Winter Sounds

As the year closes, and winter is well set in, I’ve been trying to finish projects, keep up the pace, and also find time to pay attention to the land. This month, I finished final edits on an essay to be published in the new year about three sound artists’ consideration of environmental change and catastrophe, and conversations with nonhuman voices. 

This has been a welcome if complicated focus, writing of intimacy with the unknown, hope in our co-existence with neighbors, as well as the possibilities––both beautiful and threatening––that our relationships with technology can open. 

In writing, I’ve been reading, and I want to share some lines from David Hinton’s book “Wild Mind, Wild Earth” –– 

Togetherness is a primordial value, deeper and more ancient than self-awareness, let alone philosophizing. It inheres in the body itself. We instinctively need this togetherness; and togetherness requires kinship. Indeed, this goes so deep it challenges our assumptions about individual identity––for without kinship and togetherness, what are we? …We inhabit a single tissue of language (or it inhabits us). We are positively interfused and adrift in it––and in family, community, culture, civilization. And why would it stop with our species? 

May we find the time and grace to be in kinship with our neighbors, human and otherwise, and respect (meaning literally to “look again”) the wild earth that holds us. 

Here’s the same pond, in winter, three times: