Transcript for All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hello friends, a quick note here at the beginning about this episode. So this is one that's been in the works for quite a while and it goes into a subject that's timeless and a subject that I could truly steep in and explore forever. It's about sound and vibration and how sound is understood in animist and spiritual traditions around the world. And just so everyone knows I started working on this episode some time ago. well before the current crisis in the Middle East erupted. So in the midst of what's going on in the world right now, it may seem tangential to release an episode about sound and vibration. And then, of course, there are also ways in which song and sound are vehicles through which to process difficult times. And they offer a way to connect in the midst of the cacophony around us. and they help us replenish our relationship to place and to each other and to all that really matters in a living son or a world. So song and sound are from this perspective always relevant and the song of all that is which as Tolkien articulated so clearly is a song of both joy and lament is present and is waiting to be sung along to always. And so I just wanted to say that before this episode starts. I know everyone is feeling a lot. I'm feeling a lot. I'm going to dive into some of those feelings in future episodes and discussions. But for now, here's an opportunity to steep and song sound and vibration. Really deep thanks to Trevor Hall to Shri Parvati Baul and to Leah Song and Chloe Smith for contributing their voices to this episode.

Listen, listen, close. There is a sound. Do you hear it? There is a sound buried beneath the noise of everyday life, the chatter of the children, the grumbling of the car engines, the growl of the garbage truck, the roar of the subway train. far beneath the bells and whistles that occupy our waking lives. The apps that beat us, the timers, the reminders. There is a sound. If we're too distracted by the noise, some say, we miss it. Too distracted by the buzz of our own thought process, we miss it. Too distracted by foam chatter, We definitely miss it. Yet, just pause for a moment, open our ears, find two ourselves a little bit, take a breath through the pores of our skin, and suddenly, sudden, all of nature is conspiring to funnel us towards it. The dragonflies wings, The lapping reel of waves over pebbles. There is a sound. There is an uttered and re-udged across the ages, uttering of itself by itself. Forever. Do you hear it? A sound that is the hum of all voices in one. All worlds in one. As if the interstellar chorus of black holes and collapsing stars were inextricably mingled with crickets all. As if infants cries and angelic guires were sprung of the same voice. as if lover's moans and the Mongol howls of the cremation ground were one song. As if all songs of reunion and dissolution, all cries of please don't leave me and it's so good to see you after all these years and I do Yes, I do. And don't grieve for me. And now, at last, I pass into the great mystery. Our all one song.

The sonorous ripples of the universe is ongoing love for itself, some say. The reverberations of a great longing, or you could say a very simple longing for this sound is simple. This sound is simple. It says, listen, listen. It says, here I am. Oh, great wonder in the midst of all this. I am. So, some have said that it is the vibration of consciousness beholding itself. The clivering voice of the universe that never ceases to proclaim, I exist in humble wonder. and then trembles at the repercussions of that very proclamation. Does it call itself beloved? Yes. Is it, in awe of itself? Yes. Does it long for itself as the Chateka bird lambs for rain? Yes. The bird that sips only monsoon rain from the high skies above? Yes. Does it retract? Now separate from itself and sing in isolation of returning home? Yes. And then does it rejoin as all coral voices of creation melt back into one? Yes. Does it split again into limitless choirs of specificity and diversity into eyes and jaws and glimpses? into interstellar clouds in the hiss of fungal spores and the clack of cicadas wings and the lolling of a million tones. Yes. Does it reshape and infinite rhythms as the stick pounding upon the drum? As the concussion of bombs on battlefields and the finger strikes of a little girl practicing piano scales? Yes. Does it ring in the clash of sword on shield even as it expresses as tender size? Yes. Does it arise out of itself forever? A source spilling over forever forever? Yes. The song that sang itself had no language says Susan Shone Harjo. It was a heartbeat that thundered through the canyons of time. Where is it to be found? This eternal heartbeat, this sound. It's hidden in plain sight. It plants itself in the myths and stories of the world. It echoes as the names of the gods themselves. It whispers in the name of Schu. the Egyptian wind god. It buzzes in the name of Zeus, all lightning and thunder. It hums in the name of the secret god, Ammon and reverberates as his dynamic creator counterpart Tatatana Tatatana. Listen. Amen. And Tatatana, Tatatana. Ahaan. And an echo. Tatatana. Tatatana. All this. Ahaan. And an echo. Tatatana. All this. Do you hear it? Tatatana. Tatatana. It rings out in Tolkien's word of creation air. Air. It proclaims in the beginning was the word and the word was God, and listen close. It whirs in the word, word itself. Do you hear it? You can hear it turning in the Sanskrit word for turnings, Vritis, Vrit, Vrit. The dragonfly homes the thought arises that kitten winds a universe's born, such as the turnings of the Holy Word. There is a sound. It is vibrational potency itself. It's power to shock is right there in the word Shakti. It's why the word hum hums on the word buzz buzzes. It puts the breath in the aloha. It breathes the heat into samastiti. It is the clean clean of kali, the dom dom du rega, the aah of shiva, and the yee of shutti. It moves from mouth to mouth, leaps from drum to ear and shakes bodies. It shakes cells. It is a heartbeat, a drum beat. were an ancient Peruvian floor drum that booms with resonance across a thousand years. It allulates in the name Ulu-lu, the vibrational naval of the world. It puts the watery hiss in Mississippi, which means, of course, the sound of the gathering of all the waters. It is the fractal ripple of vibration that puts the Shah in the Ori Shah. Shah, the fractal shards of consciousness. It delivers the pop-in Puppo-e, which Robin Wall Kimmer describes like this, quote, my first taste of the missing language was the word Puppo-e on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishanabe ethnobotnist Kiwai Denokwe, forgive my pronunciation, in a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Pupowy, she explained, translates as the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. Do you hear it? Singing as the world. The aboriginal guy will group of women say in their book, song spirals, quote. The world sings all the time. We sing and the cloud sing. The planet sing, the rain sings, the birds, the plants, the rocks, the tides sing. And we sing the world, those are certain. The fish, animals, and different beings. They sing in different ways, a different frequency. Some songs take a long time. The world is alive with their sound. The world is their sound and ours. This is the music of nature. This is why they say the names of the animals are the sounds they make. The wallabies don't do them as their tail and feet hit the ground. The dove is gukku, the coal bird is gukku. Each name is the sound. The sound is them singing. The sound of the waves through the songs is. Here the sound. This communication between animals, between land animals and people, between the tide, the sun and the moon is about giving and receiving messages.

Beloved. Do you hear anything? The whole swaying forest in the Gita Govinda is trying to get you to hear it, which is why Jaya Dev and Vok's kukus and bees and the bend and sway of sandal trees. He's spiraling you through a forest of sound to take you right to it. Follow him, follow the trail. For the sound is nature. It is her. It is divine. If you want to call it that, it is the movement of the Lord. Sound is God says Pundit Pranat. And many are the texts that speak of the animating power of creation as sound itself. The great goddess is Nada Rupa, sings the Lalita Sahasronama. She who is in the form of sound, She is the word, the text says, the lady of the word, worshiped by celestial musicians. She reverberates in this sound. She is divani. Resonance says the Khamarkanda. And so, erupting from deep space, she harms. She harms. About her dense black hair, the bees are buzzing in swarms, cries romper's head. a verse that sent Sri Ramakrishna spiraling into trance. Listen to that closely. About her dense black hair, the bees are buzzing and swore. Do you hear it? The eternal, fathomless mystery, buzzless. Right now it wasn't. The fruitful darkness is all around us. In blue.

deep space reverberates with sound. And at last, scientists are finally saying that they've heard it too. The sound of gravitational waves, the sound of creation, the hum of the cosmos, just a couple months ago they had last detected it. Gravitational waves, sounding from a black hole. around your dense black hair, mother, the bees are buzzing in swarms. It's like a choir with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies. Says scientist Kiara Mingerelli, assistant professor of physics at Yale University. Yes, Kiara, it's like a choir. because it is a choir. For Tolkien, creation itself came to be because of a choir, quote, then the voices of the iron ore like unto harps and lutes and pipes and trumpets and veals and organs and like unto countless choir singing with words began to fashion the theme of a new guitar that's the creator to a great music and a sound of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights and the places of the dwelling of a new guitar were filled to overfly and the music and the echo of the music went out into the void and it was not void and Tolkien wasn't wrong. The universe is not metaphorically a choir. It is a choir. It turns out that all that stuff about the music of the spheres is true. Turns out the ancient alchemists and astrologers were right from the atomic to the cosmic this whole place is singing. Planetary intervals are harmonic and the entire solar system is attuned, harmonic structure says John Martino in the little book of coincidence. And so you know, that's not a new age book, that's a mathematics book. That's right, the math of musical intervals is present in the relationship between all of the planetary bodies in our solar system. It's present in the relative dimensions of the sun and the moon and their relative positioning to planet Earth. And those same musical ratios are present in the human body just as they are present in the morning glory and the spiral crown of the desert succulent. The ratios that govern plant growth that determine the pattern of leaves on the stem, the distance between those leaves these are harmonic musical intervals. There is music literally in how leaves grow. There is music in how flowers express in fifths and octaves. DNA itself is structured musically, such as Joaquim Ernst Parent. Precisely, according to the Pythagorean, to track this. The octaves, the fifth, the fourth, and the major second. Your tissues are literally sung into being, vibrated through the four stringed lute of the DNA molecule. This universe is a choir, and each atom Says Lama Govinda, is constantly singing, a song. Explore her Alexander David Neal speaks of an encounter with a Bunpo practitioner and Tibet, who was known as the Master of the Toad. She records him as saying, quote, all creatures, all beings, all things, even the seemingly lifeless ones, give off tones. Each one produces a special characteristic tone. Why? Beings and things, he says, are conglomerations of the smallest particles, doodra, and these particles dance. And as they dance, they produce tones. This is what the teachings say. In the beginning was the wind, he says, with its whirl, it created the juttoms, the primordial forms. This wind sounded, Thus it was sound which formed matter. The sounding of these first jot-toms brought further forms, which by virtue of their sounds created new shapes. This is by no means a tale from things long past. He said, it is still this way. The sound brings forth all forms and all beaks. The sound is that through which we live. The cosmic system, says Hazretten, may have calmed, works by the laws of harmony, the laws of music, and everything. Everything obeys the secret music. A secret music in which one primal sound, sounding forever, fractals into its infinite choir, its infinite orchestra, its infinite chorus of whales and allulations, its infinite keens, its infinite lament, its infinite whoops and exaltations, and each of those voices lead back to one sound. One sound. So, if you've ever recorded in a recording studio, you know that a song, right? All the varied instrumentation, all the many tracks, the rhythms, all this ultimately is one waveform, right? When you see it, when you're recording, it's one waveform. A vinyl record is one waveform, spiraling around a center. So if you were to take all sounds ever song, all sounds emanating from all the great spiraling structures of space time, from the home of the hummingbird to the roar of deep space, and you were to trace that great orchestra on a page, what would all those sounds together look like? They would look like one wave. one stream, one serpentine pulse. There is a sound. One ambilical sonic line direct to the mystery. This is the one vibration. Can you hear it? And when we catch a glimpse of it, we start to remember that this sound has perhaps been guiding our lives all along, that we've navigated this life, this world through resonance. that we've gravitated towards the things that we are passionate about and the people that we love and the communities that we want to deepen into from a deep, hard, resonant. This life has been a musical endeavor all along and all of our lessons you could say come in the form of a sound.

So I've wanted to interview Trevor Hall for some time now. His music has formed a soundtrack for some of the more meaningful events in my life. And I've wanted to storytell over his melodies and to speak with him about sound and song and devotion. Because his music for me is steeped in a deep devotion. There's a tangible love of the divine mother an unabashed willingness to go into the simplicity of the mystical at a time when people are either reluctant to go there or perhaps too willing to advertise themselves as mystics. And I've also wanted to do an episode for a while now on vibration. You know, I thought about calling it, it's all vibration, man, like the cliche goes. But the cliche is there for a reason, right? It is all vibration. And I've wanted to explore the facets and aspects and permutations of the animate as sound. Because there are many traditions the world over who feel the link between animacy, between this living universe and sound. And so when I heard Trevor release a song whose chorus says, all of my lessons come in the form of a sound, it was a bridge to something I've wanted to explore for a long time. And be warned, I've taken Trevor's lyrics in our conversation in this episode and spiraled it all into my own pondering sound and vibration and anonymity. So not everything in this episode is necessarily how he views the meaning of those lyrics. It's a spiraling off of his lyrics and his sound. You could say into a sureless ocean of sound. As our conversation revealed, All of my lessons come in the form of a sound can be as grand as the reverberant hum of ultimate reality delivering insights to the attuned ear, and it can also be as simple as the process of composing a song. In gratitude, they're out back in the barn.

beautiful and that whole feeling like I'm in the I'm in the barn but I go everywhere. It reminds me there's a there's a line from Hazarat and I had con the is a few mystic and yeah and he says the mystic travels led by a mysterious sound and it reminds me of that yeah the transport of ability of sound and then then he also says who knows the mysteries of sound knows the mysteries of the universe

I was interested if you had any thoughts on that.

into silence, as Trevor's talking about, into the vastness, into remembering, into freedom, a journey home. From song spirals, quote, the sound communicates who we are, our identity and where our homeland is, the place and the song are one. We go back to our homeland through song, feeling to that we go back to our homeland through song. When we understand sound as transportive, when we understand it as a chord, a lifeline of thread, when we understand we are connected vibrationaly to it, then we can write it home. What were you gained by merely hearing this sound? Ask Rama Krishna. You hear the roar of the ocean from the distance. By following the roar you can reach the ocean. As long as there is the roar there must also be the ocean. By following the trail of home, you attain Brahma, the limitless expanse. Sound is a trail. Have you heard the sound inviting you on the great journey? Sure, Abindo described it as the far-off anthem of a pilgrim sea. A murmur, multitudinous and lone. All sounds it was in turn, he says, yet still the same. The immortal cry that ravished the captive ear. Many traditions described song as a vehicle of travel. A caravan path. Quote, song spirals are a root of path. They walk through the land. When we hear the song, we travel through country. The song takes us there. We see everything. The soil, the rocks, the leaves, the sea, the crocodile making a nest, the lightning. The song spirals tell us where everything is. We are in another dimension when we sing. The time is now when we sing. the sound brings me into a place of silence sound transports us somewhere but the place to which it transports us is here to the place of present the time is now when we say they say right the mantra is the great traverse to here to the place of present Vibration is the presence of the infinite and the thread that connects us there. And this understanding of vibration isn't limited to ancient Tantra or to modern surf rock. In the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda traditions, everything is connected through vibration. Vibrations, Umbanda mother, my glass, he says, in the book Spirit Zong, originate in the spiritual realm. Vibration is the flow of energy within and among humans as well as the energy of the spirits it connects everything. There is vibration in the light of the candles and preparation for the ritual. There is vibration in the curling in sense. There is vibration in the garments worn, vibration in the shimmer of the beaded trance veil, in the tinkling adornments in every aspect of the ritual aesthetic. The ritual shimmers deliberately. It pulses deliberately. It's meant to vibrate. It calls vibration through vibrations. Vibration is in the rhythm of the drums, the clapping of hands, the pulpitus, invoked. Quote, the drum has an energy of vibration and a shea. It hurls you, the vibration will lunges you to the ancestor. Lunges you to the divinity, to the sacred, understand? Vibration makes possible the manifestation of the entity and the trans ritual, the abundant mother says, the song, the music as a vibration and the saint, the animate being, has a vibration. The animate being, has a vibration. The animate being is a vibration. St. George arrives in the circle. Who is St. George? St. George is a vibration. Some of the Barbara is a vibration. Ocean and her dance of waterfalls and lights her dance of joyous vails. Ocean is a vibration. The saint is a vibration. The enemy force is a vibration. God is a vibration. So in the Afro-Brazilian traditions, the vibration of the music attracts the particular vibration of the enemy. As the vibration rises, the practitioner themselves begins to vibrate. Deep in the marrow, deep in the cells, the rising vibration marks the onset of trans. And the practitioners ride the thread of vibration right to the superior world, which hums and radiates itself as an endless sea of vibrations. Vibration is a chord, a thread, if you want to reach the ocean, follow the roar. John Coltrane put it this way, a love supreme. He said, thought waves, heat waves, all vibrations all paths lead to God. And then he said, thank you, God. Thank you, Creator. Thank you. Thank you, great vibration. Thank you, eternal song. Here before you, and in the power I say, thank you. So great journeys are undertaken through sound. Pilgrimage is realized through sound. Communities are replenished through sound. And within this sound, if we follow it, is our own remembering, our own reconnection to a living cosmos, to a universe that homes with life. Remember, it sings. Remember how you were shaped in a homing womb, how your first sensations were of a liquid world that hummed and pulsed. Remember, remember, deeper still. Remember silence, remember, vastness. Remember how the goddess herself awoke, how creation stirred, to the sound of its own. The sound leads us to this place, this womb of mystery. The sounds conspire to lead us to the holy country, the high vast deep country of vibration. The sound is a far off country. This sound beyond. And yet it is present right here within us. It is in the body. A yogi alone says Ramakarsana, knows that the universal sound originates both from his own naval and from the supreme Brahman. The great expanse resting on the ocean of milk. So where do we look for the sound? Look for him, the Temple of Your Lims, cries bowel singer Jadu Bendu. He is there as the Lord of the World, speaking, singing and enchanting tunes. There, in the Temple of Your Lims, lives the animate force, singing and speaking. And the role of the practitioner is to clear the vessel and hear the universal sound reverberating within And one thing I've always loved about the Indian traditions, they're not just going to tell us philosophically that the universe is sound and sound is our homeland and that the ultimate reality is sound and then leave us to figure out what that means for us and some kind of abstract way. They're going to describe dozens of ways, possibly hundreds of ways, to ride sound back to its source. hundreds of ways to hum, to incant, to chant, to invoke, to sing.

So the Vignana Baerava Tantra gives us practice after practice of sonic immersion in which the individual consciousness attunes to the vastness through sound. One whose heart mind is completely focused on the prolonged sounds of a musical instrument such as a country through the duration of the phases of their resonance. At the limit of the perceptible sound, one's beautiful form becomes that of the supreme void. So the practitioner listens until there is no listener, only sound itself. And as that sound recapitulates the pulse of creation itself, arising out of itself, swelling to fullness, dissipating into a sky of reverberation before sounding again. The practitioner follows it into spaciousness. By performing a complete articulation of the own sound and meditating on the void at the end of its protracted saturated sound, one enters into the spacious openness by means of the void which is the supreme mother tower. So the yogi wakens to the supreme sound from the shiva samita. This is my most beloved yoga. From practicing this gradually, the yogi begins to hear mystic sound. The first sound is like the home of the honey intoxicated bee. The next is that of a flute, then of a loot. After this, by the gradual practice of yoga, the yogi hears the sounds of ringing bells, and then the war of thunder. This is what the bard has always wanted, isn't it? To ride the thread of sound to its source, and to dissolve there. So Bahu ishaamjugi sings, I feel no sadness at complete dissolution. What more could I wish then to dissolve in the breath of your melody? One of the things that you said about receiving that sound from the original sound and then writing it back to the original sound. And it seems like that's been part of like kind of the I guess you could say poetic or bardic or musical with sound from the beginning.

So in a sense, it's like the music is her singing to her.

Yeah, I love that image of the shoreless ocean that you brought in. It's cool what you're saying because it's almost like the words or like the last phase of that crystallization process you're talking about.

and the bard journeys the path of sound to that ocean dissolves into its boundarylessness and returns laden with salt. With the ability to call to summon to invoke to re-invigorate the world through salt. So the stories and myths are full of parts who could call the forces of nature through song. The Celtic Bard Amrigan parts a great storm at sea to the power of song. I am wind on sea, he sings. I am ocean wave. I am roar of sea, who but I announces the ages of the moon. The Indian singer Tonson lights lamps into those fire through song. Tons and singing, quote, brings rain, melts stones, causes flowers to blossom and attracts ferocious wild animals to join a peaceful, quiet circle in the forest. How was it that Tons and Kindle's candles by singing? Hazarat and I at Khan was asked, and he responded, Tons and had mastered sound. And therefore the sound of his voice became living.

Everything that he wanted happened. Very few in this world know to what extent phenomena can be produced by the power of the voice. He says, if there is any real trace of miracle in this world, it is in the voice. And of course, our first inclination is to view these stories or the powers of the Bards as metaphorical, right? Sure, they had powerful voices, but they couldn't actually move things with their voices, right? Light lamps, bring rain, and then feel into it just a little deeper. Feel into what you have moved in this life through your voice. What has come to you in your life through voice, through tone, through inflection, through words? Think of all that you have summoned, holy, summoner, the love in your life. It's there most likely because of words that you shared. You and your partner met and someone said something that resonated that echoed in the ear just right, and the rest is history. What comes to us comes to us through. Voice, vibration, in one way or another. This is the living power of the word. Every word is a call. Every word is a vibrational request of the universe. We're here to call. To hear the melody of creation and sing back, this for many traditions is the role of human beings. To sing back, to be a voice calling. In a world that threatens to love us to sleep, in a world of cacophonist voices, can we remember that every word we speak is a call and bring some deep resonance, relationality, intentionality to that call?

I feel like when we lose that sensitivity as a society, as a culture, when we lose that ability to listen and offer back, to offer me this back that has profound impacts.

Yeah, that's part of Goof inspiration and how that spreads and moves.

You know, the way that music in a second, 20,000 people are moving.

I feel you, and it reminds me of when Ramakrishna said that everything is within the jurisdiction of Shakti, right? Have you been like the conversation we're having? The mind that when you're meditating, the thought that's even a person meditating. Yeah. All of that.

To me, it feels like just a natural recognition of the universe and the way things are. understand like what Ramakrishna said if you understand her to be the power that moves through everything that is as jurisdiction within everything that the natural relationship to that is.

Yeah. And, you know, to me, it feels like a recognition. It's the like, the alignment we're in with nature. I mean, with time. You know, we're not all in the shots. We're not in control. We're fleeting, like passing. Yeah. It's like all there is to do is sing her praises in a way.

When we realize that all of it is her, that all of it echoes as her, all of it is nature, all of it is the animate force. All of it speaks, all of it listens as her. When we realize that she is vaster than vast, and yet she is closer than close, that the distant far-off sound has been right here all along, the feeling that this stirs is what relief, surrender, devotion, the quenching perhaps of a great longing or the invitation to dwell in that longing as everything around us cries in longing too. So we started with the song all my lessons. The second line after it says all my lessons come in the form of the sound it says I am a bird who is waiting for them to come down.

Yeah, it's beautiful, and then Mirabaisong about the Jagatika Bird also.

So metabysings, as the tautic bird pines for the rain cloud, as the fish longs for water. Mira is restless and longs for her separated lover. The devotional cry of the Chateka bird is a cry of longing. The cry says, Look, the divine is all around us everywhere. There's water everywhere. The divine is singing out with tangible voice all around us. Nature is singing out with tangible voice all around us, but still she feels so far away. When will it rain at last? You know that feeling? We feel the animate call so present, so clear, but it teases us. Drags us along, grinds our faces in the dirt a little bit. It hides from us it conceals itself. It casts us out on winding trajectories of separation before calling us inevitably home. How could you do this to us? We want to cry. don't leave us, don't walk away in silence, don't walk away. This dichotomy, this friction, this tension of feeling at once, the presence of the living world and our separation from it, lives right at the heart of the devotional songs. So, Parvati Baal sings a song of Lalan, a song that cries the chettica, the rain birds sitting by the sea as thirsty. The bird is dying without water. The last oath, the gods of destiny, is this what you had in your hearts? The Chatech awaits patiently for the clouds, but the cloud passes into another country and rains there. Tell me, friend, how long will she hold on? Do you feel it? Longing itself has a sound to it, and every sound perhaps is a song of long. The relationship between sound and longing goes deep. Think of it this way. Why do we make sounds? Why do we say things? Why do we speak words? We do it because we long for something. Human voices sound out in longing. The bird calls out in longing. If the bird was not longing, it would not feel the need to set the air reverberating with its song. So sound is a longing, drums beat in longing. Cricket legs rub together in longing. Listen on a summer night. and the sound you hear is the sound of a hundred overlapping longings. Crying out together, when and last we join with you, great mother, great sound. When and last we release your quenching rain. Nature cries continually all around us Conjoined with me, devour me again. Find me. Leave me. Do it all again. Bright comment in the night. Find me. Leave me. Return 6,000 years later. Do it all again. Universe. We call out. Let us collide at last. The perpetually self colliding universe in which all sounds are collisions. All collisions are distractions. And all collisions are creations. And all collisions are sound. The sound is the friction, it's the universe, rubbing up against itself like cricket legs, forever and long. What are we called to do in the face of this great longing? If the buttons are to be believed we are to throw the books across the room, close the laptop, fling open the door, make for the nearest forest and cast ourselves upon the ground, crying at her fragrant feet. I mean, books are important, written words are important, concepts are important, notions are important, but sometimes, sometimes, don't you need to get away from the discourse? I do. Don't we all need to get away from the discourse? You know, you and I talking about this and that, bantering on about this and that and all about us, the universe is proclaiming a love song so deep. It blazes with irrepressible fire. It pounds in our neck veins all about us. Now, it says, cast away those meaningless words and fall again at my feet. No more books, no more empty words. No more running away from her.

And every piece of the world sings the whole world, because she is the world singing all glory upon her name. The new song, you say, like, what does it take to get the blooming? And then you say, I put a prayer upon the grape. Oh, it's good. Yeah. To me that speaks to that same energy in a way.

What does it take to get it booming? How in this world of chaos do we find connection to that fathomless sound? How do we find the muse that moves through all this? I put a prayer upon the great blue sky, a prayer. How do you pray? The word prayer as a whole lot of baggage attached to it, right? But as Mary Oliver says of praying, I don't know what praying is. She says, I do know how to pay attention. And then she says, it doesn't have to be the blue iris. It could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones. Just pay attention. Then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate. This isn't a contest, but the doorway into thanks, and into a silence in which another voice may speak. What does it take to get it moving? Opening the space so that another voice may speak. So that a song all around us may speak. You know that place where our words aren't trying to prove anything anymore. When we're not trying to make things be this or that, when we're not acutely aware of an audience, when we're not trying to advance any particular agenda, and we're simply humming along with what is. Simply whispering words straight to the mother's heart. So familiar, so close. And then maybe we soften our deep, somatic bracing against that word prayer. And we suddenly see how this whole life of ours has been a prayer. And how every sound is a prayer. And now we never stop praying. Even if you forbid it to your friend says mudan, I am helpless. My songs contain prayers. Some flowers pray through the radiance of their colors, and others being dark pray with their fragrance. As the loot itself prays with vibrating strings, so do I pray with my songs. beautiful and then I watch it move upon the water. So long it brings me into now.

One of the tried and true practices of the barred is to listen for the voice of the world in the sound of the waters. Orfias, they say the voice of the animate itself. Orphus sang through the sound of the waters. Listen closely to the waters, and you can hear the sound of Orphus's voice. You can hear the sound of the sound of the world. So generations of Greek and Thracian poets and singers listen for Orphus's flows in the waters' voice. Transpractitioners in ancient Greece let the sounds of underground streams take them into states of rapture. They heard pan singing there. They heard the nymphs, chatter, and back in the royal. The voice of Oshun, the lady of waterfalls and streams, draws us to her, playfully. The muse moves through the waters. The waters speak the litany of creation. The waters laugh and dergal. The waters take us into sweetness. The dynamism of water. and the dynamism of sound and the serpentine dynamism of animacy all around us are connected. If the singer wants to invoke dynamism, animacy, they sing quite often about water. So the guy who women sing the water, quote, the song sings the waters they say. It speaks of whales, surfacing, playing, circling, spraying from their spouse. the movements of nature are present in the song. When we sing the body of water, they say, we are not singing about water, but singing water itself. Of that body of water, we sing. And when we sing of that water, we remake that water. And we remake ourselves and our connections with water and all else that is country. The song spirals name the different waters. following the water out to the bay. The driftwood that has been dislodged by the fierce tide, the mangrove sticks floating and bobbing on the water, floating across Arnhem Bay. The next clan, the mother child relationship onwards, it spirals. So why name the different waters? Why specifically name the floating, the bobbing, the flow of the tide? What's the power in that? Why does the traditional Afro-Brazilian song to ocean name every aspect of the water? The river, the lake, the stream that crosses the forest, the stream that cuts the field, the waterfall, the force of the waterfall, the crystalline water, the water that finds the sea, into the arms of the sea. I'd last into the arms of the sea. Why does it do this? Perhaps it has something to do with resonance and reverberation that energies the vibrations of all the facets of the place build as they are involved. The animacy grows the places replenished through the naming and singing of all of its aspects. The network of goddess temples across the Indian subcontinent is replenished through the singing of it. The song lines are alive, they are to be sung, they are to be repeated, they are to be invoked. The place is replenished through the naming and singing of all of its aspects. The specific place hums with specificity, hums with its own song and hums with the one song all at once. So the guy will women describe the practice of the hunter singing the names of all the beings he encountered on the phone. Quote, the hunter sits under a geometry and sings of all the things he saw on his journey to the hunting place. The floating driftwood, the coconut, the garfish, the queen fish, the turn, a small bird with triangle wings that hangs about the sea, and he sings others too. Everything he sees in country he sings, Every time a Yidditja hunter goes out hunting, these are the things he sees, they're in the song spiral. The voice of the world is not an abstract transcendent home. It pulses dynamically and specifically in everything around us. It flows more strongly in certain places, sings more loudly in certain places. When the ritual drum pounds for days on and the sound lingers in the land, Go listen up at Taoist Pueblo, the place of Red Willow, you'll hear how songs linger in land. At Raja Rapa, the songs linger in the land. Songs pool like liquid, songs grow like vines. There is land that practically shouts and land that has fallen silent. Do you hear? And why spend the time it takes to listen for the song of a place? to learn the song of a place to sing the song of a place to help replenish the song of a place. Let's revisit this part of what was said in song spiral. When we sing of that water, we remake that water, and we remake ourselves in our connections with water and all else that is country. To hear the song of a place and to sing it is to know connections, to know and vocalize the law of the land. to know how to walk respectfully, to know how to live this life, to be in good relation, to be in harmony. And this part's important because while it can sound mythologically beautiful and everything to talk about the one sound and singing back, it can also sound abstract and it's not abstract. It's very central and very tangible. It's all vibration, right? Isn't an abstract cop-out It's all vibration means that everything we do matters. All the ripples matter. To know the song of a place is to know its rhythms, its cycles, its inhabitants, their habits, their rhythms. To know an ecosystem's time of fullness and lack. To know its seasons, to know how when too much is taken over there, then the results are felt over here. and to vocalize it and reinforce it in the land and in us. Every season says song spirals is greeted with a song. The pigeon tells us tides are going in or out. The women keen for the beginning of the new day for birds that sing. They keen for the first rays of the sun. So the song is the law of the land and is the way to walk in the world. Because the primary opening of the human being to the world says Italian philosopher, Georgio Agamben, is not logical but musical. How does that sound to you? That all the choices you make in this life are musical. That who you were drawn to in your life and those who were drawn towards you, who you built the life with and who built the life with you. who you laughed with and cried with, who you played with and worked with, that all of this was musical. If we're ever going to figure out what cooperation means in this world, if we're ever going to figure out what right relationship with land means, we have to navigate musically. It's a resonance, thank. Which is why the ancient Chinese texts say that the first duty of the politician is mastery of music. and that, quote, heaven earth and humankind come into harmony through tuning to the same note. When the singer comes into motion, the texts say, heaven and earth respond. The four seasons are in harmony. Stars and planets are orderly. Life is sustained in all beings. So there are traditions where the names of communal ecological relations are spoken every day and gratitude where oceans and groves are asked for permission to enter every single time. Where animacies awaken and thrive because they are sung to. I'll get into this more in the next episode, but there are places where the dead are conversed with as often as the living. everything becomes a dialogue, and when one stays in dialogue one is never alone, and the world is never dead, and everything matters, and everything in this world of beautiful collisions and burning longings, everything sank. It goes something like this. Say the guy would win. Quote. Our song goes to the clouds as we walk to our homeland. The clouds collect the sound and later it will rain. In the ceremony we sing the song and then another clans sings the song. It gathers in and eventually it rains. As we walk, the sound of our walking goes up to the clouds. Our sounds, our voice, our footsteps, the sounds of our existence are woven into the clouds. We walk, we know that place. The birds start talking and comes alive as we go. We are making sounds, the birds hear us. It is a welcoming. We are singing to the clouds and the chanting goes up, up, up out of our mouths and up to the clouds. Like a vibration of our existence, talking to the clouds, singing to the clouds, sending our song to the clouds because when they hear the clouds gather. Knowing the clouds is there, knowing that we are always connected. That is our kinship, our pattern of interconnection and our law, our role. Rome is the underlying rules and connections that bind us together. That tell us what to do. It is a respect. The law tells us that we are always connected even as we separate, even as the clouds. The clouds know things, and they talk. They say here we will separate, so that is part of the law of things. The clouds know they have knowledge, they can talk, this is in the song spirals. The law and the song spirals like the clouds that gather and separate. Tell us to live life to its fullest. Life is precious and we must do what we have to do before we go so that later on, when we are bound, others will respect us. We sing from the land to the sky up into space, from the sea and from the river that lies beneath the path that the messenger takes. The Milky Way is the pathway for the messenger to the spiritual world and the possum string, links, land and sky, and all that is underneath the sky. This is singing country, singing the sea. And as we sing the beings of country, we are never alone. We are all together. The whole universe is with us through this long spirals. We must sing it in all the connections. We sing country. What does it mean to you to sing to the land, to sing relationally, to sing back every day? What do you feel are some practices that have helped you like open to receive that downpour or to fine tune the antenna of listening or what helps you?

We sound our longing in a world of longing and the sound of longing rises to meet the great longing. and the great longing pours out around us everywhere, always. And it shows us how to live, how to breathe, how to love.

Listen for the sound of the wind of grace blowing. It's there, just out of reach. Do you hear? It's there, it's right here. Do you hear?

Many thanks to Trevor Hall for taking the time to have such a beautiful conversation. And Trevor's new album, Trevor Hall, and the great in-between is available now, everywhere you find a music. And there's a whole bunch of his songs that form the soundtrack to this episode. And those include, con, the fruitful darkness, all of my lessons, blue sky mind, bowl of light. I remember you. Jagadisha, my god, we call and chapter of the forest. I used a lot of other songs in this episode as well. These include the song This by Sheila Chandra. Don't walk away by joy division. The song Tambora i. M. i.a. the song Vasi for Ogun by Huobatadia. A love supreme by John Coltrane. Special thanks also to Sri Parvati Baal for singing that song of Lalan about the Chateka bird. to Leah Song and Chloe Smith for singing about the shore of the ocean. And to the guy who grew up with women, their book, Song Spirals is absolutely a must read. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Also quoted in this episode where the books, Song Lines, The Power and Promise by Margo Neal and Lynn Kelly, The Gospel of Ramakrishna by Lex Hixen, The Silmarillion by JR Tolkien, Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmer, The little book of coincidence by John Martino, when the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through, a norton anthology of native nation's poetry edited by Joy Harjo. Jaya Dev's Gita Govinda, Nada Brahma, the world is sound by a Jochem Ernst Barrett. Astronomers hear the celestial choir of gravitational waves for the first time, an article by Ashley Strickland in CNN, June 2023. The mysticism of sound and music by Hazrette and I had conned. The Latheta-Sahasra-Nama, the Kumari-Kakandaha, Magic and Mystery and Tibet by Alexander David-Neo, Savitri, the World Soul by Shri-O-Rabindo, the book Spiritsong, Afro-Brazilian religious music and boundaries by market-all, mirror of the sky, songs of the bowels of Bengal by Devin Bhattacharya, the book Sonic Theology by Guy Beck, Christopher Harish Wallace's translation of the ignyana byte of a tantra, the poems of Mirabai, praying by Mary Oliver, music in the power of sound by Alan Danielu. And finally, special thanks to Sunny Ryan Hart from Necrot for contributing some beautiful guitar sounds to this episode. If you liked what you heard today, please consider becoming a patron. patronage starts for as little as $6 per month, and it's a great way to go deeper into the topics that we explore on this podcast. Patrons get access to a twice monthly study group, an archive of study group discussions. and a thriving community in which topics related to animacy are discussed and steeped in. You can find out more at patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. Until next time, may our lives be filled with imagination, vision, and wonder.