Hi,
Everybody.
Welcome.
I'm so glad you're here.
To begin our journey into sound and evolution,
I will invite you to sit in a way that feels comfortable to you,
Or lie down.
If it feels safe to close your eyes,
You can allow them to close.
This one may also work well with an eye covering.
Once you're settled,
I'll invite you to simply bring a little bit of gentle attention to the breath.
Being aware as you breathe in that this is you breathing in,
And being aware as you breathe out that this is you breathing out in this moment.
If you want to,
You can allow the breath to slow down,
Just noticing the quality of your breathing.
As we invite in the awareness,
And in many traditions and old stories,
All of creation begins either with an inhale,
Where the divine creates space for the universe to appear,
Or with an exhale,
Allowing the creative impulse to move like ripples through the universe.
As we go through our journey together over the next few minutes,
I'll invite you to either follow along with the words,
Or just let them wash over you like water.
And we can take a nice,
Slow breath together,
Breathing in,
Releasing with a sigh.
As you continue to breathe with gentle awareness,
I'll invite you to trace the breath back.
We didn't always breathe with inhales and exhales.
Before that,
We spent nine months in the womb.
Our entire existence mediated through fluid,
Through the nourishment,
The heartbeat of the mother.
Before we breathed,
We listened,
We vibrated.
We learned about all of existence through those pulsations in liquid,
Through the gentle expansion and contraction of the womb.
Within each of us,
There is a cellular memory of that time,
Because after all,
For nine months,
That was our entire universe.
But our cellular memory goes back even further than that,
To the very beginnings of our evolution when we were deep under the waters of the ocean,
In a much vaster,
Infinite world of liquid and vibration and of song.
Deep in those oceans for millions of years,
We were surrounded by the singing of creatures,
Of whales,
Of ancient beings that have been long forgotten in the past.
And yet something in ourselves remembers what it is to live in the depths of the ocean.
To hear not with our ears,
But with every fiber of our being.
Whether we were one cell or many cells,
We all vibrated in harmony with each other.
And then slowly,
Gradually,
As the oceans receded and we became more complex than single cells,
Or two cells,
Or three cells,
We made our way up onto land.
And those deep vibrations of the ocean's depths gave way to the sounds of running water,
And of our relations,
The birds and the insects,
Of the sound of gentle rainfall in the forest or jungle.
And slowly,
Over tens of thousands of years,
We rose up to walk on two feet,
Feeling the earth living,
Vibrating,
Just as the ancient depths have,
Living and vibrating,
Communicating with us through the living soil.
And we learned how to make light into the darkness.
We learned to gather around fires together.
Remember,
Remember what it was,
Those first times of coming in into community,
Of gathering on a cold night around a warm fire.
Breathing together.
Hearing the sounds of the natural world around you,
Not as alien,
But as kin.
No more separate from you as the whale from the water.
All parts of the same organism,
The same cell.
And slowly,
We learned to create our own vibrations,
Our own instruments.
See if you can connect with and remember those first rhythms as ways of communicating with the natural world,
With our old home,
With the whales,
With the universal womb that once held all of us.
And over time,
Those rhythms become more complex and more layered.
And instead of just being ways of beginning kinship with the natural world,
They became ways of being in relationship with each other.
One rhythm made by humans speaking to another rhythm made by humans.
We started to listen more to our own rhythms.
Our own rhythms,
Our own voices,
Our own songs.
That we started to forget where we came from.
We started to forget the oceans,
The jungles,
The forests,
The desert.
We started to forget.
And in the space of that forgetting,
New rhythms,
New sounds began to emerge,
Not from the dance of connection,
But from the dance of separation.
Those new sounds emerged from the belief that we were somehow different,
Better,
Superior to the natural world.
And as those ancient rhythms faded from our collective memory,
A new acoustic ecosystem emerges.
Not rain on leaves,
But locomotives on tracks.
Not drums singing around a fire,
But the relentlessly consistent rhythm of the factory floor.
Not the harmony of a co-evolved sylvan world.
Not the song of the deepest depths of the ocean,
But the cacophony of the industrial city.
Yet even in the midst of all of this noise,
This noise that came from the illusion of separation,
There was a yearning in the cells,
In the memory,
In the breath of remembrance that we each experience for nine months in the mother's womb.
Of what it is to live in a world of vibration.
Of that deep,
Insistent,
Gentle heartbeat that thrums even now beneath the surface of the world,
Beneath all of the electrical hums and the machines,
The airplanes and the cars,
The buzz of electrical lines.
Even now,
With each breath,
We can return and remember.
I'll invite you to take a nice slow breath with me.
Breathing in and before leaving this space,
I'll invite you to simply look around.
Take a moment to simply listen.
Thank you for joining me.
