For the past several months, I’ve been listening to and sharing this recording from September 2023 during in-person and online gatherings, and it’s been clear to me for a while that it would be the next subaquatic conversation I would make available here on the site. What I’ve only just realized, in preparing to post it, is that it’s basically a mirror of the first conversation, “We Are One: Ancestral Flow” (available above). On that track, I start off with a tune I later titled “Lamento” that channels energetic and sonic aspects of the Middle Passage as I receive/perceive them, and as I pour the emotion of that ancestral memory through the melody moving me, one particular whale comes directly to the hydrophone to speak to me, bringing a message (We Are One) that soothes my spirit in the moment and has continued to work its healing resonance on my being and life ever since. On this register, I am the one intentionally offering my voice as salve to a whale who nestles up to the mic to be sure their woeful, downright heartbreaking song rings out above the voices of the other whales in the vicinity.

It's a song I had been catching pieces of in the days prior, and I heard it in its entirety shortly before pressing play to record our interaction. I was so moved by the weary sadness that spoke to me of the worsening condition of the oceans and held an ominous strain of foreboding that basically served to announce that our tipping point had been passed. Confronting the dire consequences of humans’ destruction/self-destruction on scales not witnessed in recent history (perhaps ever) had now become inevitable, according to this transmission, and while I didn’t receive it as a message of hopelessness, I definitely noted the warning ringing through it. These whales are also always dreaming to us of the Power we hold to make a way out of no way, Harriet Tubman-stylee. Given all this, I couldn’t help responding with sounds intended to acknowledge and alleviate the distress I was hearing, offering an extended vocal caress, which is what you’ll hear, in addition to the resulting shift in the entire sonic palette. This whale wanted to be heard. I let them know that they were, and a healing took place—as it always does when we come together in song, in psalm. May the healing extend to you as you imbibe this sea session.