere morsel part-crumb of your Being.

Why are we not all on our knees broken open together singing in joy and wailing in grief?

I am humbled. I need you so deeply, so utterly, that l cannot even breathe without you. Forget interdependence, my love, l am completely dependent on you. I am your flesh and bone walking. I am of the collision of nebula. I am born of the original song bursting into the multiverses from beyond...moving through.

Even when l breathe no more, my body is still yours, entangling further into other lives as other lives are entangling into mine, are me even now.

How may l live my life for those to come;

be willingly Co-dependent, Co-breathing, Co-singing with all of you; knowing my breath and my song, is also your breath, your song.

How might l surrender to your life-giving frequency remembering that this one too is born of your longing.

May l remember grace and courage by touching into your resonating psychic field.

For l am also your longing in being and becoming now.

Sing me, my love; that l may sing you in life’s great Symphony.

It is so.

Wendy Robertson Fyfe

Wendy is Foundher of the yearly Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus. She is also an International nature-based Soul Initiation and Human Development Guide, Mentor and Supervisor, writer, poet and photographer who passionately tunes into the deeper mysteries of the human and more-than-human world listening for our unique voices born and longing to come forth. She is involved in co-creating 'The Centre; Wild and Soulcentric' in West Coast, Scotland. Wendy has published a first book of poetry and images: 'Whispers; Imagining Earth Community, Surrendering to Earth's Wisdom'.

Thank you Doug Van Houten for your beautiful collages. Doug lives in Kentucky and is an International Nature-Based Soul Initiation Guide with Animas Valley Institute. He is passionately heart-felt about bringing people into their unique conscious living in Earth's Dreaming particularly through dream, body and art; through programmes and mentoring.

~~~~~

If when reading this blog, you too would like to be more involved/participate in the sacred ceremony of Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus yearly on1 April, please contact us through www.earthsongwave.com.

Haunted by the Songs of The Dead Rebecca Wildbear

Collage: Doug Van Houten

Hearing the last song of a male Kauai ‘O’o tears me up. He was singing for a female who will never come. Now his lovely voice is gone too. I cry for him, and for all the species we have lost. First listed as endangered in 1967, the Kauai ‘O’o lived in the forests of Kaua’i, and was extinct 20 years later, after their habitat was destroyed by human activity.

One in a million species expires naturally each year, but now extinctions are happening 1,000 times faster. Humans are driving species extinct*more rapidly than ever before in the history of the planet. Since the dawn of industrial civilization, we have lost eighty-three percent of wild mammals and fifty percent of plants, and a million more species are at risk—all largely as a result of human actions.

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.

The world needs the bitter and resonant cry of every creature, even our own deep voices, attuning with the song of the world. As a wilderness and soul guide, I invite people to listen to the voices of all the others and remember their own unique notes, the mythic purpose of their souls. I was made for this work. Yet it is not enough to stop the destruction of the last remaining wild species.

Whistling

Did the Kauai ‘O’o know he was calling out to an empty world?

“The costs of civilization are too high,” his song pierces me. “Remember the connection we once had.”

The first human words sounded like birds. Humans and birds evolved from a common ancestor, a reptile millions of years ago. Both grew to form complex vocalizations and social groups. Rare whistling languages, often called bird languages, used to be found all over the world. The truest voices of our ancestors, they are now heard only in a handful of places with scattered settlements or mountainous terrain.

In south-western Costa Rica, I lived amongst the Guaymi people in rustic dwellings, eating home-grown rice and beans in banana leaves. We taught each other, in Spanish, our first languages. When the Guaymi whistled to each other, the sound traveled a great distance through the rainforest. They looked beautiful with their heads and bodies vibrating, faces and lips moving wildly to form the unusual sounds.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, the Hmong people speak in whistles. In their courtship rituals, now rarely-performed, boys would wander through nearby villages at nightfall, whistling poetry. If a girl responded, the dialogue would continue. The lovers added nonsense syllables to assure the secrecy of their melody.

Longing

“Is anyone alive out there?” the Kauai ‘O’o sings, but there is no reply, nor will there ever be again.

Is he sorrowful? That is what I feel when I sense what is happening and read things like of all the mammals now on Earth, ninety-six percent are livestock and humans—only four percent are wild mammals.

Tears flow. I long for a world more alive than the one we inhabit. For rivers to run clear and flocks of birds to fill the sky. Ancient trees to cover the land. Oceans to teem with whales and coral. For machines that mine coal, oil, and trees to be dismantled. For people to stop extracting and start honoring. For lost cultures and species to return, and be driven out no more.

Longing is prayer, and prayer is a conversation. If we listen to nature and our dreams, we can be guided towards the actions that matter most. If we ask and await the mystery, we can receive a response and then embody what is asked. Prayer is what we become when we offer our lives in creative service.

Will civilization collapse first, before the biosphere? Or after all species and wild places are already gone? Species can’t survive without unspoiled habitat, but there is less every day. Even in the wake of late-stage global capitalism, I long for a sustainable society, rooted in an ethical approach in its relationship with the land, honoring the voices of river, bird, rock, and tree.

These collaborative relationships have existed for millennium. The Yao people still team up with the honeyguide bird in sub-Saharan Africa to hunt for honey. Using a series of special chirps, humans and birds communicate with each other. The honeyguide birds lead the way to hidden beehives, and the Yao people share the sweetness with their avian friends.

Protecting

Is the Kauai ‘O’o aware this is his last message to the world? What will humanity’s last song be?

The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. She had a palsy that made her tremble and never laid a fertile egg in her life. In the 19th century, passenger pigeon migrations darkened the sky. Flocks took hours to pass and were so loud that human conversation was impossible. These birds sustained people through the winter. By the mid-1890’s, flock sizes numbered in the dozens rather than hundreds of billions.

Passenger pigeons were hunted out of existence. After the invention of the telegraph and the railroad, the commercial pigeon industry boomed. Hunters killed them in their nesting grounds and harvested the squabs. No one stopped when their numbers crashed. People slaughtered them until the end.

In the 19th century, people did not believe they could drive a species to extinction. This seems to mirror a denial still present today. Most people do not believe humans are destroying the biosphere of the living planet. “People need these jobs,” the passenger pigeon industry said to avoid restrictions on hunting. Industries today make similar claims, as their mines, dams, and industrial agriculture clear cut and pave over ecosystems, poison rivers and the sea, and dry up underground aquifers.

Indigenous peoples have always been the Earth’s greatest defenders. Indigenous people protect eighty percent of global diversity, even though they comprise less than five percent of the world’s population. The Earth needs more people to stand in solidarity I wonder if the Kauai ‘O’o felt as desperate as I do, if he understood that the planet is being plundered. I imagine myself singing alongside him, calling out—are you out there? What will you do to protect the beloved Earth?

Industry plans to destroy a critical corridor for pronghorn antelope and mule deer, nesting ground for golden eagles, ferruginous hawks, and prairie falcons. Lithium Americas is slated to build a lithium mine on Thacker Pass. They say it will provide jobs. Falsely, they call it green to manufacture belief that it somehow will not destroy the biosphere. Five to eight percent of the global population of endangered sage-grouse live there. The watershed is home to the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout and the endemic King’s River pryg. I invite you to join environmentalists Max Wilbert and Will Falk in protesting the mine. The songs of eagles, hawks, falcons, and sagebrush are priceless and irreplaceable.

Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming books, Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration, and Advocacy for Earth and Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.

*regional availability

~~~~~

Thank you Rebecca Wildbear for your Earthsong offering to Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus 2021.

If when reading this blog, you too would like to be more involved/participate in the sacred ceremony of Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus yearly on 1 April, please contact us through www.earthsongwave.com. May Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus also be an opportunity for you to "listen to nature and our dreams, we can be guided towards the actions that matter most. If we ask and await the mystery, we can receive a response and then embody what is asked."

Singing the Song of Now:Re-membering ourselves into the great cosmic Songweb of Life. Sara McFarland

Grandmother Snow Moon

One day last May I walk in the sacred grove of hawthorn, ash, oak and elder, home to fox, hare, a riot of songbirds and, seasonally, horses. Although they have not yet arrived in their summer pasture, I can see where the horses have trodden a path through the shade of the leafy summer canopies to stay cool. I see where the game trails of deer lead through the thickets of sloe and hawthorn. I smell the musk of Fox and hear the blackbirds rustling in the thickets. I step into the tiny circle of moss covered trees - ash, oak, elm - that I call the portal. It is only large enough for me to step into and turn around in; a small nest for Ritual and singing, leaning against the trees in a squat to touch the earth, or standing, to look up into the branches.

In the days before this encounter, I have begun to feel/hear a kind of vibrational song tone that I have called Frequencies. It is like hearing a glimpse of the song of a particular creature or place, or the Golden Web of Life. In the portal, I have the inspiration to ask to hear the Frequency of the Otherworld, where Ancestors, more than human creatures, dream figures and Soul kin live; where the gods and goddesses dwell, one might say, the Holy in the Wild. Taking a breath and giving a breath as offering, I listen. I feel my heart opening into the Hologram, the great Web of Life, the presence of Mystery awakening in me. Listening, lending my voice to the Frequency I let the sound move through my throat. The note becomes a full body resonance letting me hear my own heart in its embrace as the one sound becomes an entire opening, a portal itself, a Frequency.

I leave the tree portal sounding the Frequency as l walk, following it like a golden thread through the grove. An unassuming but powerful healer of the mint family is standing on the path I am called to take, with her purple flowers like small lips, puckered for a kiss - Self-Heal, Prunella Vulgaris. She is shining at me like a star and I stop spellbound. I hear her singing her Frequency as if she were calling in response to the Otherworld Frequency I had been sounding. I bend down to greet her and share breath with her, letting her Frequency move through my heart and throat, reverberate through my cells. It is the inner intimacy of the sharing of consciousness, as if through the song the waves of sound entering me is also a visitation of her essence. It is like being caressed by a lover on the inside, inside my heart.

Since that meeting, I apprentice myself to her and to the healing work of Frequency and herbal medicine I have been given to do. But it is slow going, and often brings doubt or a kind of fear of singing my Frequency, my true song, into the world. A not-knowing or a kind of not-trusting that my listening is skilled enough to hear the voice of the More than Human creatures and my ability to lend my voice to Earth’s Frequency is true. “Sing”, says Mystery, say my ancestors, say humans I share my improvisational recordings with. I feel my own Soul Frequency longing to caress the wild world, the Golden Web, as Self-Heal gently caressed my heart. “Singing is remembering” says the witch-healer in me. “Don’t sing” says the one who wants to keep me safe in forgetting, keep me from offering my medicine. This one wants to keep me quiet, small, likeable and not too loud. “Sing only songs others have written” this one says, or “sing only where no humans can hear” or “don’t practice music theory or voice exercises” or “don’t show off”… David Whyte expresses this longing, fear, pain, release, survival silence and soul song exquisitely in his poem:

THE FIRE IN THE SONG

The mouth opens

and fills the air

with its vibrant shape

until the air

and the mouth

become one shape.

And the first word,

your own word,

spoken from that fire

surprises, burns,

grieves you now

because

you made that pact

with a dark presence

in your life.

He said, “If you only

stop singing

I’ll make you safe.”

And he repeated the line,

knowing you would hear

“I’ll make you safe”

as the comforting

sound of a door

closed on the fear at last,

but his darkness crept

under your tongue

and became the dim

cave where

you sheltered

and you grew

in that small place

too frightened to remember

the songs of the world,

its impossible notes,

and the sweet joy

that flew out the door

of your wild mouth

as you spoke.

David Whyte

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. Frequency is a sound path, a vibration in the body and the world, a way of literally tuning in to the field of Earth Community Consciousness. A way of shifting consciousness in order to travel between the worlds and a way of sharing consciousness with the more than human world. Frequency is a song of Soul which travels through the heart and out of the mouth making visible that which is invisible. It is a way of weaving connection, restoring the threads that connect us to our relationships, both human and more than human. Singing the frequency is, as Briony Greenhill, my singing teacher says, singing the “Song of Now”.

Frequencies are also the “language” of the Golden Web of Life which means there is way of knowing and communicating beyond human language that is frequency based. It is a de-centralising of the human. Also, Frequencies are a way of receiving information from the Web, much like a spider sits in her web and feels the vibrations of the world, elements and others on the filaments of her Web, her hearing of the Song of Now. How can we listen to the voices of the wild others and hear their song, their Frequency so that we can offer our human voice to gift it back to them? It is prayer and Ritual Reciprocal Relationship. When I tune in to the right Frequency I feel a shift in my body and my consciousness. It is as if the veil lifts, the portal opens and I am in unitive consciousness with the sacred Other with whom I am with.

Sacred Grove, Prayer to the Boar Crones

As a practice each morning, I sing gratitude to the 7 directions, my ancestors, the mountains and wild creatures here, to my own heart and for the path I am given to dance with the gifts I am given to carry. I sing as offering out on the land to and with the forest, the meadows and sky, to sun and moon, and the wild ones. In this springing time, I am singing to and for the wild boar that live here, especially for the Great Sow; the one whose fecund, fertile, hairy, earthy energy pulses with a wild rawness of erotic and fierce boar energy. There is a family of 8 who live in the hills here and I am blessed to see them sometimes. More often I smell them, their earthen piggy, musky scent. I continue praying, making offerings of breath, voice and apples from last year’s harvest and courting the Great Sow to hear her Frequency. In dream she is teaching me her language, in waking I go every day to the Sacred Grove portal to sing to her. Still, I feel I have not yet heard her Frequency, it is not yet ringing in my own body. I cannot yet hear my own heart held within her Soul Song.

When I am in the forest or out on the land, I often sing my Soul frequency and the frequency of the day, the place, a wild Other, and allow an improvisational song to evolve out from it. The song of Now. These songs are both prayer and practice. (In the future will be a cd of songs given to me and co-created by the Wild and my Muse.) Here is an improvisational song prayer to the full moon as I was tracking her and opening myself to her frequency.

Grandmother moon

Deer are hushing over the field, jumping, springing through the teeth of your light

It is the predator’s night

It makes for easy killing when you can see your prey

And who will you kill tonight, moon; whose heart will you pierce with your beauty? Who will you seduce through the veil over the threshold with your song?

Oh moon, let me remember your song, pierce my heart with your beauty and let me slip over the threshold into the night, into the starlight

Into the old ways, never before seen

Oh let me remember and let me make an offering of your songs; that others may remember, let us remember that we have forgotten

Let me pierce hearts with your beauty, let me see clearly in your light

Let me guide them over the threshold, through the veil, with your song

Let us remember a lunacy

Let a great lunacy overtake us, ’til we are all pierced by your beauty, slipping through the veil singing your song

weaving us back into the fabric of the night, into dream, oh goddess of dream time, oh dark goddess who shines the light, oh beautiful predator of our hearts, siren songs

Make me drunk on your beauty and never return…

In reverence of the Holy in the Wild and may this be an offering for all, that we may re-member. I invite you to arise on Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus morn on Thursday 1 April, indeed in any and every morn, and greet the day with song. If you can, go out and sing your gratitude and prayer while moving within the larger body of Earth Community, of what we call “the wild world”; songs of praise, courtship, wonder, beauty, grief, longing… You may even hear the Frequency of your own Soul and sing it out into the world as an offering and a greeting, like the birds do in the morning. You may open your heart-ears to the Frequency of a creature you meet or a place you are in relationship with, and offer your voice as the magical “making visible that which is invisible” instrument singing their Frequency back to them. I pray that we all begin to hear and sing these Frequencies through time and space from Soul to Heart, from the Heart of the World and the essence of each creature; that our voices are an offering in Ritual Reciprocal Relationship with the Holy Heart of the World. May we sing ourselves home to the Sacred Grove, feeling our hearts resonating once again with the Song of Now of the Golden Web of Life and in reverence of the Holy in the Wild.

~~~~~

Sara McFarland is an improvisational nature-based singer, SoulStoryteller and performance artist, naturopath, ritualist, Wild Mind and Soul Initiation Guide, and wilderness mentor. Sara spends her time apprenticing in Reciprocal Ritual Relationship with the Holy in the Wild following the whispers of her Muse. Guided by her own Soul's holographic, crazy Wisdom and Beauty she listens to the melodies that Earth and the Ancestors sing through her. Sara lives in Woelferbuett, Rhoen, Germany.

Image and Video by Sara McFarland

Thank you Sara McFarland for your offering to Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus 2021. Sara is also a contact for Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus in Germany.

If reading this, you too would like to be more involved/participate in Earthsongwave Dawn Chorus, please contact us through www.earthsongwave.com