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.