Ambassador (Part 1)
Whale Whispering gathering at the Potomac River in Georgetown, June 2024, Photo by Ashanee Kottage
[Disclaimer: This post was written over the course of the last 9 months, and originally completed in July, before I returned to Brazil, but never posted. There are a few references that date it, such as a one to the “new” season, and though I made a few edits to this final version, I chose to leave them in to show how the writing has been working its way out over “time,” winding toward the estuary of my blog.]
They’re here. Returned to Bahia from Antarctica for the 2024 turn of their cyclical presence, they’re weaving the notes that comprise this year’s soul serenade and my ears are ringing; it’s high tide, high time to emerge from the billowy buffer of my silence in the depths and relay the message that was broadcast to me last season in their terse telepathy. Their wisdom is so permeating--expressing Olokun’s unfathomable fathoms of knowing--that it’s easy to become stilled in the space of receptivity, drinking the glittering nectar of their gifts without end…but I’m on a job here, so I breach once again, let myself be seen even though/when I’d rather remain under cover of blue. In their awareness of how prolonged my digestion would be moving between these sixth and seventh seasons of this commitment, of the leveling up involved, the whales only gave me one word, and it was most certainly all that I could chew:
Ambassador.
Thrumming, resolute, and definitive, it rooted into my consciousness instantaneously, and that root stretched down to strike some buried bell of truth whose peal ricocheted around my mind with the fact that they had just given me my title. Whoosh. I am so overcome so overcome with gratitude and humbleness and a sense of being honored that a tsunami of feeling carries me to the edge of vertigo and suddenly I am expansive enough to contain it and Yemanjá is here. She cradles my body like she cradled my ancestors’ bodies across these waters, all of them transforming into something different from what they had been, as I am; I swoop down to whale level and we sing this power, we sing this power, Together, and they remind me who I am becoming.
Some backstory, for those who don’t know, and for me, because it’s helpful to spell it out to myself as I work through the density of mysteries involved in getting me to this point. When I was in my last year of high school, there was about a ten percent chance that I would catch a wave to the University of Hawai’i and pursue a career in marine biology. This was mostly my secret, but I did receive and partially complete the application. I never finished it because in the process of filling it out it became clear to me that though my heart was called to the sea, this was too far from home for me to wander at that time. My ultimate choice, for which I am forever grateful as all its challenges and trials and triumphs and joys were absolutely necessary aspects of my preparation, was Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, because I wanted to travel the world, connect with people everywhere, continue to learn other languages, immerse myself in myriad cultures, make the world the best place it could possibly be with me in it, whatever that meant. Only once I was well into my journey there did I come to understand that I had landed at the ultimate training ground for diplomats in the city of my birth, and upon receiving the degree that certified me to pursue that track with a golden stamp that basically guaranteed me access to that professional arena, I rejected it outright, having learned what I’d learned through the obstacle course of that first stint in higher education. I wanted to go higher than that education could take me. I wanted to go deeper.
Into my own history, into the stories of my people, the stories of the people, the stories that had been kept from me, the ones I would be required to seek with intention and vigor. Between receiving the certificate that signified having survived Georgetown (thanks to so many, so many who supported me along the way) and taking the higher plunge through the genuinely blissful process of earning a “Master’s” (the irony…) degree in Africana Studies from New York University, there were posts at Human Rights Watch, long-term temporary assignments at the World Bank and the IMF (personal reconnaissance), and numerous contracts with other organizations involved in international “development.” Also, a whole foray into a HIV prevention/sexual wellness education for Black women, including those who were incarcerated. I moved to New Orleans after finishing at NYU, escaping the post-911 pall that still held the city in its grip, ostensibly to teach African World Studies at Dillard University (which I thoroughly enjoyed despite the hellish shenanigans involved on the administrative side of the work) and through which I returned to the understanding that my true calling was to music, the most powerful tool of diplomacy I’ve ever encountered. I landed in the limbo where the quintessential musical ambassador, Louis Armstrong, was born, guided by my ancestors to spend two decades wading and bathing in the swampy waters that spawned the genre with the power to unite the world: jazz.
I thought I had found my path, and I had, only it turned out to be the spiraling kind, naturally, shaped like the so-called bubble net the whales use when they lull fish with their songs and dance them into union to be swallowed en masse in what must be one of the sweetest ways ever to die. My song is my diplomacy, that’s the knowing that New Orleans brought home for me, one of its countless gifts to my journey. (Countless gifts from my darling New Orleans…). So I left my job as an adjunct professor to sing on the streets of the French Quarter in Nola, and this is where the plot twists in a gut-wrenching way, because the person with whom I took it to the streets (first, and then we were the magical trio), with whom I took it to the studio, and to film, and to Europe, the person who insisted on showing me that my song is for the world, Dorise Grace Blackmon, now DoRise, transitioned to the realm of the ancestors on November 19th last year, and only since then have I claimed my truest (yet) understanding of this title that the whales—not officials at the U.N. or the State Department--have given me.
Through the quietness of my grieving, the whales have lulled me, too. Into acceptance, into Grace. It would have been plenty for me, I thought then, to be a musical ambassador at street level always, because that’s where music’s universal power was shown to me. When Shorty and Slim/Slim and Shorty became Mother Tongue with the addition of Tanya Huang and her spellbinding violining, we played for hours and hours, day after day, corralling humans from every possible ilk and origin into the lair of our Love song, just like the whales with the fish. We knew all the Quarter characters, from Ladder Man to Mustard Man to Doreen and our beloved Grandpa Elliot, and the folks whose only home was those streets, we helped make it sweet for them. I looked into their eyes when I sang, just as I did those of the businessmen and sex workers and housewives and truant trans teens, and the tourists, tourists, tourists from the whole expanse of Earth, we gathered them together in our corner hearth; I looked into their eyes whether they could see me or not and I watched Love win over and over and over again as the dollars rained into Dorise’s guitar case. It was plenty, then. But even then, I was below sea level, and like a good mermaid, left the streets for the stage on my way to the sea, to find myself at last standing on a stage that overlooks the sea, where the sea turtles and the whales who had summoned me could hear me loud and clear and near.
Because my diplomacy assignment was never solely amongst humans, or contained within the third dimension, or limited to Earth/Onile. My Cherokee ancestors have accompanied me since my earliest solo walks through the woods as I chatted with squirrels and harmonized with birds, whispering to me that we came from the stars and to the stars we will return, and my gospel song was always for the Universe, always for the One. So I find myself here now, at the precipice of such startling (and potentially crushing) responsibility, breathing the Cosmic Breath that the alligator-dragon and the sea turtle taught me to stay planted on the planet and do this job, wail it out, get it done, get it done, get it done.
The whales’ songs wrap the globe in Oneness from inside the ocean, but the forgetfulness of the majority of human people is so thick that the loop of polarity/adversity that only magnifies division and continuously replaces one cause for another is a scratched record whose fever pitch is rattling the galaxy. The binary is the foundation of creation, but not the Source. Touching the Oneness is a way through the chaos of this time, this time that’s been portended, foretold, a way through all times. The whalesongs, and these conversations between a Chocolate City girl and the whales, are a way to touch the Oneness, a way to open hearts wider, wider, my heart wider, wider, wilder, wider, wider, wider, wider. It’s been challenging not to be engulfed by what I experience as the massiveness of this assignment while reaching daily for that touch through the muck and mire of the fire this time. The genocide in Palestine, the massacre that sparked it and the echoing howl of unhealed trauma fueling the devastation from the Israeli side, Sudan still imploding, and Haiti, Haiti, Haiti, Congo, Ukraine, Louisiana, Detroit, Chicago…And, I push through, I breach, I breach, even though this journey with my mother’s health challenges, mixed with this grief, makes me want to stay quiet, out-of-pocket, singing to her and the dragonflies and turtles and with the baby birds in the gazebo over the neighborhood pond. I’m seeking the balance.
This is what I have to offer to this moment, in full acceptance of this title. Releasing these conversations between and with the whales to the world, carefully and respectfully. Gathering humans together in the presence of water to listen collectively to the sounds that I am certain are among the ingredients required to alchemize this Earth change in the direction of a symbiotic thriving between the planet and her inhabitants--if enough of us absorb and embody the transformative power they offer. Collective singing and wailing, letting the Earth hear us through the waves and ripples, our voices caressing her salt and sweet wetness, raining Love into the bodies that quench and cleanse and feed and transport us. When we gather, with a bowl or a creek or fountain/river/sea, with our tears and our dew and our plasma, we cocreate. Whalesong becomes like a carrier oil for the fragrance of our sung prayers, our voices like the scents of sweet olive, angel’s trumpet, jasmine, magnolia and gardenia commingling in the dense damp of underwater air on a July night in New Orleans, an oil that is not blubber, that is not crude, that is not extraction, but offering, tribute to the living temple upon which we dwell in our living temples. We send it wafting through tributaries to reach the oceans where everything connects; confluence is the goal and the guarantee. From Rock Creek we float prayers to Palestine and Israel, because the river does indeed join the sea, which is Red and was parted once for freedom’s sake, so the Torah says. We wade in the water as Harriet insisted/insists we do, for freedom’s sake, for Love’s sake, for survival, for blue. and green and aquamarine and all the colors no human has ever seen. And we vote and we march and we organize and donate, we liberate our tears, and we meditate…To whalesong.
The songs that I heard, and recorded, from the whales last year were the most mournful, grievous, and urgent that I’ve heard since I started doing this work or in any recording of whalesong that I’ve ever listened to. There was grieving for what is, and grieving for what was to come, an unmistakable alert to impending catastrophe, and because I was so deep in my own involvement with and grieving of the impending passage of my sister Dorise, I neglected to share the message as expansively as I was charged with sharing it. I’m undertaking that now, remembering the chill that passed through me on October 7 as I realized with absolute certainty that this was at least part of what the whales had foretold--the tipping point I heard referenced in one conversation/songversation in particular. I’ve shared these recordings a few times, online and at small in-person gatherings by water. The call now is to share them widely and openly as the new season’s sounds hit the waves.
As crazy as it may seem to some for all its apparent passivity, collective listening to whalesong is an act that offers repair and redemption for us and our planet, altering our consciousness, our brains in ways we can’t come close to comprehending, shifting us out of self-destructive somnolence and into a state of connectivity that allows us to activate powers that had been dormant in most of us. On the opposite side of the ocean’s surface, the whales are singing us awake; their inverse lullabies tendriling out toward our minds, reaching us through whatever channels they can. I am one of those channels, translators, go-betweens, diplomats; my voice travels the planet along with theirs, subaquatically, through our conversations. I sense that the degree of care and personal equilibrium required to do justice to this assignment are what the whales want to emphasize and offer constant reminders of in floating me this title, the one I ran from for so long, so for as long as I’m alive, I will work to live up to it.
Ambassador.
Part one is done.
Conversations with The Whales: