Thank you, thank you, thank you for this day, for our lives, for this home we call Earth. You Mother and you Father, the energies of life that come together, thank you so much. Gratitude for your presence here, Ape Huchi Kamuy, and your presence here, Wacka Ush Kamuy, sacred waters. And you are at the center of life, of all of life on this earth. Fire and water, you are the elders.

Life. It’s our gift as human beings to be able to turn sounds and vocables and vowels and consonants into melody. Which is the songs. And they exist in nature always. They’re always singing. Everything is always singing. And humans have this beautiful gift of hearing it and then articulating it out. And it’s just life force. You know that it comes through us and we are sung through. So yes, it takes us back to our essence. I feel essence of spirit is in the breath, to let that spirit free and move. So it’s such a wonderful gift we have.

The first song I received at the river source with this particular stream bubbled up from the waters.

My work has been about reclaiming our natural ability to praise with our voice, to grieve, to celebrate, to express our stories.

This is after my father died. My mother, in her grief, would sit at the piano in the wee hours of the morning weeping and playing the piano and singing. And I would curl up under that piano. And knowing that we can release the grief through song was just transferred. But my mother, she would always say, what is your song? You know, what is your voice? For me, it is all about listening now, before acting. It’s about listening so deeply that nothing is left behind. Nothing is left out because without everything, we are no longer, we have no life. So my practice is listening day and night, opening the heart, softening the mind and the body, and purely receiving. It’s not like listening: What is that? Trying… but with such relaxation that you really feel you’re hearing the essence of the truth.

Instinctively, I think we know as humans how to heal ourselves. And, for my mother, it was song and nature. And that became our gift. I began to bring these songs to the women. And sort of a whoosh blossoming like the seed of the heart’s longing went whoosh. And I realized there is strong medicine and a power to singing the songs. And my sort of offering personally is to help us remember our songs, our songs from the lands that we come from. I approach everything in that way. But it’s been many years of cultivating the way of listening first. And that’s not easy with our loud noise-filled world.

I come to the women’s circles with no agenda. And sometimes even the morning of, I try to just receive any information I might need but I step in front of the sacred fire and water with the circle of sisterhood, including the more than human. And from that place, we listen together. Like we’re all steeped in the organized religions that are trying to control the wild essence of life. Women are reclaiming their waters and their wild nature. And I call her wild woman in the truest, most integral sense of the word. The way that we call nature wild. Wild is natural and is full of integrity. It’s really tapping into your inner essence. And there’s so much life force there. More life force than you have on your own when you’re connected to the earth and the elements.

A lot of this right now is dream, is conceptual, it’s coming in. But it doesn’t mean that if it’s not manifest right now, that we should just say, oh, well we didn’t do it. Earth time, manifestation of dream into reality here takes time and collective consensus. And we start small. We start with our own families and welcoming in others, even with different ideas and different belief systems to start rethreading back those threads that got severed, the roots that got clipped and we can’t find the water anymore. So we’re doing that work of reconnection. And the word I think that really encapsulates it all is regenerative culture. Which has concern for, for everything being full of life. Not just human, not just our kind, our people.