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.