Grupo Competitivo/Come Together

Video by Giovanna Ribeiro

In Brazil, the name assigned to collectives of three or more whales seen traveling together at high speeds and/or exhibiting aggressive behavior in the form of forceful physical contact is known as a grupo competitive (competitive group). It’s understood that they are made up of multiple males sparring with each other over the one adult female present, with whom the whale who emerges as dominant will mate. Running up on one of these groups is considered one of the highlights of whale watching; it’s thrilling to witness the streamlined focus, the levels of sheer might, and the palpable adrenaline moving through these posses as they race and joust. The word that comes to mind to describe the vibe of these scenes is atomic. It literally feels like they could collectively decide to blow something up right then and there, and woe to anybody caught in the path of their wrath. Many whales have the scars and wounds to show for these battles, though my sense of them is less of violence than of purpose. And maybe sport. I’m aware, though, that I have to be mindful of projecting too much benevolence onto humpback whales as a whole just because they’re my people and they display such sweetness in other contexts. Sometimes calves accompanying mothering whales who are in estrus are killed in this process, and that’s a bit hard for me to wrap my mind around. Surely there’s some kind of natural selection involved in it all. It’s intense.

Still, I can’t help but imagine that in the depths, away from the nosiness of humans, there’s all types of other action going on in contrast to these displays at the surface--some one-on-one, some prismatic (queer), some gentle, some kinky—just like there is with their dolphin cousins. It doesn’t make sense to me to think that these animals who express sensitivity and intelligence that from my perspective far surpass humanity’s wouldn’t have an even greater range of sexual expression than we do. But these are my mind’s meanderings…(This seems like a fine time to mention Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. I’m guilty of assuming that folks who have made it to this space must have passed through that portal already, but I’ll stop that right this minute and advise you to get it into your life asap if you haven’t already. It is so concise, yet so densely spectacular). Having witnessed dozens of competitive groups at this point, what I know without needing to imagine is that they showcase the freedom, the wildness, and the powerthepowerthepower of these majestic mer-magicians through exhilarating displays of raw masculine energy. That’s what you get at and near the surface.

But when I sing to them, the roughhousing pauses.

Over and over, I’ve watched super-agitated pods make a shift that’s somehow simultaneously abrupt and seamless when the music reaches into them, like even mating is not so pressing that a break can’t be taken to appreciate a good song, to honor the offering being made, to acknowledge that the healing, loving intentions behind it are being received. I do feel that it’s personal on a certain level. While it’s unlikely that every whale in every group I’ve ever encountered has interacted with me directly before, I have a gut-knowing that the word is out about this work; they know what I’m doing and have a pact to give a collective nod of approval whenever they come across it. Also, they are moved by it, so profoundly that they switch from hardcore warrior mode to water ballet mode on a dime, synchronized swimming and tail salutes everywhere. It’s emotion all around whenever this happens; the sacredness of the exchange is never lost on the humans on board, and these moments in particular have given me access to a realm of feeling that I experience as an elevation of my sensibility. They take me to a place beyond tears, where the effect is so stratospheric that the water doesn’t move out of my body through my eyes, but rather shifts its movement within my body in synchronization to the movement of the whales: I co-feel with them. My capacity is expanded and all I can do is shake my head to that internal-external rhythm; teardrops are too little water to do justice to the heights of sentiment involved.

That’s the space I’m in at the start of this video, delirious with wonder as the whales approach, then instinctively compelled to get as close to them as possible by moving to the prow--or rather responding to their call to meet them at the prow. Gingerly working my way toward the front of the boat, I use the rail for support in the face of the epic agitation caused by their dozen or so (not all visible) bodies zooming toward the Terra Mater (Motherland or Earth Mother, one of the expedition vessels owned and operated by my beloveds at @ScubaTurismo, based in Caravelas in the deep south of Bahia), then motion for Jaco, who is filming behind me, to come closer to get the shot. Giovanna, who is filming from the upper deck, peppers the scene with her inspired commentary, exclaiming at the number of whales, their proximity, and questioning where Jaco was when he didn’t approach after I waved him toward me the first time. In his defense, I had asked him and the other men on board to stay back from me when the whales first came near, because I had gotten the clear impression in the prior two days we had spent at sea between Caravelas and Abrolhos that the vibration of Yemonja’s àṣẹ that I carry needed to be more forward, less diluted during initial contact. Za, Terra Mater’s owner and captain, appears in the frame when I motion Jaco forward as well, just as the whales are moving into formation right in front of the prow, dipping and rising in perfect coordination with each other, fanning out in front of me, saluting, leading.

I felt the absence of my documentary team of director and producers acutely right then, because all I wanted to do was focus on the whales, but it was such an extraordinary meeting that I had to be sure it was being captured, and I’m so thankful for Giovanna’s intuitive impulse to grab her phone and head to the upper deck. It’s unusual for me to divide my attention between the whales and anything else during these encounters, but I knew this crew had turned out in response to the very specific call I had radioed into the waters from below sea level (in the boat’s hold) the night before. Liquiding between sleep and trance, I had spent it projecting the request that they show up in numbers (even though it was quite late in the season and extremely rare to see a group this size) precisely so that this type of visual (which I was beaming to them telepathically as well) could be recorded. The humans need drama, I explained to them, in order to pay attention in large numbers, and part of my assignment is to get their messages to as many humans as possible. I’m quite clear that countless humans think that the notion of communicating with whales in this way is pure malarky, and that the idea that they’re aware of what’s happening in regional conflicts at ground level is utterly nonsensical. But when I say that I hear extreme amounts of alarm and lament in their songs of these past two seasons, it’s because they are singing the blues about Homo sapiens’ destructiveness toward each other and Terra Mater herself. They feel the earth and the waters being rattled by and riddled with bombs, and they sense the reverberations of so many children screaming in agony, whole communities wailing and weeping en masse in Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Ukraine, and elsewhere, not to mention the stress of all the other species of flora and fauna affected. Their numbers in this region have increased tenfold in the past few decades, and, back from the brink of extinction, they have a vested interest in the continued viability of this planet as a habitable place for the offspring they’re sparring to create in this video. Emerging triumphant and fortified after generations of decimation and trauma from being brutally hunted, they can also offer inspiration/visions of embodied resilience in this moment when (surreally) genocide is once again front and center on the world stage via the horrors playing out in Palestine and Sudan. And, they have an unshakeable reverence for the living being who hosts us all; they are her record keepers, their songs are the songs of Earth. They know.

So the whales who answered the casting call for this video shoot did it for the sake of cocreating a visible, verifiable demonstration of the idea that one human’s voice can influence a whole group of beings who are exponentially larger and stronger than she is, can move a raucous gang of musting males to pause for peace, to stop in the name of Love and represent for what harmonious redirection can look like. They want us to see that this can happen in an instant, and by positioning themselves ahead of the boat, they’re offering their guidance, directing us to the power of singing as a tool of radical transformation. I often repeat myself and the themes of the project on this blog with the understanding that many or most people won’t read every post, and something I want everyone to take from this space is that the whales are doing so much more with their songs beneath the water’s surface than science has come anywhere close to acknowledging. These graceful goliaths hold a balance, mitigate harmful effects of human activity through vibration, just as they play a central role in the storage of carbon, but as the havoc being wreaked from above amplifies, they are calling on more humans to do as they do: come together in singing songs of repair for local and global ecosystems and communities. If one voice can do this, what could thousands, millions, billions of voices joined together do? Shift this whole reality in the span of a song, that’s what. A key point here, though, is that it doesn’t take billions. As I write this, there are a few relatively small (compared to the number of humans on Earth) groups of men making choices that are not only threatening the future of whole populations of people, but also recklessly contaminating and toying with the notion of unleashing mass destruction on the entire planet. They do not represent a majority, yet so much of the world is under their spell, convinced of their power, subject to their whims of tyranny, insecurity, and ego. Here is a different spell, woven by whales and humans, offering proof that a song sung into water with a pure heart and complete surrender to its vibration and intentions can bring about ceasefires and so much more. That’s what this video is showing: a ceasefire. The whales went right back to banging each other up after a few minutes of dancing to the music, and derailing their mating ritual was the farthest thing from my intention. Without denying that there are steps involved to getting there, the whales are pointing us toward using our voices to courageously specify and empower the visions we are weaving. This is not to suggest that folks should stop taking other actions at all; it is to say that those who feel compelled to participate in singing new worlds into being must show up with total conviction in and affirmation of the possibility—the fact—of Love’s victory, aiming beyond mere breaks in the bombardment, for all their usefulness. It is to say that in their most impactful and effective expression, these songs must move through the bodies of people who are committedly engaged in the establishment and sustenance of peace and healing in their own lives and relationships.

The idea of singing as fundamental to shifting reality is news to no indigenous people anywhere. My African ancestors who made the Middle Passage journey whispered to me of their musical and energetic exchanges with the ancestors of these whales from the slaving vessels that dredged them westward, shaping the core of this project. They planted and watered in me the memory of surviving by singing through the most terrifying terror and drawing courage and confirmation from the voices that answered them from the deep, dunking me into the zone where the miraculousness that saw them through it alive dwells, pulsing in the eternal now, accessible to us now, through water (among other channels). The song I’m singing to the whales in this video is the same song I’m singing in most of the videos from the past few years in which they are responding with undeniable engagement, appreciation, affection. It’s called “Canção Para Um Bebê Baleia (Song for A Baby Whale),” and it is a hit that gets them grooving every time. It came through during one of those time travel sessions when I found myself shackled to a line of other women on deck, bound to unknown hells but finding freedom through my voice when a mother and baby whale surface next to the ship and this melody, in a moment of pure inspiration at the sight (and recollection) of such tenderness, surges through me. I sing it each time I greet the whales, expressing welcome and Love for the newborns and the generations to come, pouring out a blessing that the waters in which they will grow will be healthy and safe for them and all the other species that depend on them, including humans. I carry this song to the hold with me and sing it in the wretched, wreaking confines of night there, a lullaby for myself and the other captives as the whales circle-dance and sing their way around the boat, responding through the blackness. I know I did this then, and I can do this now, and we can do this now, because one of our most recent ancestors, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon--mentor, song medicine carrier, scholar, memory holder, activist—hummed this truth into me repeatedly during our personal time together and expansively and incessantly through the vast body of her work on African American musical traditions: We have always sung ourselves free.

This grupo competitivo hung with us for 20-30 minutes, and their presence was too intoxicating for me to do much beyond what I’m doing in this video: singing and communing with the whales from a place of the most profound awe. Fortunately, there were other moments when I was able to fulfill one of the other missions of this sojourn, which was to gather more underwater recordings of and with the whales; they’ll be available here: https://www.michaelaharrison.org/conversations-with-the-whales and elsewhere soon. I’ve been told countless times by the biologists and tour guides who have worked with this population for decades that it’s pointless to try to get any recordings of these groups because they’re too focused on the fight to be trilling tunes through the waves. I did manage to ask Robert, the other Terra Mater crew member (who doesn’t appear on camera), to drop a hydrophone into the water at one point when they were splashing around near the boat as I sang over them. Not trying to capture anything, just to check the truth of what my vibrating bones were telling me. As soon as he dipped the line in and turned on the speaker, we heard it loud and clear: numerous whale voices rolling over each other through the ruckus. As far as I could tell,

they were all singing.

**If you appreciated this post and are touched by this work, please consider supporting it with a contribution via the donation tabs throughout this site, and/or by purchasing a download of any or all of my recordings with the whales, linked above. Thank you for reading!

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:

Store 2 — Michaela Harrison

Aquamarine* (for Earth Day 2023)

Among the many, many learnings Bahia has offered me, one of the most distinctive has been the understanding that not only is it possible to fall in love with and carry on a whole relationship with a place, but the same is also true for a color. The shades of aquamarine I have met on my countless sojourns there have left me drenched in reverence for the ways the Bahian waters express themselves through that palette. They are the inspiration for this newest song in the Whale Whispering canon, which (as is obvious from the rehearsal shared in the video above) is still very much a work-in-progress. Such generosity, such abundance, so much sustenance—Odoya! Maferefun Yemonja…Offerings, millions of offerings year after year, infinite prayers sung and flung to the waves on the petals of roses, daisies, baby’s breath…What else could the waters connected to and flowing through this Bay of All Saints be, but utterly sanctified?

I want to keep it these colors. A few posts ago I wrote about the travesty of the oil washing and clotting up on the beaches of Praia do Forte, and that wasn’t the first time it had happened. Part of this work is definitely informed by the trauma I and so many others have experienced as a result of living through numerous oil spills in Louisiana, including the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle, of which today marks the 13th anniversary, and smaller spills on the Mississippi that left me wheezing, achy, and nauseous in my second-floor apartment six blocks from the river. There are so many images of obsidian sludge smothering the wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico imprinted on my mind, and I remember my neighbor May, a young lawyer who represented her Vietnamese community in New Orleans like a boss as the fisherfolk reeled from  the impact of the disaster on their livelihood. I recall the sea running black and then, during another oil spill just two years ago, the water itself catching fire. Fire on the water, what a strangeness…And somehow, beauty in it all: that blazing ring of marigold only enhanced the art already emanating from the waves. In Bahia, I love all the colors that the waters of the bay relay; the indigo information in the more profound reaches of the Atlantic move me immensely, as do the teals and turquoises of the spans between the coast and the deep. Still, something about the liquid gem that the ocean becomes close to the shoreline stirs a primal force in me, one that feels integral to the very core of my identity.

Even when I was a young child, my birthstone held a special resonance for me. I always had aquamarine jewelry, and was aware of how it kept me connected to an ocean I rarely saw in person before my adolescent years but inherently understood to be central to my journey in this life. The adults around me had a clue that this Pisces baby needed to rock that vibration form early on, and I’m so thankful that they knew. It’s a stone that’s known among energy workers to support entering, exploring and remembering the Dreamtime, and has been revered for millennia as a protector of seafarers, bringing serenity to its wearers. These days I’ve scaled my jewelry purchases way back, and as much as I appreciate and enjoy working with them energetically, I can’t help but understand the whole industry around crystals as an iteration of the larger obsession with extraction that robs the Earth of the treasures she surely has reasons for holding deep inside. For the past few years I’ve been having visions of a movement to return the majority of the crystals to the earth and encourage trading rather than buying the ones that remain above ground as a way to phase out the mining of them. Something like crystal swap meets—is this already happening?…Anyway, the waters, particularly in Praia do Forte, remind me of my stone, remind me that I’m home.

“It’s Not Easy Being Green.” The first line of this new song was inspired by Kermit The Frog’s greatest hit. That Muppets classic has always felt to me like something the planet might sing, as deforestation rages on. Ray Charles also put his stamp on it, infusing it with soul and adding new dimensions of significance around race, difference, a sense of belonging and the lack thereof that made it even more poignant than Kermit’s wistful, lonely rendition. If it’s not easy for the Earth’s earth to remain green, it’s just as hard for her waters to maintain the hues and qualities that speak to a safe and healthy ecosystem. Once “Aquamarine” was a whole song, I realized that it’s also a nod to my prismatic (LGBTQIA-plus) family, particularly the trans and beyond-binary folks who have been catching so much hell for insisting, by virtue of their very existence, that the sweeping spectrum of gender expression be acknowledged and respected.

It came through in a way that feels like it does justice to the water and the whalesongs with their myriad layers, this tune, despite its brevity, and once the current arrangement is complete and recorded to my satisfaction, it (along with the other songs form the project) will be mixed with humpback melodies before being shared with the world. I wrote about receiving my first verbal message from the whales in one of the first entries on this blog. The phrase they dropped on me at the very beginning of this Whale Whispering odyssey bears repeating here (and everywhere, as far as I’m concerned) since it made its way into these lyrics and I certainly want to give the whales their credit. In answer to my question about what they wanted me to tell humans on their behalf, they lasered “Get off the oil” into my mind, a response that came to me as clear as the water that was eddying around my ankles as I walked along the beach. Here are the lyrics in full:

It’s not easy being aquamarine;

you’re not really blue,

you’re not really green,

you’re always representing for in-between

surface and depths, horizon and sky,

you’re so transparent yet so much more than meets the eye, oh,

Aquamarine, when you’re truly seen,

you’re celebrated for the clarity of Dreaming that you bring…

Speaking of clarity, don’t you love the water this way?

Not black or grey, “Get off the oil,”that’s what the whales say, hey—

Aquamarine, Aquamarine, you’re just exactly what you were meant to be:

crystalline!!

Like basically all of my original music, this is a Love song. I am in love with aquamarine, and funnel my creative capacity into supporting its right to glow in tropical tones and sustain the lives that dwell within its constantly transforming reflectiveness. This piece was composed between the craggy edges and the underwaters of my favorite tide pool in Praia do Forte, known as Redonda (Round). There’s all the poetry and zero mystery in my preferred swimming/diving spot being the one named for its circular shape, a reminder of the Oneness, circle of life. May the circle be unbroken. May aquamarine remain, unapologetically prismatic in its revelation of the nuances, the astounding diversity of possibilities contained within the rainbow, so far beyond the seven colors we can perceive with our eyes. May I, in my breaking open, be awake to the pains of my past and confront them courageously, facing down the remnants of sadistic wickedness reverberating through my womb via my mother’s mother’s mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ wombs, with compassion for us all. Snatching my/our power back from the lies of a society that stays trying to convince us and the world that we don’t deserve to love ourselves. May I, in opening my heart to these Blues, be exponentially expanding my awareness of—and my access to—wholeness.

*Featured in the video are Marcio Pereira (guitar) and Nino Bezerra (bass). Filmed by Gil Camara at his home studio in Salvador, Bahia, Brasil.

**Please take a few minutes to visit https://www.oceana.org and sign all the petitions on their “Take Action” page!

What It Takes to Breach

Photo by @toddcravens

Before, I did not understand. I had an idea, an inkling…Now I carry the knowing in my body, a recently recovered aspect of my identity—one who rises, with weights around her waist, from the sweet sanctuary of Olokun’s[1] embrace, where she feels safe, I feel safe, I am safe. It takes a lot to come back up from that mother’s milk on the half a breath I have left after exhaling impulsively when the ocean’s pressure put my lungs in a squeeze that made me feel like a python’s prey. With the whales crooning a cocoon around my suspended (actually slowly sinking) body, I am free, and I taste how fine it would be to stay here always. I hear what they heard when they got down this far, with or without life in them still. The true blue medicine on the other side of the bitter pill of being heaved overboard or choosing to jump rather than go down with the ship toward whatever hell it might be approaching… Whalesong. Before, I didn’t understand. Yes, it’s the weight of the world pulling me in, it’s the warped womb, the liquid tomb. But she is still in bloom, creation’s song booms rapturously throughout the healing rooms inside and outside of me and there is indeed a balm to make the wounded whole. Some of them stole/themselves back/from death; this is what I know now in a way that I could not have known, before

I breached. I had and have spent so much time marveling at the whales’ ability to troll gravity by flying all their weight out of the water at any given moment, and I’ve had several experiences of tuning in to a particular whale as they rose, having a semi-vicarious sensation of what it was like in a flesh-and-blood sense. This, though, was my body, and when I dove on a quest to meet the songs at their source, to feel myself fully enveloped in the mighty, mellifluous balm itself, it was without flippers and with a weighted belt that (I later found out) had just a little too much poundage. In retrospect I realized that I didn’t take enough time or care with understanding the intricacies of locking myself into that situation, and this lesson has come to resonate with significance in so many contexts since then. I sank with ease where I had been buoyant on earlier tries. I couldn’t see them with my eyes but I didn’t need to see: the whales’ auric presence is massive. I knew they were under the boat and within 75 feet of me at basically the same level where I found myself, about 10 meters down—and they were absolutely aware of me climbing into their reverie. Crown-first, I entered the zone where the sea pulls rather than pushes and quickly figured I had about 20 seconds to hang after a check-in with my lungs, then melted into the sound of salvation where the only truth is that I Am One with all of creation.

The treasure I dive for isn’t one I can touch or feel with my hands but my heart, my soul, my mind can expand to hold the heavy of all that this song is encrypting into me. Every atom in my 3-D form thrums with the whales’ emanations and I don’t yet know that it’s exactly what I will need in the moments to come, but I don’t have to know. I am Present…Here…inside the sound…The first thing that happens when I stop all thoughts is that I sense my time-bending capacity ratchet up exponentially and those 20 seconds stretch into centuries; the Middle Passage millions set me a-tingle with their proximity. I feel more than hear them through the veil of the whales’ mediation/mitigation. They’re translating, using their voices to filter out the screams, the moaning, the grunts and the growls, the howls, the chain-rattling and the keening that, in addition to the singing, comprise the actual record left by those ancestors in these waters. To hear all that would do me tremendous harm. The echoes and strains I do catch periodically are enough to sear my spirit, triggering memories of branding and my own sizzling flesh and the feel of a baby’s mouth de-suctioned from my breast--I would not survive hearing the entire choir. The whales’ skill at distilling these African vocal spells into show and tell is a marvel of gorgeousness that slides in through every broken part of me, mending, illuminating as it blends into my blood, activating my dna…so I remember how to breach.

Some of them knew how to do it. Some of them had actively prepared for it through their initiations and training, knowing they must not die so that the magic could live. To sink in shackles and then resurface is the work of workers of miracles; my awareness of them surges as my lungs push back against the peace of this apnea and I unfurl, go from fetal to feral in a flash as the weight at my waist wakes me up to what it will take to rise. I’ve been so faithful and so foolish, I see, refusing the flippers because they always feel awkward to me, and forgetting to learn how to unfasten the belt that now feels magnetized to the planet’s core. Oh, this will take so much more than I had understood when I descended, confident in basic skills gleaned from freediving in deep tidepools near the shore without this leaden lasso encircling me. For the briefest instant I have the sense that this will be too hard, this struggle against gravity to get myself those 30 feet up, back to the surface where air awaits. The rope I’m holding is slack and therefore useless as a support in hoisting myself, still I grasp it like it’s a lifeline as I locate the Power inside me and tap it like a rubber tree. I cannot panic—in the ocean panic can mean death. I must know, I must know that I am the Power, as the ancestors have already told me. So, I inhale. Not breath, not water, but sound.

It’s already everywhere, reverberating lavishly, so I’m not surprised when I start to feel the whales’ song work on my physical form. They code-switch on me like champions, and without missing a beat or changing a note shift into a transmission that my body downloads with ease, taking a shape I’ve never felt before, flexing, repositioning, and coordinating muscles in a way I had never imagined possible, generating what truly feels like a superhuman force from my waist down to move me through what is definitively the most difficult thing I’ve ever done physically. As they always do, the whales know. They sing me up, sending out vibrations that propel me as I hone my focus on the surface, a streamlined, fully-embodied intention to access oxygen. Simultaneously, their voices hypnotize me into maximum fluidity, I am sleek and sliding higher and there is no thing that is not me—a breaching whale is a leaping lizard is a mermaid rebirthing herself is a miraculous resurrection of one discarded, all parting water. Whalesong glitters the endless saline solution with astral technology through notes both audible and beyond my capacity to perceive with my ears; only my soul can hear the deeper utterings. Either way I will never, ever fully know what they mean, because mystery is mystery is mystery is mystery still and always, Hallelujah. I elevate.

The whales remain below as the ancestors accompany me, they are my school as I rise. Afterwards I will reflect on visions of them slithering back onto ships then standing tall as they drip Earth-tears and dare with death-defying stares anyone to send them over the rail again. After this it will click for me that only upon living through this do I legitimately grasp what it means to be Undrowned[2], though Alexis, prophetic as always, wrote me into the book with certainty that the knowing was inside me, was what propelled me to Whale Whispering and would eventually awaken to permanently alter my consciousness--as it has.

In my rising, a zillion thoughts nip at the periphery of my awareness: I should have tested this belt! I should have formally trained in free diving! I WILL NOT DIE IN THE OCEAN TODAY…I hear them but only process them consciously after I surface; I am a laser, I am a rocket, I am a baby whale learning from Big Mama what it looks and feels like to spread my flippers and fly. It’s fun. It’s what I was born to do. I am gaining momentum as I near the Above and I feel what a magical machine my body is, I know this story has a happy ending—but. Just as I get to within a few feet of my destination, my lungs contort with the urge to inhale rightnow rightnow rightnow rightnow, and I am still pushing, still focusing on the whales’ now-distant dirges, I am two feet from the surface and feel myself about to implode, faint, imbibe the entire Atlantic in a quest for air and I sense the last of my resistance slipping from me, still I know with my entire being that somehow this ends with me bobbing up through the Blue safe and well. Through a fleeting ripple I get another whiff of ancestral terror. Then a splash and a hand, I am reaching up as Zá, owner of the @scubaturismo boat and my whole merBrother, reaches down to clasp mine. He tugs me the last 18 inches of the way so that I soar with support, definitely projecting further upward than I would have on my own, and I am already grinning as if the oxygen were helium making me speak in dolphin squeaks, making me a balloon, I swoon as I go weightless again, this time breathing in as I breach. The half dozen folks on the boat break into cheers when I break the surface and from Below the whales hum their approval up through the soles of my feet, their vibrations cradling my womb.

So that’s what had happened, on levels and levels and levels. I went down deeper than I ever had—foolishly, hastily—and found myself in a place from which it was extremely challenging to return. Was it as deep as deep can get? Hardly, and eventually, I will go deeper, much more carefully. But I surely could have stayed right there, forever drifting in Blue to the tune of the whales and the muffled thunder of the ancestors, sacrificing myself to Olokun. As it is, it’s taken me months and months to truly begin re-emerging from the place I touched; it’s like that with Olokun, more than slightly mind-blowing…I could call on some of my biologist colleagues to help me insert the right language to discuss what is physiologically involved when whales sault in slow motion from the sea, but none of it would relay the spectacle that is watching these winged cetaceans set sail. At my first hint of struggle in ascending, they whispered into my cells, unleashing the dormant knowledge of what it takes to breach, to break through, to get out from under. I imagine that each individual body has its own formula for propulsion at the end of the day; for me it was trust, more than any of the physical processes involved, that served as the ultimate fuel for my flight. Then and now I trust in the Power, I trust myself. I trust in ancestral protection, the guidance directing me, and in the helping hand that always, always, always appears when I need it, right on so-called time.

[1] Olokun is the deity of the ocean, its depths, mysteries and riches, and primordial wisdom in the diasporic spiritual traditions of the Yoruba people.

[2] Gumbs, Alexis Pauline; foreward by adrienne maree brown. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press, 2020.

Detoxify You

Start with right now. That’s what I hear whenever I feel a swell of overwhelm at the notion of writing, containing, capturing this rapturing in words, and I know it’s them, guiding. They speak to me in compact sentences that slide through the fluid layers of my consciousness with a precision owed to the pointed simplicity of the vocabulary, the whales’ prowess, and my own yielding. The two-to-five word phrases always come with whole downloads attached. These downloads are wordless knowings that I perceive, then have to maneuver through a sort of interpretive kaleidoscope in order to share. So right now they are saying start with right now, no matter that it’s been a whole year of radio silence on the blog (what is time??) and I’m feeling like I have to spew a million miracles into one post to make up for that extended period of largely wordless wonderment. It’s ok, though. Right now, I am breathing, and that’s a miracle matching the whalespeak in my head and the song of the sea in surround sound outside it.

It’s the tail end of that season when the whales TURNT UP, everywhere—here in Bahia especially. Baleia (whale) has been the word on everyone’s tongue in the Salvador metropolitan region and the Litoral Norte (north coast) where they  showed up and showed out en masse in a way no one can remember having seen before. I’m not quite foolish or arrogant enough to believe that I’m responsible for this whale visibility movement; whatever part I’m playing in it is most surely being orchestrated by them and the ancestors. I am certain, though, that this work with them is somehow integral to what’s been happening. Their message at the end of last year’s season was basically, “next year, it’s on.” It resonates that the 2021 season was when I started to really focus on recording my exchanges with them underwater as a result of being able to buy the required equipment (shout out to V and www.vday.org for the affirming grant that brought that dream into 3-D reality). They insist on being heard as well as seen; they want it known that they are talking (in part) directly to us, the human people of Earth.

Since I’m the whale lady in people’s minds, folks are always sharing whale news, anecdotes, images, etc., with me, and this season has been full of reports of whale sightings near the shore, at the beaches in the city, breaching whales, close encounters, and humpback babies everywhere here in Bahia. Posts from around the world speak to the increase in close whale encounters in other waters as well, and to me it’s so clear that they’re ramping up their efforts to support human people in understanding some things that are needing to be processed by larger numbers of us. We possess the power to tip the scales in favor of our collective quantum elevation to the status of miracle workers; this is something the whales want us to know right now. As Indigenous people, healers, witches and wild dreamers everywhere been knowing, we are capable of defying the prescribed limitations of science, including the science of climate change (what I now, per the whales, refer to as Earth change). Meaning that we can, for example, mitigate, repair, and reverse many of the conditions that have been making the planet an increasingly less viable habitat for countless species in miniscule fractions of the time that has been projected for such processes (like, say, the breakdown of petroleum-based plastics in natural environments). Contrary to being a suggestion that we should ignore climate science, the idea is to embrace it while continuously stretching our understanding of and deepening our connection to our own capacity to effect change on multiple levels, which is why Whale Whispering and Emergent Strategy go hand-in-hand. It’s a joy to know that there are so many pockets of magical humans conjuring together for social justice and Earth healing; the work of my dear sister Dr. G Love and Soulshifting comes to mind here. This has been an ongoing theme in the project, hence the importance of singing to the waters collectively for their healing, but this year there is a specific emphasis on miracles that is accompanying the mounting urgency in the tone of the whales’ singing and gestures. It’s about truly exploring the reaches of our capacity in its endless elasticity. So, keep recycling, protecting forests, leaning into solar and wind power, regulating commercial fishing, scaling back oil and oil-derived products, ousting petrochemical plants from poor Black communities, rejecting treaty-breaking drilling and pipelines on Indigenous lands, electing politicians who support truly green agendas, etc.--and tap the enchantment that the whales transmit when they dance, dive, sing and breach as inspiration to stir any latent magic into activation.

∞

I started writing this piece about two months ago, in longhand (as usual) in a journal where other notes and half-written blog entries await my return. I was in too deep with the spell, with the ocean, with the whales, to focus the way I have to focus when I do this type of writing, and I knew I would have to go back and complete the blog work retroactively. It’s taken me so long to write it in part because I kept trying to frame the whales’ loudest and (for me) most resonant of this season’s messages as something directed to the general public—or whoever happens to find their way to this blog—and certainly everyone who does will take from it what is useful for them, if anything. But I’ve written and rewritten it several times and it just wasn’t ringing sincere, and when I started getting sick again a few days ago, for the third or fourth time this season, all the lights switched on: this message was one the whales had directed first and foremost to me personally, and the only valid way of sharing would be through the lens of my personal relationship to it, because that is what unlocks its true meaning. The bitterness rising with a thick mucus in the back of my throat is the telltale sign, I now know, and as I write through the fatigue, nausea and tightness in my chest rounding out these symptoms that have repeatedly resulted in negative Covid tests, I finally see it for what it is. And the whales’ guidance reverberates throughout every cell in my body: Detoxify you.

When this message first came through, it was just what I needed to really get back into my stride with my self-care program, which as I’ve mentioned before is focused on, among other things, womb wellness and addressing the roots attached to the fibroid tumors that have been a long-term issue for me.  I started working with a wonderful massage therapist who was/is supporting me with getting at and moving the blockage in my abdomen as I made dietary changes, committed to a more extensive exercise program and stayed hydrated while wailing out ancestral woes over the ocean with the whales’ accompaniment, and slowly but surely, the fibroids have been shrinking noticeably. A few weeks ago, I sat down in front of the computer to complete and finally post this entry—after announcing on Facebook that my social media was about to be flooded with all things Whale Whispering. I understood that it was important that this be the first message shared after such a long absence from the blog…then realized that I couldn’t finish it from the space I was in. Just as I was choosing a bunch of new videos and pictures to share, the phone with almost all of my photos and footage from this season fell and stopped working; it has yet to get fixed as the part that’s needed is still being chased down. That served as a wake-up call for me to acknowledge that in the time since writing the first few paragraphs, I had done some serious relapsing with regard to what I was putting into my body, resulting in the return of chronic inflammation and some other immune system responses, and had let myself slide back into a toxic relationship dynamic that has been one of the core issues affecting my core for years. I had to be honest with myself about that before I could do this post justice. In order to share the guidance the way it is asking to be shared, I’m required to let the truth of my grappling with it be a part of the sharing, because showing, exposing my challenges inside of this healing/vibration-raising journey to being an increasingly viable instrument for the whales’ and ancestors’ messages is necessary for this truth-telling to ring true.

I’m back to wrangling myself from the sugar demon’s clutches, scaling gluten and dairy way back, long morning walks after sunrise meditation, spiritual baths, and inner child work, all of which have helped me get clear enough to finally understand what the whales and my body have been saying. I’ve been experiencing oil spill-related symptoms off-and-on for months and am only now truly waking up to the reality and significance of this mind-blowing fact. Why did it take so long for it to finally sink in? I’ve spent hours in the ocean almost every day for months; I am a whole canary in the coalmine out here, and it’s time to sing like I’ve never sung before.

The whales were telling me what to do before the oil even started showing up on the shore in the weeks after my arrival…Detoxify you… I definitely noted the increased intensity of their expressions—I even connected it to the oil once I began seeing it, and had the thought when I first started experiencing symptoms that they could be related to the oil, but somehow that thought left the forefront of my consciousness as the symptoms came and went a few times and the oil appeared to have run its course. I chalked them up to the flus/viruses that tend to circulate during seasonal changes here and kept it moving. I think in part because it doesn’t look like the more overtly alarming spills that I witnessed/was exposed to over the course of my many years as a Louisiana resident, it was easier to drift back into the lull of feeling like the water was fine once the tar-like globules of coagulated oil that everyone had been stepping on and over on the beach seemed to be showing up less and less. The water has consistently been a gorgeous, tropical dream-come-true-blue, but I was walking on the beach a few days ago when I sensed the bitter taste returning, and I looked down and saw that there was oil swirling in the eddies of water at the shoreline and a brown sludge covering a long swath of the coral that so generously provides Praia do Forte’s famous tide pools. I started coughing right then and right then I knew. I should have known for certain before. I understood that the whales were calling people’s attention to the oil spill, and I have been talking and asking about it since it first appeared, because there has been no official response or clean-up that I’ve been able to see, and no uproar from locals demanding a response. Since weeks had gone by without any new signs of the oil, it seemed like the worst had passed. But now I’m understanding that the oil circles and cycles around like everything in the sea…The whales were telling me from jump: filter this crap out of your system, and ring the alarm.

Until a few days ago, I wasn’t getting a clear answer from anyone about the source of the spill and couldn’t find anything about it in my online searches, which is surreal to me. When the signs of the spill were at their most intense, I heard people commenting and complaining about the oil, but that was the extent of it. I just heard that it has apparently been traveling down the coast from Venezuela, where the operator of a ship decided it was a good idea to release the vessel’s used fuel into the sea rather than call the coastal authorities to safely drain it and transport it back to shore (to where??). Now that it has reappeared, again no clean-up and no uproar. I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that a place that has such exquisite beaches and is so dependent on tourism could let this slide. Lula’s election is a bright spot on the horizon in terms of the prospect of serious attention to environmental/climate issues with a particular focus on the Amazon, hallelujah. There was a more extensive oil spill here a few years ago and an official clean-up did happen, though by all accounts it wasn’t nearly enough, and things have apparently deteriorated to the point where it’s basically normalized for people to be walking around with black smudges on the soles of their feet whenever they go to the beach. Bonkers. Now that the whales have distanced themselves from shore, I’m turning my focus to performing more for the last few weeks of this sojourn. Every time I take the stage will be an opportunity to call folks’ attention to this spill, the health hazard it represents, and to encourage folks to call the governmental offices with jurisdiction over issues related to the environment and public health and demand an organized response. I will also be teaching them all the “Omi-O Chant,” the song the whales gave me to heal the waters. And yes, I’m making the appropriate appointments to check into the symptoms further.

∞

This post is extra-long, and it occurs to me that maybe I should have divided it up, but it feels important to share as a trajectory, and I wanted to bring this forth in the context of the emphasis on miracles because when systems fail, we reserve the right to wield magic to handle up on what needs handling, like a wretched oil spill and its fallout. (We reserve that right at all times irregardless of systems, but I’m talking about this here right now). The specificity of this particular message from the whales is around turning our collective attention to miracles as an aspect of the solution-oriented thinking needed for these times. Miracles are within our reach; each one of us is a potential channel for the energy that brings about the spontaneous remission of a cancer, or brings an apparently dead medicinal plant back to life, or summons or stops the rain. With fewer physical blockages and less energetic clutter, what else can we do? If we have concern about and advocate for the eradication of the toxins being spilled, dumped, spewed and leached into the environment around us, we are called remember the ecosystems of our own bodies, integral to/expressions of that natural environment…

Supporting and sustaining the healers and dreamers who are already on the miracle-making path is critical—as it has always been. The whales are working to wake us up to this and so much more; their current songs are full of concern for what will happen if we stay stuck in the nightmare of believing in the lie of our limitations. At least here in Brazil, they’ve taken to whacking their tails against the water while the top half of their torsos are suspended below the surface (yet another feat of miraculous agility for such a massive creature) with much greater frequency than I’ve ever seen in my years of observing them. Like, Snap out of it—you can do this. But you have to have a clear connection to the force within you…Detoxify you.

I have a sense that most of you who have found your way to Whale Whispering can hang with all this talk of miracles, but for those who are struggling with the idea, with the word, I encourage you to question why. Who or what convinced you that you’re not capable of miracles, or that miracles don’t exist, or that you should be skeptical of them? What does that word indicate for you, where does your mind travel when you hear/read/speak it, and what reality would you co-create if you trusted in your capacity to miracle-make? Harriet Tubman, a whole, actual superhero who existed in 3-D reality in the state where I live in the U.S., astral traveled to see the safe path forward from above on nights when she was leading others north to freedom. Her ability to do this and all kinds of other miracle work was sparked by a life-threatening blow to the head—is that what you require? I’m taking the whales’ advice while reveling in the miracle of being able to receive it. Here is a snippet of their singing from this season, for those who are willing and able to listen. The image in the video is by Dr. Marcos Rossi Santos.

∞

Here again, on the day when I will actually post this. I was editing, tweaking it early this morning and thought I would come back in from my beach break to insert the videos and pictures and then be done, but the water spirits had other plans. I’ve spent the past few days scoping out all the local beaches, observing the oil’s moves in relation to the tides, taking note of where it’s concentrated, and have seen that it’s hitting mostly in the exact area where I had been spending most of my time in the water. This morning I went to another beach a few miles away that was clean and clear, and made my way back into the water for the first time in several days. It was super salty with no hint of oil, and as still as the air on a dense July night in New Orleans when there’s no storm in the vicinity. I was singing to Yemonja from way out in Tatuapara Bay, and she told me that the post wasn’t complete, that I needed to write about the little healing miracle I had this week in order to paint the full picture, and I told her I would.

The morning after I became clear about what was going on (earlier this week), I woke up with a throbbing headache (so rare for me), mucus gurgling in my chest tasting so bitter, so bitter, and nausea that made me want to just lie down flat on a cold floor until it passed. I was dizzy and weak, but I felt the sea calling and I knew that if I did not take control of the situation, the oil sickness would lodge itself deep within my body and be a mess to get rid of, and I have a show tonight—I was determined that I would be well enough to sing by today. So I dragged myself to the beach, my sunrise meditation spot, and I prayed and rebuked the sickness. As I went into meditation I declared to myself that by the time I finished the symptoms would be gone and I would continue to improve as the week progressed. I can call it a miracle because I was feeling disgusting and miserable but I managed to sit there and breathe and tune into Source, and when I got up an hour later the headache and dizziness were gone, the nausea had receded, I was breathing more clearly and the worst was definitively over.

As I was singing my gratitude into the ocean this morning, a school of large fish leaped up out of the water about 30 feet in front of me and bounded across the surface in alternating groups like they were in a relay race. They disappeared and then a few seconds later danced across the water some more, covering a sizeable area, and I was so delighted with Yemonja’s response to my song. It occurred to me that there was a bigger fish chasing them to make them leap that way—like they were being chased—and at some point, after they disappeared for good I felt a presence, a swish in the water near me as I continued to sing. I noted it but didn’t see anything so just kept singing and savoring the delight of the visual if the fishes’ dance across the placid surface of the sea in the golden light of the new day. On my way back home, I ran into Ana Benta, a member of the roving band of neighborhood children who shine at the core of my local fan base, surprised that she had managed to get home and already be headed back down to the beach in the time since I had seen her by the water when I first went out. She was starry-eyed as she came upon me, and told me she had seen the dolphin swimming around me and it was so beautiful to watch. When my own eyes grew wide, she asked me if I had seen the dolphin…I told her no and she repeated that it had swam right next to me, around me, appeared to swim under me (that was when I felt its swish)… And I came home with one more miracle to squeeze into this post. It’s not necessary to see every instance of the magic at work in our lives. It’s enough to be open to it and trusting of it, knowing that when it is called for it shows up, and if we ourselves don’t observe it but are supposed to know about it, that information will find its way to us. Can I get a witness?

Yes I can.

Lamento/Interstellar

“Lamento” is the name of this song. In Portuguese it can be understood as the noun form of “lament” or the first-person conjugation, “I lament/I am lamenting;” here both meanings apply. A lament for the condition of the waters that are so disturbed, so desecrated, so dishonored daily, like the chemical plant-pocked Mississippi River and the Earthblood/crude oil-soaked Gulf of Mexico (www.louisianabucketbrigade.org). Like the waves gulping the ongoing nuclear spill at Fukishima, Japan, now in it’s tenth year (Fukushima Meltdowns Turn Ten, Still Getting Worse | Dissident Voice). Like the nightmare-horror story crimes against Nature and humanity that have choked out life in the Niger Delta for generations (Oil companies bring pollution and loss to Nigeria's Niger Delta communities | Earth Journalism Network). This most recent spill off the coast of California. While I understand that there is so much more to whalesong than lament, it is clearly an element of their expression so I let this song moan through as one of the streams of healing release, as always giving the blues their due. Lamenting the torturous journey that so many millions of Africans made over and into these Kalunga depths, hearing their voices gush through my own as I offer myself up again to the tales they want to tell through me, this time wordlessly.  

Within 5 minutes of dropping the hydrophone into the water for the first time on the way from Caravelas to Abrolhos (yes, I finally made it to Abrolhos!), this song started gurgling up. What I am able to write or speak about that moment of hearing so many whales singing at once, filling the ocean with a sound that is the definition of otherworldly, will never contain the strangeness, the astonishment, the sublimeness of that experience. I’m not trying to tease or be mysterious or provocative; there will be audio attached to this post and others as soon as the excerpts have been cleaned up and mixed for quality by the sound technician whose hands they’re in now. Right now I just need to expel, to discharge enough of the glory from the center of my chest to make room for more, always more. I’m writing but I’m not saying what it is, really. I’m sharing in this way because unlike Smokey, I believe a taste of honey is better than none at all.

Breathing, breathing, breathing, listening, listening breathing. To something that can be compared to nothing else. Hearing a few whales sing at once on a recording is already fantastical, altering, but this choir of dozens live and relatively close to the boat I’m in is representing other dimensions of reality. Interstellar. If I had to name the song they’re conjuring I’d call it “Interstellar” (Star Trek IV was right). I hear the lament and I hear alarm, alarm about the lack of krill, the return of the excessive traffic and noise pollution in the seas after the reprieve of the first phase of the pandemic, alarm about the humans, the humans, the humans. I also hear joy, spunk, optimism, jokes, love. And I go back to intense, haunting concern as my overall impression of the moment; it meets my own concern and after a few minutes this song sings itself with my throat. It’s pulsing through the water via the aquatic speaker that I’ve finally been able to purchase for this work (stay tuned for a whole gratitude post) and as soon as it rings out through the depths, the whales respond. Their song shifts in response to my voice, and in a flash of turquoise-filtered light, we are in jazz together. We’re singing and in the distance, on the horizon, whales are breaching left and right. The only other time I’ve been able to do this was two years ago, on borrowed equipment with just a few hours to experience the exchange with whales who were not visible at the time. Now, with great care for the volume and intention and energy I transmit, in moderation and with limits on legal times for interacting observed (but most importantly letting the whales dictate the flow) I can release my voice as medicine into the water repeatedly when they’re  nearby and say definitively which ones I’m “songversating” with.

This video is just a taste of that honey. It’s one side of a story so multifaceted I wouldn’t dare claim to understand all that it contains and I’m thrilled with just the living and the sharing of it—whatever comes beyond that is gift, it’s all gift, treasure. There are actually two whales on the scene, circling and lingering beneath the boat as we exchange riffs and I continue to flesh out the form of this composition. The whale that’s not visible is right next to the speaker that’s suspended about 30 feet down. It’s my third day at sea in the waters between Caravelas and Abrolhos, 5 days after the first notes of this song presented themselves as another gift from the Source. The whales are not singing what I’m singing but what they’re singing is informing where I go with the notes, and sometimes they chime in from the surface with a spout of air that taps me into that ancestral breathing and is the rhythm I hear under the tune. The rhythm is the breath, I hear it so clearly all around my voice, around their voices, under and over the surface of the water. Soon there will be more here in the form of recorded audio. Until then may this drop of magic sweeten your way.

Soundtrack for a Red, Black and Green New Deal

I’m so honored to report that the first song given directly to me by the whales (as in: “Sing this”) is featured as the soundtrack for the “Water” video that is part of the Movement for Black Lives’ Red, Black and Green New Deal Initiative (A National Black Climate Agenda - The Red Black and Green New Deal (redblackgreennewdeal.org), which was launched in conjunction with the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (Home | GCCLP) last month. As described on the initiative’s site: 

“The Red Black and Green New Deal (RBG New Deal), an initiative of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), puts Black liberation at the center of the global climate struggle, and addresses the impact of climate change and environmental racism on Black communities. This RBG New Deal agenda proposes immediate actions policymakers, corporations, and every day people can do to fortify Black people—especially those most marginalized, such as disabled, chronically ill, transgender, gender-nonconforming, and intersex people—from the uniquely racist practices of the fossil-fuel industry. We are organizing to introduce a National Black Climate Agenda that includes federal legislation to address the climate crisis by investing in Black communities and repairing past harms.”

The initiative centers around 6 focal pillars—water, energy, land, labor economy, and democracy. During the initiative’s launch, a video for each pillar was debuted; you can watch the one for water below. I’m thrilled to have my voice connected to this work because it is directly aligned with the intentions for Whale Whispering—it’s also a gorgeous piece of cinematography. The agenda is both straightforward and thorough, and I encourage everyone reading this to take the time to visit both of the sites linked above and engage with the campaign if you haven’t done so already. 

On a soul level, I feel the ancestors smiling on this development. As I said, this song was given to me; I don’t consider it “mine.” In singing and sharing it in various settings over the past year or so, I’ve come to understand that it has the potential to extend its reach to many, many people, and I love the idea of folks from all walks singing to water with African words, using the same phrase that countless journeyers uttered and sang as they made their way in chains across the Atlantic. For those who haven’t read the original post on the song, check it out here: Omi-O! — Michaela Harrison  for more context. 

Free Bleeding

[Video for song at end of post]

In one of my first dreams of the year, I’m underwater (surprise), far enough beneath the surface that the light is hazy, diffused, the teal sprawled around and above me deepening to cobalt below. It’s partially a waking dream, partially a lucid one; I’m in that limbo consciousness, half-aware of dawn’s emergence beyond my eyelids, fully aware that as I dream the whales, they’re also dreaming me. There are whales in every direction, dozens of them, some within a few feet of me and others farther away. I can see them dipping, undulating, revolving in slow motion, but I can hear them better than I can see them. And I can feel them even better than I can hear them. They’re present with me in real time and I’m certain that they have pulled me into this vision—they called this meeting—this is a revelation of the next level in this journey with them.

There are humpbacks and cachalots within view, and I sense the presence of blue whales in the vicinity. A chorus of whales. There are so many voices in the water, there’s so much rumbling vibration that I’m lost in the sound; for a while nothing else exists, only these songs. Not all of them are facing me, but it’s obvious that the whales are directing their voices toward me. This song is for me, and more specifically, for my womb. And just as the dose hits, just as the medicine begins to take effect and I feel my center reverberating with something anciently and irresistibly regenerative, I awaken fully and sit up in my bed.

This, I understand, was a call to the core. The core of my body and the core of this undertaking—womb healing. Ocean as womb. Wombs of black bodies as containers of personal and ancestral trauma to the extent that fibroid tumors, cysts and related conditions are epidemic, and my womb is one of the many. There is remedy for this womb trauma in the songs of the whales. I’ve been knowing this, and the dream came as a clear summons to get back to my focus on the womb, where the blockage is so dense and the trauma so harrowing that it’s seemingly easier to simply avoid. Of course, there’s no avoiding it in truth; it’s always there, always looming, begging to be rooted out, and the whales have reminded me that they’re here to help with that. I thought last year was my year to dive with them, but obviously it wasn’t. I have to be fully present with the truth of this trauma as it affects me and so many others when I go down into the depths with them so that I can willingly receive the medicine of their vibrations. I must be open. I must be authentic and vulnerable and receptive when I face that music with my whole body in order to receive, then share, the full extent of its benefits.

This brings me to the story I’ve been trying to tell for a while here on the blog. I started writing about it right after it happened in October but am only now, in February, getting together the gumption to give it the space it’s been demanding. (Hurray for Black History Month and the ancestors being activated en masse). One of my last trips out to sea before leaving Brazil at the end of whale season was another private expedition focused solely on this project. There were only two other people on board: Sergio, one of the team members at Projeto Baleia Jubarte and an amazing photographer with an unparalleled ability to spot whales, and the captain for the day, Rodrigo. I had determined that this would be the day I would get into the water as I hadn’t, since the previous year, placed myself in the embrace of the open sea, though as usual I had been swimming and free diving daily in the shallower waters inside the reef along the coast. As soon as I submerged myself in the sprawling Atlantic, miles from shore, those Middle Passage ancestors started speaking--via my womb.

(Please check the title of this post again before proceeding. If the sharing of details about menstruation feels like too much information for you, you might want to stop reading here).

I was in what I understood to be the last day or so of my cycle, and there was a thin trickle that was just significant enough for me to put in a tampon, mostly because I was going out in my white bikini, which didn’t seem like a set-up at the time because there was so little flow. As soon as I lowered myself into the water from the boat and launched into my mermaid dive, though, I felt something like a pop in my abdomen and then an instant sensation of pressure being released as I descended to 10 or 12 feet below the surface, the water’s force making itself felt within my body. I noted it but didn’t process it mentally because I was much more focused on what was happening around me, experiencing the overwhelming immensity of the ocean and telepathically and sonically reaching out to the whales, humming as I resurfaced. I could feel that the whales I had connected to were several miles away and closer to shore, and got distracted as I was tuning in to them because I saw a white/transparent blob just beneath the surface of the water about 15 feet in front of me. I couldn’t say for certain what it was, but it was big enough to be noticeable from that distance and gave me the feeling that I should get out of its way. I hustled back over to the ladder and when I grabbed on to it felt the blazing, electrocuting zing of a bluebottle tendril wrapped around my arm. As Sergio and Rodrigo helped pull me up onto the boat and busied themselves with trying to remove the tendril without getting stung themselves, I felt gravity kick in and immediately exert its influence on my uterus. I looked down at the water pooling at my feet and it was tinged with blood, with various scarlet rivulets racing down my legs toward it. The guys didn’t seem to notice but they had to have seen the blood on my bathing suit as I moved to reach for my kanga, wrap it around my waist and slide a rag over the puddle with my foot. With the stinger finally off and my arm and hand welted and still burning with pain, I sat down sideways in the prow, doing my best not to bleed onto the seat, because by then it was clear that I was gushing right through the tampon that I had put in only an hour before.

The folks on the whale watching boat radioed that they were in sight of some whales, much closer to shore, so we headed that way. I was aware of what was happening around me but only from a distance, it seemed; half of my attention was in another realm altogether. Seeing my blood flowing on the floor of the boat had triggered an experience that felt like a time breach, and as I sat down I tuned in to the part of my consciousness that was suddenly inside the hold of a cargo ship full of captive Africans, surrounded by blood. Transported to another time that is both past and concurrent, I am in the blackness of a bunk with dozens of other women, most of us bleeding. There is blood on the wooden plank beneath my body, blood on the floors, and the acrid smell of blood fills the tight, dense air. There is a sense of purpose to this; I am aware of and among women who choose to remove their cloths and allow the blood to pour from their bodies as an act of self-determination, an act of defiance, sanctifying the space to which we’ve been confined, despite its design to defile and desecrate us. The power is ours, we say with our blood. The air is abuzz with an electricity exponentially more potent than what has been pulsing through my right arm post-sting; I’m barely aware of it now as I sink into the sound of the voices around me. There is moaning, there is humming, there is singing. Humans…and whales. I can hear them. They accompany us, echo us, harmonize with us, cloak us in the vibration of compassion with lullabies larger than this lie of our enslavement…Freely we sing, and freely we bleed.

I grab hold of the mélange of sounds as I slide back into full presence on the boat speeding toward other whale watchers, feeling my womb releasing some of what has been backed up, blocked up for so long. Feeling something beginning to dislodge... As the noise of the boat motor grinds its way back into my consciousness, I start to lose the multi-layered song that had enveloped me moments before. I close my eyes, breathe deeply and affirm that it’s still there inside me and I can access it when I need to. I breathe into that trust, knowing that my ancestors and the whales are supporting me in tapping into this healing. When I open my eyes again, the schooner is in sight, and so are the whales. There’s no getting into the water now, in view of these tourists, with my blood-soaked bikini bottom. Not that I’m ashamed—it’s just too sacredly intimate to share with strangers, what is happening to me in the moment. Though the hydrophone is not picking up any singing from them, I sing to the whales as usual, songs that carry a strain they always seem to recognize, these co-originators of the blues.

By now we are a few generations into a relatively widespread acknowledgement, at least among black women and gender nonconforming folks who are/have been womb carriers, that ancestral trauma is a major factor in the challenges so many of us face with regard to sexual and reproductive health. That whatever personal narratives around illness, abuse, assault, loss, etc., we may have as individuals are compounded by the centuries-long trajectory of direct and indirect violence to black wombs is not a secret to many of us, though it’s also true that many remain unclear about the details of this history and its impact. My focus here is on my direct experiences with that trauma as it has shown up in my body, my relationships (with others and myself), and the memories/flashbacks/regressions/dreams/time breaches like the one I described above that connect me to the roots of it from the early stages of colonization and capture, through the Middle Passage to the present. Before forming this bond with the whales, I held the awareness of it and sort of chipped away at it, mostly from the outside, through various healing practices and procedures, including a myomectomy, but the fibroids eventually came back, prodding me to deal with the fact that I never dove all the way into unraveling the “roots” of the issue—something my late maternal grandmother, Bertie, told me to do in a dream I had not long before my first meeting with the whales. I can say that I knew from the beginning of this work that this womb focus was central, but it’s only now, after the fateful year of surrender that 2020 was, that I’m bringing the sharing of it to the fore. I can also say that until I connected with the whales, began to feel their presence with me at all times and truly listen to their songs, the thought of diving into this trauma in any kind of focused, extended manner was utterly terrifying and overwhelming to me. I had poked at it many times over the years, but always recoiled after briefly touching upon it. Therapy has been a powerfully beneficial tool for working through the impact of traumatic events and experiences in my lifetime, and, it has brought me to the understanding that those events and experiences are in fact the top layer of the trauma. That in the center, at the core, is this morass of tangled emotions, physical responses and survival mechanisms stored generation after generation after generation in the wombs of the women who passed their DNA to me and with it, the inherent bodily understanding of this sacred container as the storage site for inexpressible pain.

But it must be expressed. Those roots Bertie mentioned-- all the unshed tears and unreleased fury from the innumerable rapes, children born of rape, children sold away, forced breeding, cultivated self-loathing, terror, horror, wickedness endured by my ancestors—are spaces I would rather not go digging around in. But here they are balled up inside of me: my inheritance. And all around me, as evidenced by the wounded and/or hystorectomied wombs of so many of my peers and family members. Again, this is not news; there has been amazing work done around healing ancestral womb trauma over the years, and I’ve benefitted from aspects of some of those trailblazers’ work—Queen Afua and Iya Osunnike in particular—but never managed to fully engage it on a practical level. My ancestors guided me to this work with the whales as a way for me to tap directly into this ancestral trauma and go through it, without re-living the terror, to get to the medicine. The songs are my way, and the ancestors’ songs—the spirituals, the blues, etc.—combined with the whales’ songs, are my guiding lights in my quest for the buried treasures within me and the sea: songs of healing for all these wombs “past” and “present” and for whales and the world’s womb and therefore the world itself, nothing less than this.

So tapping into this remembrance of bleeding as an ancestral affirmation of agency, inspired by the sight of my own menstrual blood, was like finding the rarest of jewels and realizing it’s connected to a whole mine. That mine is mine, and I can appreciate and share the wealth it represents without a depleting extraction process by just letting it flow—there’s that word again. Connecting to the creative process through bleeding as a link to my forebears’ empowerment has been an invaluable gift, straight from the Middle Passage. Each time I went to sea after that day (three or four more times, as it happened within a few weeks of my departure from Brazil in late October), I had the same experience of feeling time collapse on itself, sometimes seeing the waters from the perspective of being on a slaving vessel, in other instances feeling the eyes of captured Africans on me, aware of me as I stood high above the water on the prow, queening over the whole seascape. This was dizzyingly visceral for me on my last day at sea, when I could again hear them clearly. One of the songs from the hold of the ship, the tune coming in through my ears from the salty air, seeping out through the memory in my blood, the lyrics, translated, bubbling up from the mine within. I’m finally sharing it here, months after first writing about it. It wasn’t complete enough until I came to this point of directly addressing my womb and this bleeding experience. I found myself unable to record the song without giving voice to my womb, or rather, I found myself unable to give voice to my womb through the song without first presenting the song as one of the pearls of my wounded, recovering womb, emerging from the most intimate, tender, precious part of me that I feel instinctively inclined to protect and keep hidden as I move through this healing process, but that I must reveal in order to continue to do so.

When I started writing this post, the title came to me right away. At first it came through in Portuguese, as Deixa Sangrar, which literally translates as “let it bleed.” When I looked it up to see if there were any other nuances to the phrase I should understand before using it as a title, I discovered that it’s the name for a whole movement, which in English is known as Free Bleeding. Somehow I had never come across this apparently global affirmation of “period pride” supporting the abstinence from the use of any products to stop or capture the flow of menstrual blood, both as a way of protesting the cost of so-called sanitary products and as a way of removing the stigma associated with menstruation in so many societies. I have long understood menstrual blood as an extremely charged natural force and am in community with others who honor it as sacred. I’m also aware that in many indigenous cultures, girls, women, and genderfluid people who bleed traditionally spend their bleeding time away from the rest of the community, often releasing that blood directly into the earth. But the Free Bleeding movement had stayed off my radar until I started writing this post, and until the experience I just described, I had never considered the notion that one of the many ways the enslaved had of expressing their autonomy was by refusing to block the flow of their womb blood. Now…I know. So Free Bleeding takes on a whole new richness of meaning in the context of the Middle Passage and those who understood their power to be far more essential—that of life itself--than the violence which was used to hold (parts of) their physical bodies captive.

This rabbit hole goes deeper, of course. There’s another experience I had, which I can genuinely call a spontaneous regression in terms of the way it happened, that took place before I even had the idea of Whale Whispering, but that I now understand to have been a precursor to it all. The telling of that will be for another time, perhaps here on the blog, maybe on film, maybe in song or all of the above. I want to also acknowledge that for many people who deal with fibroids one of the symptoms is excessive bleeding, though that hasn’t been a regular part of my experience, and what happened in October was different than anything I can remember. It felt like a release—something genuinely freeing. And once I got back to the shore, after spending some time in the water rinsing myself off and preparing myself for the transition back to land, I sat on the beach for a little while to let the light-headedness I was feeling pass. As I walked back to my apartment, I proceeded to bleed onto the sand, onto the pavement and onto the soil in the distance I covered, and I just allowed it to be what it was. I don’t know if anyone noticed. My wet kanga covered my lower body and the fact that I was coming from the beach dripping wet was nothing abnormal, but if anyone happened to look down around my ankles or at my flip-flops, they probably caught a glimpse of it…that power.

Marine biologists speculate that humpback whales’ songs are related to their reproduction, possibly even to promote estrus in female whales, something I discovered after receiving the initial guidance, in the early stages of this project, that the whales’ songs would be healing for my womb. I have already experienced tremendous soothing, cramp-relieving benefit from their recorded songs and in dreaming, and I’m so excited for the time when I can finally be underwater with them in physical form and feel the unbridled force of their melodic magic moving through me as I continue to navigate these Middle Passage Blues.

Survivors’ Song*

As long as we keep on breathing

and sing our way across this sea

as long as we know in our hearts

we are the Power, we will be free (2x)

As long as we know we are the Power

as long as we know we are the Power

we will be free, yes, we will be free

Keep breathing, keep singing

keep breathing, keep singing

Keep breathing, keep singing

We know, we know, we know…we free

*This is a rough self-made video, just to share the gist of the song. When I record it in the studio, it will be with an arrangement for many more voices. The whale recording used here is courtesy of Eduardo Melo of Projeto Baleia Jubarte.

The Last Word

In these final hours of 2020, I’m thinking of and listening to the whales. It feels appropriate to give them the last word on this year; they certainly had a lot to do with helping me survive it. I’ll be continuing my nonlinear chronicles in the coming weeks, sharing more photos, videos and reflections from my September-October sojourn as well as a report on my recent trip to Savannah and Jekyll Island, Georgia for events related to Whale Week. For now, here’s a brief overview of what I did and did not manage to accomplish of the intentions I had for this year’s Whale Whispering expedition, and a sweet video from one of my first trips out to sea upon arriving which includes some overlay of my vocals with the whales’.

Much of what I intended to do ended up not happening, and that fact does not in any way diminish the value of my journey or its pertinence to the overall goals of the project. I’m so clear that everything was as it was supposed to be, is as it’s supposed to be. Still, I want to honor the fact that many folks have been following and supporting this work with the expectation of results in the form of specific projected outcomes and that many of them haven’t materialized yet. The pandemic had a lot to do with the roadblocks I encountered, yet many times I felt that things not working out was actually for the sake of broadening my understanding of and engagement with the whales and this work. One of my main intentions was to spend much of my time at sea listening to and recording the songs of 2020; I felt so compelled to go, even in the midst of a pandemic, because I was certain that there were special messages contained within the whales’ expressions in the wake of the vibration of the whole planet shifting, with shipping traffic being greatly reduced and with their voices being more audible to themselves, each other and across greater distances. I was also determined to get to Abrolhos in the south of Bahia, where the shallower waters and the annual congregation of mating whales makes for great listening (and diving). As it turned out, I wasn’t able to pull funding together in enough time to make it to Brazil before Projeto Baleia Jubarte’s sailing expedition left for Abrolhos and other locations, and the logistics of travel to meet them proved too tricky to orchestrate with the limits on and the dangers of available transportation given the pandemic. It wasn’t until I arrived that I learned that the team had taken all their hydrophones and recording equipment with them for their six weeks at sea, which meant that I was unable to listen to or record the whales underwater, with two exceptions. My partner Dr, Marcos Rossi Santos, who was projected to return to Bahia from his residency in Australia by the time I arrived, ended up extending his stay as a result of Covid-19, so his expertise and equipment were also unavailable. There is one other person in the region with the necessary technology, and I was able to take two trips out with his equipment, although singing was only detected on one of those trips (the one captured in the video below). I realized early on that the stay, like the rest of the year, was about surrender, so instead of wallowing in disappointment I did my best to stay present to each moment, and what I was able to hear of the whales’ song of 2020 inspired new melodies. The inability to hear them most days also pushed me to go deeper into other ways of listening, and I had some intense and highly transformative experiences of ancestral connection that came through (I will get to that in the next post!). Marcos’s absence and the absence of the studio engineer I’ve become used to working with also meant that I didn’t venture into beginning to record my ideas of merging my songs with the whales’ as it’s such nuanced work that I truly feel the need for a production team with the appropriate familiarity and sensitivity to the whales and the project. With most regular activities being shut down because of the virus, I was unable to take scuba lessons as planned.

Despite, or perhaps because of all these limitations, I was able to hear and compose new songs, do some immensely powerful personal healing work, and tap into the Middle Passage re-membering that is at the core of this vision. While so many of my projected goals were not met, everything that did happen enhanced and propelled Whale Whispering, to the extent that I was able to share its blessings with a collective of Black women in coastal Georgia a month after my return.

The short film below is a by visual artist Isabela Couto, who was intrigued by the work and decided to center it in her student project for the semester. I share it here as a window into Whale Whispering from another perspective, as the door to 2021 opens. Blessings of protection, health, grace, peace and Love.

This Little Light of Mine

Somewhere south of this symbolic line I’m straddling as I write, someone was singing a starbeam to life. It tumbled forth from a voice that had known the suppression of its range, piercing the treacherous night of enslavement like a blazing arrow, traveling ahead and ahead and ahead of itself to fuel the torches that were the voices glowing up a path for civil rights. It journeys on, flashing against the sleekness of the humpbacks’ soaked skin, sluicing down their ear canals to seep into the massive folds of brain matter where it pools in the place of memory of their own shadow time, when their relatives and ancestors were also exploited in the name of light. But we are alive and not silenced now, the whales and I, and this song of the centuries that I bring to them is their jam. They move with particular joy to this one every time; I can see their appreciation for the most profound levels of balm stashed inside such a simple, repetitive tune. The affirmation of self-worth, the insistence on exhibiting radiance, on showing up luminous in the face of brutality hit home for them as they traverse these waters so recently tainted with crude oil. They sixth-sense the sadness from which I’ve dredged the song this day, and move closer to fortify me as I wield this power tool for my own uplift and theirs. With each note and the buzz I feel from the proximity of their auras my voice is steadily clearer, increasingly brimming with conviction. And we are so in sync that when the song is coming to its close they know, because they know, and they begin to dive, waving their tails in gratitude, in love, in departure, like a socially-distanced high-five. They’re taking it down with them, my message to all the ocean dwellers, from their dense and blubbery relatives to the wispy bioluminescent beings of the abyss: shine. Despite the oil and the plastic, despite the fishing lines and the sonar and the dead zones, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Your light is the truth, and the way back to balance.

An Open Letter Supporting the Protection of the Waters and the Water Protectors from Enbridge’s Line 3 Pipeline

We are water. Each of us is our own ripple in the infinitely diverse, swirling preciousness that is life; water defines and unites us. When we move as water in great enough numbers, we become the force of forces, overcoming, dissolving, permeating, eroding, dislodging, transporting what we encounter, and nothing can avoid being transformed when touched by this force. Water is calling to us now, and those of us who hear its voice are compelled to heed its insistence that we do everything in our power to support its life-sustaining capacity. The mouth of the Mississippi river is spilling forth a message being echoed by the Anishinaabe and Dakota, the people who have stewarded its waters for countless generations: STOP LINE 3. The movement that is being called for right now, however, is not movement grounded in the vibration of resistance, but one that emulates the movement of the river itself and in a flash surges to become an irresistible deluge.

As this is being written, seventeen water protectors sit in jail for placing their bodies in the path of bulldozers that are steadily trampling trees as they grind toward the Mississippi. Drilling at the river is the next scheduled step in the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline, which is set to pass under the river and threatens more than 200 natural bodies of water, crossing Indigenous lands in violation of numerous treaties. While the acts of so-called civil disobedience to which land and water protectors have resorted in the days since construction began have brought slightly increased media coverage to the effort to STOP LINE 3, lawsuits filed against the corporation have proven ineffective in halting the company’s progress. It continues because the massive outpouring of public support that has effectively shifted the tide in other movements this year, Black Lives Matter in particular, has yet to be generated.

Minnesota has had the world’s attention trained on it as a result of being the flashpoint for the uprising sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. As that uprising has gained international traction, it has also brought increased attention to Indigenous rights and causes and fostered an expansion of solidarity between Black and Indigenous activists. It’s no secret that the attitudes behind racist policies and actions that result in deadly over-policing and the placement of toxic plants and refineries in black communities are the same ones which greenlight permits for projects that threaten to devastate the natural environment and compromise the water supply in various Indigenous territories. Perhaps there is no accident in the fact that as this extraordinary year comes to a close, another cry to draw the world’s focus to Minnesota resounds. Perhaps it is the presence of the source of this mightiest of rivers, these headwaters that are under threat of desecration unless huge numbers of people band together to STOP LINE 3, that underlies the current magnetism of these Anishinaabe and Dakota lands.

From the perspective that individual and interpersonal healing are critical to the lasting effectiveness of any organizing in the name of justice, this letter springs forth as a call for the healing of the waters within and without. As direct action is taken to STOP LINE 3, protection, cleansing and care of self, addressing unhealthy and abusive relationships and the nurturing of conflict resolution and cooperative bonds between people, communities and nations involved in the movement must be at the core of the work. Water entreats us to engage holistically. The following steps are required right now to arrest Enbridge’s illegal and destructive encroachment:

· Flood the lines of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’ headquarters, message him and tag him in posts insisting that he protect the waters of Minnesota, honor the treaties with Indigenous nations of the state and call for an immediate stop to the construction of the Line 3 pipeline

o Phone: 651-201-3400/800-657-3717 8-4:30 CST

o Twitter: @GovTimWalz

o Instagram: @mngovernor

o Facebook: Governor Tim Walz

· Flood the lines of Enbridge’s US headquarters and tag the company in posts insisting that they protect the waters of Minnesota, honor the treaties with Indigenous nations of the state and immediately stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline

o Phone: 713-627-5400/715-398-4500

o Twitter: @enbridge

o Instagram: @enbridge

o Facebook: Enbridge

· Flood the lines of Chase Bank insisting that they stop financing Line 3 and other similar initiatives and commit to phasing out support for tar sands oil.

o Twitter: @Chase

o Instagram: @chase

o Facebook: Chase bank

· Flood your social media pages with posts about Line 3 and efforts to stop it, using the hashtag #stopline3

Join those involved in the movement, from wherever you are, in collective, daily prayer/focused intention that the pipeline be stopped

The time to move is now. We, the undersigned, have understood that the tactic of fighting fire with fire burns everything in its wake, and summon all who appreciate the true value of water, respect the environment we share and recognize the importance of honoring indigenous people, traditions, and territories to join us in circulating this letter and taking the action steps outlined herein to STOP LINE 3. We have heard the water speak and we are answering by pouring energy into the current that started as a trickle and, in order to be effective, must swell into a flood. We encourage you to flood all lines of communication leading to Governor Tim Walz, Enbridge, Inc., and Chase bank with the call to STOP LINE 3. We look forward to seeing our social media feeds overflowing with news of this movement and to joining you daily in the space of intention/prayer in support of the waters and the water protectors. We celebrate our collective power as we drown out the greed and disregard for life fueling the voracious extraction of Earth’s resources and STOP LINE 3 in its tracks.

For the Love of Water,

Michaela Harrison, Whale Whispering

Karma Mayet Johnson, The Wind & The Warrior

Nana Fofie Amina Bashir, The Wind & The Warrior

Nana Ife Afriye Kilimanjaro, The Wind & The Warrior

Nana Korantemaa Pierce Williams, The Wind & The Warrior

Renée Gurneau, Red Lake Tribal Community Member

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black Feminist Scholar, Author

Dr. Geryll Robinson, Five Directions Wellness, Soul Shifting Retreats

Luella Toni Lewis, MD, President and Founder, Liberation Health Strategies

Leah Penniman, Founder, Soul Fire Farm

Mama Edie McLoud Armstrong, Bilingual Storyteller/Percussionist/Speech and Language Pathologist

Posts related to Line 3 from front line activists:

@ResistLine3 Giniw Collective

A brief MTV video explaining the movement against Line 3 and the dangers it presents

https://twitter.com/MTVNEWS/status/1337187110156111873

A petition urging President-elect Joe Biden to STOP LINE 3

https://stopthemoneypipeline.com/stop-line-3/...

Letter from Giniw Collective to Line 3 funders (great depth and detail about the risks and violations associated with the pipleine:

https://d99d2e8d-06c9-433b-915d-f6e381b1acd4.usrfiles.com...

Headwaters of the Mississippi. Photo: Karma Mayet Johnson

A Brief Detour to the Gulf of Mexico…

In my last post I mentioned a dolphin encounter that turned out to be one of the seeds of Whale Whispering, and since then a few people have expressed their eagerness to hear the story, so here’s the follow-up. When I began to think about writing it down, it occurred to me that it would be much more interesting to add a little variety to the format and record a conversation between me and the person who was actually the impetus behind that fateful journey out into the Gulf of Mexico long before Whale Whispering became even a concrete idea, my dear friend and brilliant artist, Torkwase Dyson. Her work, as we discuss, has many parallels to this project (learn more here: https://www.torkwasedyson.com), and I wanted to get her perspective on how things went that day since it’s been years and as much as we marveled about it afterwards, we never sat down to share our memories of it with each other in any detail. Feel free to witness our session full of giggles (with a few tears folded in) as we recount the magic and its transformative, uplifting, inspirational impact below. I’ve broken the talk into three separate videos because I have rudimentary editing equipment and skills, and though I’m usually diligent about keeping all my content child-friendly, be aware that there are exactly two expletives that made the final cut.

I’m at work on the next blog post, which will detail what I was and was not able to accomplish of the items on my projected checklist for the last stay in Brazil, and include, as promised, music. I have so very much more to share!

Over My Head

Somehow six weeks passed in the time it takes a wave to kiss the shore yet 2020 started eons ago, and the Whale Whispering time warp remains in full effect. I started so many blog entries during my stay, but have yet to post any because they’re all incomplete; as much as I tried, I could not get to the words about what I was living, I could only breathe through and be present for the living of it. This time around there was heartbreak that blew my chest wide open like an exploded dam, all for the sake of the flow, shattering the last vestiges of my resistance to complete surrender to my path. I had to go elemental, submerge, truly begin to establish fluency in the language of water, sometimes with words, sometimes without, and be much more focused on that exchange being with the whales, the water itself, the spirits accompanying me than with other humans. I had to listen intently as those Middle Passage journeyers really began to make themselves heard and felt, and be quiet within myself to absorb everything and expand with it, be taken by the current to the healing source inside.

It was obvious to me from early on that whenever I started to post again, it would have to be at a different level of personal exposure than it had been before, and I had trepidation around that. I was concerned about establishing the proper balance between how much to reveal for the sharing to be an effective offering of healing support to those who might read it and need it and maintaining my privacy as a shield for the sanctity of my process from anyone who does not appreciate and honor it. How much to share? What to include, what to hold back? Eventually I came to understand that it was less about getting to specific answers to those questions on a point-by-point basis than it was about settling into a degree of self-trust that would allow the words to wash through me, knowing that what was supposed to be expressed would be expressed and what was not would not. So I did not post at all while I was in Bahia this time—I hardly even journaled, which is so rare for me. But the waters hold the record of my experiences and their impact, and the songs speak for themselves. It’s important to note that I was still with out a camera/film crew for the majority of the outings on this trip due to budget and Covid-related restrictions, so most of the photos and videos I have are snippets that are not of a professional quality, but do provide some visual/audio record of what happened along the way.

Now that I’m back to the States and settling in, feeling just how much of a metamorphosis I’ve been through since I was last in this haven of nostalgia and familiarity that is “home” (quotation marks because Bahia is certainly home for me as well), that trust is present in a way it hadn’t been before I went through this most recent trial-by-water, and I can write with much less fear of sharing too much or too little. And I must write. That’s an integral part of the Whale Whispering assignment, since detangling the writer’s block I’ve struggled with over the years is critical to the sacral chakra work that this whole project represents (more to come on that). I begin with the end, my final meeting with the whales before traveling. Of course it’s not an end at all, just a punctuation point, and this order makes total sense because it’s 2020 and it’s whale time and time is no-thing—they insist that I continually emphasize that in the way I share about my connection with them. There are cycles and rhythms and measurable patterns of occurrence to be sure, but easing into a practice of acknowledging and marking these fluctuations outside the traditional constructs of time is a liberation that will support the growth being required of humankind at this juncture. See, I write myself down into that reminder after starting off about six weeks and 2020. Flow.

My heart was agape (read that both ways) as the schooner trudged out to sea and I assumed what has become my regular post on the prow--elevated, front and center, panorama of blues stretched all around me. I had and have been vacillating between a sensation of having been utterly gutted and being (as a result) free of obstruction from experiencing the Presence of Love that nurtures continuously and never harms. My intent is on sinking, evaporating into the latter to the fullest extent possible because I have had enough of suffering, on behalf of myself and my ancestors. The cresting and dipping of the boat through the waves is a rocking that, without fail, brings me into touch with balance, so I was able to give myself room to feel the pain of regret and loss while simultaneously experiencing the infinitely gracious and irresistibly uplifting generosity of Creation as flying fish flitted silverly over the water on either side. The whales had begun their southern migration well before that day; it was already the end of the season and unusual for the whale watching excursions to still be operating, as whale sightings were becoming rarer and rarer. There was speculation that this could be the last tour of the year, and there was no place else I was going to be but on that boat since before the sun rose and set again I would be on a plane heading from spring to autumn.

Adilson (the captain) and I were side-by-side as has become our habit, he on the lookout for blows with his hawk-eyes as I psychically descended into the water visualizing then tugging on the silver energetic cords connecting my heart to the hearts of the whales, greeting and summoning whoever would come to meet us that day. I emphasized in my messaging to them that I really needed their medicine at that moment, busted up as I was, and that this was our final opportunity to connect in physical form until next season. There was a palpable sense of concern onboard as the possibility that no whales would be sighted loomed large, and as we got further from shore and the heat of the day came from higher in the sky, that vibe only intensified. There were several children present and they all wanted to know when the whales were going to show up (???). I had been singing the songs I usually use to call them, but there was nary a sprinkle from a blowhole on the horizon. The tour guide came over to Adilson to  say that we were nearing the end of the second hour and since the clients had been told the tour would last about three hours (I know, Gilligan), it would be necessary to turn back toward shore soon. I had never been out to see the whales and gone so long without a sighting, but I didn’t doubt as the captain made eye contact with me and told Tais we’d give it another half hour before turning around. He and the crew who have led whale watching expeditions for over a decade have repeatedly expressed their confidence in my ability to connect with the whales, and we’ve had multiple chats about the power of affirmative thought on that prow.

When he looked at me, I had a flash of understanding that it was my job to call the whales—that if I didn’t do it right then the season would end with a disappointment for everyone on board, and I would have missed an opportunity to send out through my chest the intensity of emotion that had been churning there for days. I had been singing to them, reaching out to them as I usually did, but suddenly I realized that I hadn’t been singing with the same feeling that I’d communicated to them from my heart. Cha. When I tell y’all that these beings are possessed of supreme wisdom and sensitivity and know and are actively engaged with and supporting what I’m doing, I’m not speculating. They know. I’ve said it before, and I realize I may lose some of the scientists and skeptics following this stream at this or some other point, but I’m here to tell it as I live it, like it is, so that those who don’t know and are open to knowing can hear it from someone who is experiencing it firsthand, day after day after day at sea. And so that those who do know, or believe it but don’t quite know, can have access to yet another space where it’s affirmed: reality is so much more sublime than the modern, Western, patriarchal, white supremacist paradigm would have any of us experience. Thank the ancestors the setting for Whale Whispering is magical, mystical Bahia, so not one single person directly or peripherally connected to this project there bats an eye even halfway when repeatedly presented with the degree of spiritual phenomena seeping from it; it’s just a matter of fact. The captain and the crew know that when I’m on board, the whales are showing up, irregardless of how many days may have gone by without them making an appearance. I’m stating this with such confidence not out of arrogance, but from a place of being utterly humbled by the certainty that has settled over me in the wake of what happened next, which dissolved any tufts of doubt that may have been clinging to the edges of my consciousness.

Adilson and I had both been commenting from the time we embarked that we could feel the presence of the whales (it’s BIG, like they are—if you are tuned in to them you definitely don’t have to see them to know they’re near). They simply were not showing themselves to us, and I swear, once I got clear about why, the message was basically: You are not here to do half a thing. You are not accessing the essence of the healing your ancestors managed to conjure through the journey in slaving vessels across these waters by holding back the truth in your heart. Whew. Whoa. That is exactly what I had been doing, not consciously, but certainly in part because I was on the tour boat and not a private charter that day and didn’t feel inclined to make a show of such raw, intimate feelings in the presence of strangers with camcorders and cell phones at the ready, people with no idea who I am or what I was doing. When the clarity struck and I remembered that this was about me and the ancestors and the whales and anyone who was present to witness it was supposed to be there, I grabbed the rope connecting the bow to the mast, closed my eyes, threw my head back--and sang. I sang out the end to a pattern of sick, broken love, I sang for every soul that had endured the wretchedness and the terror of a “slave ship,” I sang for every supremely intelligent, compassionate, wise, joyful and generous whale that had been slaughtered without honor or regard for their majesty as their oil was used to fuel the fires and build up the structures of colonization and enslavement. And before I finished singing, Adilson was signaling to Rodrigo, who was at the helm, to turn the boat west in the direction of the whales he had spotted. It was like that. When I got down to the real business at hand, they showed up immediately.

And when we reached them, it was exactly the scene I had envisioned when I put out the initial call that day: the whales and the dolphins together, a cetacean send-off for my last day, because the party is always infinitely more lit when the dolphins are on the scene, and they definitely have their own thread in this story that I will get to the telling of as the flux dictates. I sang a few Yoruba chants and a few of the songs I’ve composed for the project thus far, and they all danced in appreciation as usual, then dove, waving tails in appreciation. It was a long dive, and as we waited in anticipation of their resurfacing, the raucous excitement that had taken over the boat lulled to a hush, then I began to sing a different song.

I’ve noticed that the whales are particularly responsive to the spirituals I bring to them. They feel the depth of emotion encoded into those songs; their bodies move differently when it’s a spiritual I’m singing. This day I pulled up my very favorite one as they combed the depths, in part because I connected to their perspective as they dove, and placed myself in the position of hearing my own voice from above the surface of the water, singing with complete focus, full of all the sweetness I could generate to thank them for their presence, for their lessons, for the healing. “Over My Head” is the song that, for me, epitomizes the genius and the resilience of the genre and of the people who created it, insisting on beauty, focusing on it, continuously weaving it through the experience of enslavement, and like most spirituals, its impact lies in both the exquisiteness of the melody and the profoundly resonant simplicity of the lyrics:

Over my head, I hear music in the air                                                                                                                              

Over my head, I hear music in the air                                                                                                                             

Over my head, I hear music in the air                                                                                                                                 

There must be a God somewhere

Over my head, I hear (singing, praying, etc.)…

I sang it with my whole soul, and it seemed like there was no other sound in the universe but my voice and the thwack of the waves, and I was floating as I sang, already positioned several feet above everyone else. And then it was happening—not with the quickness registered in this 6-second video captured by one of those cell-phone-in-hand-folks on the boat (thank you!), but, from my perspective, in the most grace-filled slow motion—this 30-something ton being projected its body from the water in what was so clearly its form of applause for my singing, then swooned and smacked the surface in its descent, setting off waterworks that sent our boat to rattling and everyone to cheering. And my breath caught, even as I compelled myself to keep singing, because I saw with ease that part of its intention was to meet me at eye level, to make the whole effort it takes to leap like that in order to look into my eyes and silently say, Yes, child, that’s what we mean by singing. And then that was it, that was the farewell, and the whales began to move away from the boat. But as we powered up again and started back in the direction of the shore, the dolphins gathered to accompany us, leaping over each other directly under where I sat, basically clamoring to get as close to me as possible, occasionally jumping up almost high enough for me to touch them through the net that hangs down from the bow. Eventually all but one of the dolphins fell back to show some love to the other people on the boat who were in a fit of wonder over their proximity. For me, this wasn’t a new experience. In fact, every time I’ve encountered dolphins while singing, they’ve done the same thing, come to swim under me while I sang. There was one who stayed with me when the rest of the group peeled off, though, bouncing over to the side I was sitting on as the captain marveled next to me. Then it too leapt, turning onto its side while airborne so that it could look up and right into my eyes with one of its own. Oh, the depth of consciousness, of knowing, of complexity in that eye and all it communicated. Adilson mentioned it over and over as we were returning, that and the whale’s breach, so close to the boat, while I was singing. He had seen what I saw in both those looks. The affirmation, the celebration of what I’m doing, because they know. The whales hold the record of Trans-Atlantic slavery in their griot songs, and these beings understand the correlation between the brutalization of both whales and humans on a mass scale and the cultural precedent for global abuse of and disregard for the natural environment that was established during that time when millions of humans were dragged, screaming, across the oceans. And the dolphins, well…I realize as I write this that I’m going to have to do some “backtracking” to give all this the context it deserves. Maybe that will be the next post. They are the ambassadors.

Anyway, this dolphin who positioned itself on my left side, the side of my heart, said so much when it gazed into me. I’m still settling into comfort with sharing this unfiltered for whoever may decide to read it because I know it will have some people writing me off as crazy and delusional, but I am being gifted with these experiences to tell the truth about them, and share the healing that springs from them. One thing I know is that the captain of the schooner, who has been working at sea for 30 years, will corroborate all that I’m saying, because he saw and felt it too. I plan to interview him for the documentary during my next stay in Bahia. He was looking right into the dolphin’s eye too when it basically said to me, We see you, Star. The messages generally don’t come in the form of words; they come as knowing imprinted on my mind, they come as feeling, then I translate that into human language to be able to share them. But there was one word that definitely resounded clearly in the look that dolphin gave me on that day when I had set out truly feeling down on myself about my shortcomings and recent mistakes: Star. This dolphin relative, and the whale who breached before it, handed me a treasure that day, one that I can never lose. In my early adulthood, on my first journey to Bahia, when I received Yemonja, I was given a name in Yoruba, and that name remained when I was crowned as a priest of Yemonja 12 years later: Irawo Omi. It means Star of the Water. I’ve related to it and understood it and appreciated it in so many ways and on so many levels over the years, but it was if a million layers of sky water (clouds) suddenly parted over my head and a beam came down from the stars themselves to illuminate my orí (head, divine consciousness, inner knowing) with the unprecedented lucidity that this was the calling, the destiny I had been named for. It was never as subtle as a metaphor; until I poured my life into this communion with water and the beings of the sea, dedicated myself hook, line and sinker to this journey of returning to understanding myself as an aquatic creature adept at synthesizing and sharing the healing blessings of omi (water), the true meaning of my name remained out of reach to me, always slightly over my head. But no more. I know who I am, I know what I’m doing, I know the job I’m on, and it has only ever been to shine, no matter what story the world tries to feed me about myself. Thank the whales and the dolphins, I will never not know again.

And then, on the way back to shore…the ancestors gave me a new song. I’m working with it, shaping it up, will be recording and posting some version of it shorty. It is a belly-of-the-beast song, a bowels-of-the-ship song, a survival song. The chorus:

As long as we keep on breathing                                                                                                                                       

and sing our way across this sea                                                                                                                              

as long as we know in our hearts                                                                                                                             

we have the Power                                                                                                                                                                        

we will be free

Again, whew. I have so much more to say, to share, more soon, but for now I’m just overflowing with gratitude, so immensely thankful…And open. Aṣe.

Jam Session, Part 2

Photo by Marcos Rossi Santos

Take a leap of grace. Right now, today. That’s the Whale Whispering memo as I type this after rising at the edge of dawn to a luminescence so insistent that it pulled me out of sleep well before the sun showed its face. I opened my eyes to the shaft cascading through my window to splash onto the wall above my bed like a beam from some heavenly projector, and images of leaping whales filled the screen that the moon had made of my dream sanctuary, though I was most definitely awake. But not even the whales could hold my attention as the moon invited my gaze to follow the ray to its source, drawing me in like the most enticing of lovers--and there she was, holding court over earth and sky with a rose gold glimmer that made me gasp at the extent of my privilege, to be able to behold such a revelation. Almost at eye level, the last of her fullness was on display as the horizon strove to encounter that sublimity and be transfigured by it, just as I had. I saw that the source of the light was the Source of the Light and the Voice of the Light said with a sound like the songs of the whales, Take a leap of grace.

Let it go. Show up for this moment with a choice to open your heart completely; flip the switch and be nourished and enthralled by the flood of generosity that courses through and returns to you as a result of surrendering the familiarity and imagined security of withholding. Leap, not just with faith, but with the grace that comes from the certainty that all are worthy of beauty, as all are born into it, under this same moon, inside this same endlessly dazzling fractal situation that is the unfolding universe. Extend grace, and include yourself within its scope. Look at how the whales disrupt the logic of gravity when, in defiance of all that weight, they soar. Remember how they leapt and leapt and leapt in response to your singing that day and so many days, showing you their appreciation, their delight. Think of how they swim up next to the boat and you know, you know, everyone present knows that there are no words for this, the sensation that comes with mingling auras with such magnificence, but if there is one that could come close, it’s this: grace. 

Forgive. Release. Trust. There is nothing between this Power and you. This power is you, and you are it. Create the world you want through your living, through your shining, which does not depend on anything outside of you. Shine fully, generously, like the moon. Do not hold back. Love with that rose gold love, that knows its own immeasurable value as it emanates from the heart center, bathing everything that has the blessing of finding itself in its wake. And enjoy yourself. Think of how the whales and dolphins jump for joy, even as they groan and chatter about the melting icebergs. Take a leap of grace, today. 

P.S.:

I was going to get up and write something else altogether for this blog post, which I’d promised myself I would get done by this evening. I started it nearly two months ago, detailing the second half of the day I wrote about in Jam Session, Part 1, which was all about leaping whales, but got stunned into an extended rumination once again when I realized that I was using echolocation to find the songs my ancestors left in the sea. Once I got my head around that (a little bit, two months later), I decided to pick it back up, because it was such a miraculous day. The moon had other plans, though. I guess there will have to be a Jam Session, Part 3. <3

Omi-O!

Omi-O! This simple Yoruba salutation to water (which is also used to praise the orisha Yemonja and/or Oshun in different branches of the Yoruba spiritual tradition) is my mantra these days. I’ve also been testing out using it as a greeting more and more—a way of saying, “the water in me honors the water in you.”  While some of the songs emerging through this co-creative process are very personal expressions addressing my specific healing needs/journey, most of them are intended as offerings to be sung collectively to water. Their power is magnified when that singing happens in group settings around natural bodies of water, though because we are all connected through water, individuals singing the same song separately qualifies as collective singing. This is the first song from the project that I’m sharing publicly; it’s really just a chant—easy to pick up and pass on. All Whale Whispering compositions will eventually be recorded with whale singing included on the tracks, but as a way of sharing the work-in-progress I’m releasing some of the songs in their early phases in video form. 

This chant has become a staple of my daily practice, and it was created for that purpose. I felt the need for a song to help me remember to be fully present with water each time I interact with it, to honor it for the gift that it is, actively conserve it and support its healing from the pollution and abuse to which it is continually subjected. I’ve also, through this work, been exploring ways to activate the water in my body for self-healing by infusing that intention into the water I cook with and drink. This chant serves that purpose, too—I sing it over the first glass of water I drink every day, and then various times throughout the day when I make contact with water. It’s basically grace, for water instead of food. Singing grace instead of saying grace. Because, why bless food but not water before taking it in? Water is alive; that’s one of the whales’ key messages (reminders). In blessing it, we are blessing ourselves and each other, since all living beings are vessels for water. 

None of what I’m saying is new; indigenous people have been doing this type of conscious work with water since forever, and the Black Baptist tradition in which I was raised is rooted in an inherent reverence for and honoring of our relationship to water, though urbanization, pollution and other factors have pulled the practice of baptism farther and farther away from natural, fully immersive settings in all but the most traditional (usually rural) congregations. Whale Whispering has been bolstered, and I have been so uplifted, by the sharing of this water healing journey with the radiant community of black and indigenous women and two-spirit folks who are participating in the Sacred Waters Pilgrimage along the Mississippi river. For more information about that beautiful work, visit www.windandwarrior.com and www.gcclp.org, the Gulf South Center for Law and Policy’s site, or either group’s Facebook/IG pages. Whether or not you resonate with the notion of water as a living force, it’s undeniable that water is a conductor, that singing generates vibration, and that vibration affects what it impacts. Let us sing to the water with healing intentions, so the impact will be one of healing. “Omi-O” is the first in the Whale Whispering canon intended to be used in that way. Feel free to sing it and share it, and be sure to take some time to listen to the water as well; it has infinite stories to tell…

This is an original composition from my Whale Whispering project using the Yoruba salutation in praise of water. It is a song intended to bless and heal the ...

To help the Whale Whispering Project continue, please visit our GoFundMe page, or contribute here.

Jam Session, Part 1

Dreaming couldn’t top this, I’m sure of it. I could be defying all the laws of physics, seeing the notes prance up from the water’s surface one-by-one as tiny faeries, watching UFOs bob and weave to the cadence of the music the whales and I are making together, and it wouldn’t be any more miraculous than this moment. Crouched down on the floor of a fishing boat with a pea-green towel draped over me so the CB I’m singing into will pick up less wind interference, I project my voice through the fathoms between me and the humpbacks. I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of their language (yet), but the headphones I’m wearing give me the impression that there’s a whale on either side of my head, answering me in a way that makes my heart thunder and my bone marrow sparkle. Whether or not they understand the exact words attached to the tonal sequences spilling forth from me is unclear, but there is no room for confusion about what is being communicated both from my end and from theirs, with a frequency that feels like it could capsize the boat: Love. 

Now I’m listening to the recording of that exchange, almost eight months later, and I’m bathed in wonder all over again. Every time I hear the 50-minute audio, something new is revealed, more layers are uncovered, and healing happens on some level of my being. I didn’t know that it would take so long for me to get to the point of feeling ready to connect words to that encounter, but I did understand after it happened that I needed to let it sink in before I tried to move with it in any way. I needed to let that communication work on me before I could come anywhere near being able to write about it, needed to witness its effect on me before coming back around to it in recorded form. One of my main partners in the project, Dr. Marcos Rossi Santos, a marine biologist, musician and bioacoustics specialist, recorded the session in October, and I have been gently urging him to send it to me basically since we got back onto solid ground. It took him until a few days ago to get it to me, and it’s so obvious to me that I needed these months of growth and movement and expansion in order to hear what I’m able to hear now.

There are almost 17 minutes of the whales vocalizing before my voice comes in, so there’s a clear sense of before and after on the recording. While there are definitive instances of call-and-response, particularly in the moments when I’m mimicking them, there is also plenty of overlay, with my voice and the whales’ comingling. Usually one voice responds to mine initially, and it’s particularly noticeable toward the end of the recording that when I begin to sing in a significantly higher register than I had before, a whale (or whales) chime(s) in with a corresponding tone. Hearing the back-and-forth now returns me to that day and the sensation that I was being initiated by the whales as they observed my ability to recreate with my own voice the sounds they were making. And the knowing that the whales were not only conscious of my intentions to have this communication with them, but also knew me. I had, after all, been out singing on these seas 2-3 times a week in the months prior; all the whales and dolphins in the region had either heard or heard about the human singing from the boats. Up to that point I had only sung to them from above the water, without any equipment to project my voice. 

This day I was finally able to embark with the team from IBJ (Instituto Baleia Jubarte) to experiment with the speaker that would send my voice out under the waves as a super-sensitive hydrophone brought their voices to me from however far away they were ( I remember hearing an estimate of a few nautical miles from someone who was on board). I couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see me, but the vibe I picked up from the whales was, “Oh, you’ve brought it down below, mermaid?? Now we can get down to some real business!!” I admit I had just a flash of self-doubt when one of the biologists present expressed uncertainty about whether or not the whales were actually hearing me from where they were, and said that the proof would be in hearing them pause to listen to and then respond to me on the recording (he didn’t have headphones on so couldn’t hear the whales while we were at sea). That pause is obvious at several points on the recording, but to my (utterly non-scientific) way of knowing it’s actually the opposite behavior that makes me certain they heard me. There was a resounding “YES” reaching back to me from the chorus of whale voices, and the same clarity that I’ve had all along--that not only do they know what I’m here to do, they chose me for it. At every turn they have provided me with confirmation of this, from the whale bones that keep coming my way to the testifying they do, with their bodies and their voices, when I sing. That’s what I felt from them that day, what I hear on this recording: testifying. It’s just like being back in gospel choir at church. Most of the time the choir is simultaneously listening to and singing with whoever the soloist is, and when the whales are singing amongst themselves it’s often the same—there may be one dominant voice, but other voices are weaving themselves around the “lead.” The fact that the whales’ voices overlap with mine isn’t an indication that they don’t hear me—it’s an indication that they do. 

Now again, another listen before returning to the attempt at some version of transcription, and I can clearly hear that the repeated patterns the whales have taught me, along with the ones I’ve  contributed through improvisation, constitute a composition that in its present state remains a puzzle, with pieces that need to be rearranged, slid around in order to understand how they fit together. I’ve been giving myself the space to listen without any rush to assign words to the meanings being relayed, but as I reach the end of the recording I can feel lyrics lapping at my consciousness. I breathe through the drawling revelation of three words that match the most prominent tri-note progression of the session, then catch myself in a gasp when I digest the fact that they’re the words that were beamed to me from the whales at the initiation of this project in 2018, the phrase at the very foundation of this work: We Are One. Now that I know what they’re singing I don’t know how I ever listened without hearing it, but I also understand that the time-release effect of that realization was intentional. There’s some type of coding at work that only allows for deciphering one small but impactful morsel over many listens. I have an inkling that the pace will shift as we move into another phase of the process, and that it’s largely being determined by them. There’s also a multi-layered comprehension that I absorb with this decoding; their language has the ability to express multiple meanings depending on context and audience, so they can be having one conversation with each other while communicating something completely different to me that is directed toward human ears. I’m just at the beginning of my apprenticeship with them, and trust that over time I’ll become adept enough to understand at least some of what they croon to each other. Touching minds with them is altering in the most visceral sense; it’s as if I can feel my dna being upgraded in order to receive the knowing they transmit. The combination of grace, wisdom, complexity, precision, compassion and the incalculable vastness of intelligence they exhibit makes each meeting with them an illumination, an elevation. This is soul music, and the only way it can be fully absorbed is through receptors that extend beyond the intellect’s scope. Theirs is a language of feeling, and my most important assignment in this journey of recalibration is to surrender with a continuous yes and remain firm in what I know: that I have the capacity to learn this language just as I’ve learned all the others I’ve come to speak, because in truth there is no segregation between the whales and myself. We Are One. 

The otherworld, that realm of perceived delineation, has faded, swallowed by Blue…We’re united in this color, this hum, the echoing of their voices, mine, and the amniotic sloshing all around us…The notes we warble back and forth resonate with the timbre of a lullaby now that the whales and I have joined dreams, and my breathing has slowed to match the languid pulse of the melody that’s taking shape through our improvisation. I inhale the blues, exhale jazz as my awareness blinks into the understanding that 1- they have begun to teach me their language, 2-I have begun to learn it and 3-we are in the process of co-creating our first song. 4-Whoaaaaaaaa. We’re in this womb together, and though the treasure forming inside our dream is germinating from Blue, it is the spawn of refraction. My soul senses the range toward which this becoming stretches--a sonic spectrum designed to breach the surface in a flourishing arc that unfurls itself around the globe as a prismatic embrace; a phosphorescent refrain to spark the realization of wholeness in all who hear it. Sound of a unity that the whales have never forgotten, a wholeness that somehow I too recall through the warp of my apparent brokenness, finding it in the seed of the rainbow song which, only now do I truly understand, is what I’ve been singing all along.

“Tell them we’ve been talking to you through the bones.”

“Tell them we’ve been talking to you through the bones.”

That’s what I heard when I finally sat down to try to shape this into something communicable: this answer from the whales—a starting point. I have been, for the most part, stunned into wordlessness, dumbed by the awe that has crested over me in wave after wave as I’ve surrendered myself to this Whale Whispering  journey, this ancestral journey, this Nature walk, this water way. And despite the promises I made for regular updates--I truly apologize for not honoring them--the way to translate this into written language has eluded me until now, and I have just had to breathe through this extended pause in the word flow, be quiet enough to really hear and understand what I’m hearing. I wasn’t equipped to relay this in any way that made sense before bowing fully to the requirement that I transform in order to be an appropriate vessel for these messages and fit on all levels to see this work through. I’m still very much inside that process (it is ongoing, it is lifelong), and I have in the past few months settled into a level of consistency with my self-care practice that has allowed me to cleanse sufficiently and deepen my meditation to the point where I have a much clearer sense of what this project truly is, what I’m really doing. I began this work with the intention for it to bring healing, and always understood my own healing to be central to it, but I see now that I had only an inkling of how powerfully my interaction with the whales would impact me. 

That inkling began to expand into a different kind of knowing once I found my second whale bone in August. The vertebra I had found on my first Whale Whispering expedition, in October of 2018, was confirmation that I was on the right path, that the connection was real, that the deepest, most ancient magic was at the core of this whole undertaking. When I found the 6-foot rib , early into my second sojourn for the project, I knew that it was the staff I had been envisioning carrying with me each time I went to sea, and, as I wrote in the last report before this one, it assisted me in fine-tuning my telepathic connection with the whales to the point of being able to identify them before actually seeing them from the boat. To the point of understanding that all they wanted from me, on that trip, was the offering of my songs, and after that, my wholehearted and practical commitment to self-healing before encountering them again for the 2020 season. I didn’t have a notion of how the mental link I had made with the whales would continue to work on me after I left Brazil in October, didn’t have a sense of the intensity of the power surge that had only begun to reveal its effects when I was actually on the water in the presence of the whales. It wasn’t until I got back to the States that it started to rock my world. I‘ll come back to that rib bone, as it came back to me, after a while, and note that in September of 2019 another humpback whale vertebra was gifted to me by a friend who had found it on the beach in northern Bahia. Everyone joked that soon I would have a whole skeleton in my possession, but I was still without any that I felt I could safely bring back to the States without fear of confiscation by either Brazilian or US Customs. 

In October, after 2 and a half months of swimming and diving daily and embarking to be with the whales up to three times a week, I returned to New Orleans with several portions of new compositions for the project and a lingering tingle of the majesty of humpback whales that was on full display during my last encounter with them. I immediately got sick with sinus and respiratory issues, which had become the norm in recent years; every time I got back to New Orleans after any significant time away, I got sick. Seriously sick. When it happened after my return in October, I got a very clear message that it was time for me to move. While the idea had been rolling around in my head for a while, it wasn’t anything I had planned on doing so abruptly, but the message was clear: time to be closer to family, and time to get out of what was one of the most enchanting, glorious, fecund and environmentally toxic environments I’ve ever been in. It was as if I’d developed a whole new level of sensitivity to the myriad factors (mold, chemical spills and run-off, oils spills and smoke from the refinery in Chalmette) contributing to health issues I’ve had over the years, and the blessing, the cleansing, the spark of healing that my time with the whales had provided made it impossible to ignore the signs that this was no longer an environment in which I could thrive as a full-time resident. My darling New Orleans. Someplace I love with my whole heart. This project, from its inception, has included the incorporation of the environmental issues in New Orleans and surrounding areas as integral to the central theme, and that continues to be the case. After weeks of being ill, I began the preparations for my move, which happened at the end of December, a few weeks before I set out for this most recent trip to Brazil. The swiftness with which I made the decision to move and carried it out was a surprise to so many in my New Orleans community, and I found myself frequently explaining that I was simply “following the guidance.” In retrospect, I can see that I was being guided out of an environment that would become even more of a health risk for someone like myself who has asthma and numerous allergies, as the Corona virus has run rampant through Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular. Now my heart aches with missing the place I called home for 17 years and the people I love there, and I am full of concern for the ways in which both communities and the environment will be impacted by the fallout from the virus. And…I am thankful to know with absolute certainty that I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

When I set out for Bahia in early January, my focus was on doing shows and staying mostly in Salvador and wherever the music took me, with 2-3 weeks of my 10-week stay dedicated to Whale Whispering. As the whales are currently in Antarctica and won’t return to Brazil until June, I envisioned spending a few weeks in Praia do Forte, where the project and its host organization, Instituto Baleia Jubarte (the Humpback Whale Institute) are based. In that time I’d be working on reviewing and editing footage from the previous trip and listening to recordings of the whales and beginning to identify and pull out some of the patterns I might use in conjunction with the compositions I had begun, with the support of my main partners, Enrico Marcolvaldi, Director of the Institute, Eduardo Melo, also from the Institute, and Dr. Marcos Rossi Santos. After a few weeks of being back-and-forth between Salvador and Praia do Forte for a weekly gig at the Tivoli resort, it became clear to me that I needed to spend as much time as possible in Praia do Forte. Though the whales weren’t there, the people were, and as I began to make deeper connections with local folks who are natives of the region, who have lived with the seasonal presence of the whales and who nurture the cultural/spiritual traditions that keep them profoundly connected to the ocean and rivers, I understood that this time was about being as present with them—and with that place—as I could. Their stories and practices, and the story of Praia do Forte, have everything to do with the ancestral voices I hear echoed in the whalesongs, and in taking the time to begin to know them, I learned so much about myself, and what I’ve been called to do. I met Andiara, who has revived and maintained the tradition of the Presente de Yemanja (offering for Yemonja—and Oshun) that was spearheaded by her father until the time of his passing, just in time to participate in this ritual with the local Candomblé community. I was embraced by Nati, one of the few natives to own a restaurant on the main tourist strip in town, who open-heartedly supported my work by feeding me almost daily, and Dona Rosa, proprietor of a small B & B where I stayed through a horrendous bout with the flu and by whom I was cared for with herbal teas and baths and syrups as if I were here own daughter. These and so many other connections opened my eyes to the undercurrent of life in the village, where everyone is related and some of the stories that are held by the elders reach back to the beginnings of the nation itself; this time I laid down a root that I will surely be cultivating for the rest of my life. 

It must have been tapping into the roots of the village that made me feel like I was finally ready to go to the castle, Castelo Garcia D’avila, a 16th century fort that is significant for its place in the colonial history of Brazil and infamous for the legendary tortures of enslaved Africans that took place there. One of the main tourist sites of Praia do Forte, I had managed to avoid the castle in my almost four years of frequenting the region, wanting to go when only I felt fortified and prepared to face the lingering energies there. When I did, with councilmember Alexandre Rossi as my guide, I poured libations for those who had suffered there, sent up prayers for the spirits and the earth itself that had witnessed such brutality. In the chapel, the only fully intact original building on the grounds, I felt the centuries of prayers that had been uttered, and I sang for the ancestors, those Africans and their descendants, those Tupi people whose lands were invaded and usurped. From the hill where the castle sits there is a perfect view of Tatuapara Bay, where the ships came in, where the humpback whales were slaughtered for their meat and blubber. Where their bones were discarded and left to be swallowed by the tide. Where I continue to find the bones of those beings who heard the laments of the enslaved and kept a record of them in their songs. 

The stretch of Tatuapara Bay that flanks the Tivoli resort is the boneyard, and where I spent most mornings during my time in Praia do Forte. Before I knew the history of that cove, I had already identified it as one the most mellow and less populous beaches in town, and therefore one of my favorites, and after I found out what had happened to whales there, it became sacred ground/water to me. There is an impenetrable peace that hangs over the area, somber without being sad, despite the countless slaughters that took place there, as if the whales had left their bones as medicine for the beings who would come behind them to those waters, leaching the energy of their gentle grace, creativity and power into the very essence of the region. I went for a dose of that medicine every morning, often on the beach at sunrise for meditation and prayer, then singing to the water as I swam through it, humpback-style. The fisher-people know me, and without conversation understand that I’m the mermaid-on-the-job; they’d smile conspiratorially when they passed me as they rowed out on their way beyond the reef, sometimes saluting Yemanja, or calling out, “sereia!” (mermaid). Often I’d be the only person in the huge expanse of water, free-diving anywhere from 10 to 15 feet depending on the tide, rocketing down at a 90-degree angle then gliding parallel to the ocean floor when I reached the bottom, letting my womb pass over the bone-rich sand to soak up the healing vibrations of songs from centuries past. And on Thursday nights I would add my voice to the tincture, projecting with intention to the waters from my weekly open-air show at the resort, keeping the flow circular, trusting and blessing the flow, healing self and others, self and waters with my own song…

Other waters called to me as well during this sojourn, and for the first time in well over a decade I returned to Imbassai, the next village up the coast from Praia do Forte, a more verdant and much sleepier town where rat-sized frogs own the night and the river is the main attraction. There’s no reef cradling the beach there so the waters are rough and don’t allow for the snorkeling, diving and lazing that Praia do Forte’s beaches offer, but the clear, vibrant waters of the Imbassai river form a perfect swimming hole just before the point where they meet the sea. As a daughter of Yemonja and Oshun, places where ocean and river come together have always been especially charged power sources for me. For several days, thanks to a generous courtesy stay at Lagoa da Pedra pousada, I laid myself down in that rushing mixture of sweet and salt and held on to the stones in the middle of the current so that I could rest with my ears submerged and still breathe. More songs, and so much more healing came through those waters, including a clearer understanding of how to shape this work into shareable blessings in a retreat context, and how to work directly with the waters to pass the healing on to others in need of (and ready for) that level of release.

The songs are coming! The songs are coming! Not one of them is complete at this point, and it’s been a challenge and a joy to free myself from the pressure to force the creative process in order to have something to show for the time I’ve been putting in. As my connection with the whales and my relationship with the waters and my understanding of the project deepen, layers are gradually being added to the songs that began as snippets. They deserve and will have their own post(s), soon. I’m so acutely aware of the anticipation many people have a round this project, particularly those who have supported it financially and otherwise, and part of my own healing journey inside of this has been to acknowledge my difficulty in breaking through what I have experienced as writer’s block while also trusting the timing and the pace of everything. One of the most consistent messages from the whales has been to go slowly, and despite the remorse I feel at not having honored the commitment to provide earlier and more frequent updates, I’m so thankful to now be sharing from a place of having taken the time to truly engage my own transformation as inspired—and required—by Whale Whispering.

I turned 50 in Praia do Forte in March, and marking that milestone has also served as a tremendous motivator for committing to the changes my body and life require in order for me to live healthy and well and to be an appropriate channel for this sublime inspiration and co-creation. Reaching the half-century point is a gift, life itself is a gift; any present beyond this most precious blessing is lagniappe, as we say in New Orleans, a little something extra. Every whale bone that’s come to me has felt like a special treasure from the whales, from the sea, from the oriṣa, but this last one blew my mind. The rib I found in a tidepool right at the water’s edge in August turned out to be cracked in two places and broke into three pieces when I pulled it out of the water. I held it intact to take pictures showing the size of the whole bone, but opted to leave the two shorter upper pieces in the water and keep the longer “staff” as I knew it would be a challenge to carry all those heavy bones and then try to reconnect them. Reluctantly, I left them. The staff was left in the care of my fellow whale whisperer Marcos when I left for the States in October. A few weeks before my birthday, in late February, I was walking along the beach and saw something familiar flash in the tide. I honestly got lightheaded when I realized what it was and my mind flooded with the understanding of what kinds of odds had to be at work in order for what was happening to be happening, but there it was: the tip of the rib I had left in the water 6 months earlier. It came back to me, just as I was lamenting the fact that I had a collection of whale bones but none small enough to sneak back into the States with me…This top part of the rib, which is sitting in my lap as I type this, is about 16 inches long, and was easy to wrap inside some clothes and bury in my suitcase to slide past customs. So now I have a whalebone on this side of the water. I keep it under my pillow at night and so often I hear the whales’ voices in my dreaming. The bones have shown me that as important as anything else related to this project is the simple sharing of what I experience as it unfolds; the whales want me to describe the immense magic that is so integral to this journey with them, and I feel so privileged to join them in relaying that it is real and accessible to whoever is open to it, a radiant force that we can call upon anytime. As in now.