Song Medicine

of trees, snakes & birds

Ancient memory

Awaken inside of me

Spine to the oak tree

Beauty far as I can see.

I sit, I breathe,

I be, I be,

With gratitude, with love,

With peace inside of me.

This day is a gift

My life is a breath

Right here, right now,

My heartwings lift.

I sit, I breathe,

I be, I be.

With gratitude, with love,

With peace inside of me. 

This ancient oak tree stands rooted, beside a wildish manmade pond just beyond our back fence, on the other side of the train tracks. A ten minute leisurely walk out our back gate, and you can find yourself sitting beneath this leafing elder, her branches snaking into the sky, gnarled by time, sun and wind.

In the 2 years we’ve called this house home, I’ve sat or stood in her shadow hundreds of times. Marveling at her immensity, her regality, how much life she has witnessed arise into the light of life and then fall back into the beyond. She must be 200 years old, at least. She has become a friend and a mentor.

She is also the one who gifted me the poem above, that, months later, transformed into the following song. Whenever I pass by, I try to remember to pause and be with her, allowing my weight to lean against her sturdy spine, and offer her back the medicine that she gifted me.

One early morning June, I took a walk in the woods. Baby Gyddion had fallen asleep in our worn green carrier, his body heavy and sweaty against my chest. I arrived at the roots of the oak and leaned my back against her torso. My straw hat pushed forward a bit to cover my eyes. I began to sing her song. I closed my eyes and felt the words and energy of the song moving through my body and being. I breathed deeply and felt the oak behind me, holding me, inviting the ancient memory to awaken inside me, just as the lyrics invoke. It was then that I had the feeling of being watched. You know that feeling. Tingly prickles on the back of my neck. I lifted my chin up towards the sky, towards her branches, my hat falling against the oak’s body, and there, swaying its tiny head and staring at me with small, beady black eyes was a snake.

Gah! I jumped instinctively down to all fours and backed away, like a spooked cat. Gyddion’s still sleeping body dangling below me. I then laughed out loud to see that it was a rat snake, not harmful or poisonous, but still immense; its 5 foot body extending up the trunk of the oak, wrapped around a main branch. As I stilled my breath and heartbeat, and calmed my initial fear, I could feel the snake’s curiosity. How it might have been inching closer to me, drawn by the song, by my voice. So, from my distant crouch, I began to sing again, this time directing my voice to the snake. 

I could feel how the words now morphed in my being. Ancient memory of the snake, awaken inside of me. Spine, the snake’s spine, wrapped around the oak tree, seeing beauty, the world alive with color and movement and sound, all around it. I could feel how this song was an offering of love to the oak and also the snake, how I can offer my voice, my attention, my presence to life around me and feel life offering its love back. I felt the snake loving me in return. I was in a state of awe and wonder.

When I was a little girl I would sing all the time. I had a little boombox in my bathroom, the one I shared with my brother Will. I would record songs, little melodies that came to me, on my boombox, and collect the tapes in my red vinyl tape case. I wish I had even one of these now, but I don’t. They are distant wisps of memory.

When I was in middle school I was in the choir, and I received, like most of us did, the collective program that if you want to be “good” at singing, then your voice needs to sound like one of those singers on the radio, like Britney Spears, Reba McEntire, or Garth Brooks (yes, I was a big country music fan). I didn’t want to be famous, though. I just wanted to sing. I thought you couldn’t have one without the other. I did have the girlish wish that I could be the voice of a Disney character and would belt out all the lyrics to “Part of Your World,” in the shower, pretending I was Ariel on the rock, singing to my long-lost prince Eric on the shore. I would never grow up to be a famous singer (or a Disney princess) but I would long for it for years.

During the summer between my junior and senior year, I went to a student council camp. My best friend Joey and I decided to sing acapella together for the talent show. (I can’t remember what the song was or the name of the artist in this moment.) On stage in front of hundreds of other high school students and faculty, my nerves gripped my throat. When it was my cue, I stood at the mic and opened my mouth, but what emerged was a constricted, cracking sound. Joey quickly took over my part, and my heart crumpled. I must have blushed crimson, and wanted to run from the stage, never to show my face to these people again. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. Joey and I never talked about it. I did my best to pretend that it didn’t happen, smiling prettily to cover up my horror and embarrassment. But inside I promised myself I would never do that again. Never sing again or open myself up to that level of embarrassment.

I didn’t sing again, not for almost 20 years. It wasn’t until I found ritual and ceremony that my voice began to return to me. That the remembrance–that singing is my birthright, our birthright–trickled back through the cracking facade of my past shame. I came to know that singing is a gift offered to all humans, a way that we praise life within and around us. I could no longer let the heaviness or fear of embarrassing myself by sharing my voice through song stop me. As my dear friend and soul sister Gabriela says, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

A song mentor of mine Susan Lincoln taught me to “sing from my ancestral yoni bones.” And another song mentor Madi Sato showed me how to “catch” songs from the more than human world. With both of these teachings, I have been supported to remember that songs come from the beyond, from the voices of our ancestors that live on the other side of the veil and from the other than human worlds, like oak trees, snakes, and birds. And a huge part of receiving songs is listening. Listening deeply enough and long enough to hear the melodies and allow the songs to emerge without crafting them with our human ideas of how they need to be. This is incredibly difficult…and it’s also what is needed in our world now. Wisdom from the more than human worlds flowing through humans. And humans not making the wisdom about ourselves.

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You see, what I’ve come to know about songs (and all creations, including our children) is that they don’t come from us; they come through us. They don’t belong to us, but they long to be sung by us, to be shared through our voices, our words, and our hearts. In sharing songs, in singing, I am honoring the more than human, the voices of the otherworlds. 

So, humbly, I want to encourage you, dear reader, to sing again, to write, to go into the woods or sit at the base of a tree and listen long enough and deep enough for a song, for a whisper, for words or energy moving through your heart.  

And if you’re inspired, here is a little practice that I do every morning: I go outside first thing (well, as “first” as I can muster, depending on how many children I need to tend to). And I face the rising sun. Even if it’s cloudy or raining or cold or hot, I go outside. I put my bare feet on the earth, and I raise my face to the east, where the sun rises, and I offer a prayer or a song. I speak my gratitude for life aloud, and I try with all my might to evoke the feeling of wonder from within.

You see, I feel that one reason I was born was to weave wonder into life. To be with all that is, the Wasteland, the gray world humans have created, and to breathe the wonder of the more than human world back to the ears, eyes and hearts of humans. So, I have to start each day with a song. I have to sing all day long to help myself remember.

I’ll wrap here with these eternal words, from Rumi and a prayer:

Listen, 

You who came here to birth in order to bring the Mysteries back to life,

all of you who came to life to bring the wonder back,

your true voice makes all the creatures in the world very happy.

So please begin to speak and even sing

from that place in your heart

and tear the veil off this moment of becoming.

May we begin each day kneeling in prayer, and remember why we are here; to speak and sing from that place of wonder in our hearts, so that, together, we can create a world brimming with aliveness and real magic. 

With love,

Kate

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