Songbird, Practice
On Vocalizing and Expressing
Sign up for this month’s classes and inspire your creative practice. In NYC? Join in for Suminagashi: Meditative Paper Marbling or Marbled Paper Roses. Prefer virtual? Explore this month’s virtual workshops on Meditation and Journaling.
Sit still in one place. Listen in, for one minute, to the sonic landscape. Focus on the sounds present and close, extending your awareness out, stretching long, then return back — tuning in to the voice of your inner landscape. Subways, wind, birds, strangers, crowds, dogs, children, cars passing. The sounds of each song, close and far, vocalizing, as they arrive, peak, and fade away. All of life expressing.
Voice, in some form, has always given me a channel, been the ground for the flow of creative expression. Writing, teaching, singing, meditation — all landing places for idea through vocalization. Paired with wise body, voice is instrument, tool, teacher, learning how to howl, cry, croon. How to coax, shift, scream. How to enliven the room and how to connect and how, and when, to slow. How to spark wonder, attention, delight. How to call, communicate. There is the voice for a room of a hundred pre-schoolers. The voice across dinners. The voice loud enough to course correct an attempted carjacking. The voice to wonder. The voice order a coffee. The voice I keep with myself. Channeling the expression of voice whether paper, sensed, or sound shared is a reminder to the wide depths and dimensions of our humanness.
This internal voice is the tone I grow on the page at nights, ink hours, in early morning lights. Birds call crepuscular, and there I am in these penumbra-like hours, calling bac to myself, too, watching breath and thoughts, remembering life, emptying mind and filling pages. I grow this practice repeatedly, sustaining in increments, learning to sift through, parse out, and keep, discard, or organize what is mine at my core, what was given to me, and what can finally, resoundingly, be discarded. In writing and being, breathing and slow, I turn toward, instead of away from, the voice I know to be my own — the tone rooted, deeply embodied in belly like a basin, as if speaking were a reverberation across a canyon, when needed to be, the one like a faint whisper at dawn from one lover to the next in the gray blue twilight while the city sleeps.
Over the years of returning to body, mind, with breath and writing, I learn to build, care for, and trust voice. To feel the deep resounding embodiment of a true and felt yes; to understand the function of voice to coax and soothe; to quick shift to the loud tone, the warning cry. Voice notes to friends, notes on backs of receipts and card stock, connectors across subway stops, across moments and states and distance. Coos to the cardinals, blue jays, and mourning dove that wait at my screened in window. City voice, inside voices, collective and solitude speak. How we speak to ourselves and each other. The voices of curiosity, creativity. The voice and shape compassion makes. Are we tuned in? Are we listening?
In the mornings by the water I watch life in terrains of sameness. I feel into the voice of landscape and how the constancy of place speaks to the body and mind through the repeating, shifting, familiar. Cormorant stretches; trees morph; currents, constant, change their pacing. Many mornings, a woman lets her beagle off leash, and I watch as it howls, running around trees, catching scents and chasing them, relentless, to the edges of the field. Howling, nothing but deep instinct and sensing, the dog shaking from nose to tail; I am euphoric seeing this otherwise leashed animal in its fullest expression. At the beach, a boy runs into the growing tide. Maybe eight, he runs full-bodied screaming SHIT! as his legs hit the water — another way to say, it’s freezing. There, surrounded by friends, with no visible repercussions, he expresses freely. His voice takes up the whole horizon, and he yells, arms wide, as loud as he can. Unbridled joy, expressing into the undulating ocean, the whisper of wind, the only limits his lungs, how wide his wingspan, only tides and sand lines.
What I mean to highlight is the fires of our truest expressions — what we encourage from our bodies, from our dreams, desires, visions, hearts — are there within us. With practice, we find ways to coax, discern, create ways to channel this expression out. To take what is quiet and curious on the page, to be bold, and embody. To listen to the voices of land, animal, you, what is quiet and loud, said and not, and be dedicated to this expression. To find movement and stillness, and watch as your body speaks to you, tuning in to the vocalizing of your whole being.
Take a single breath, low, strong and slow, into the base of your belly. Notice the breath travel through that strong cavern there in the middle of you. Then up and out, traversing breath in chest, heart. Exhale and repeat. For a minute, listen. For a minute, consider of all the languages, present, ancestral, abstract, voiced, felt, made in tone and shape, eternal and ephemeral, that live and breathe in that moment. Consider something you care about. Something that helps you ground, slow, breathe. Then, up: out of the hands, arms, throat, chest, eyes, smiles, mind, brain, consciousness. With this moment to breathe and pause, what is being communicated or expressed? With pause, what do you notice?Â
Voice is incantation, creative power, connection. Our voices are our power, no matter how loud or quiet we make them, speak low in the dawn, into horizons. May we conjure up and create out with all that we have. May this season be one of expression.
from the studio:
classes and upcoming experiences:
come explore your creative practice in nyc and beyond
from a past season,
nourished by, nourishing:
Finding first ripening figs. Marbling outside. Courage. Clean house. Continuing.
