The World Loves to be “Sung To”
Nature, Resonance and the Ancient Pathway to Meaning
I remember one day sitting on my porch beside the River Nile in Egypt.
It had been a particularly water-soaked season.
The Nile had flooded and my house was quite literally surrounded by a lake filled with large fish, birds, wandering water buffalo, donkeys —and even a tiny monitor lizard or two. … those large lizards were harmless and incredibly shy. I once had one scurry over my feet while I was walking through the riverside marshes.
Sitting there surrounded by that big nature ‘stew’ that day,
a chorus of voices and movements all interconnected …
animal, wind, waters and plants …
even the farmers and boatsmen wandering between them …
I remember feeling profoundly grateful for having lived a life full of nature. Animals. Oceans. Deserts. Forests. Mountains. Rivers. Wild places.
I’ve chosen nature over careers, money, security again and again in my life. It’s been a decision, a rite of passage, or a test I have to make many times. Choosing to step away from city and social life and advantage takes a huge cost, financially and professionally. I even once said no to a massive opportunity with a music group in Los Angeles because my heart was craving too hard for the Sea.
But for me … nature in my life is non negotiable.
I cannot live without that direct connection.
It’s not simply a resource to me, something that keeps me alive, or even just somewhere beautiful to go on weekends to recover from “real” life ...Nature is companion. Nature is mirror. Nature holds wisdom.Nature is teacher.
This is hardly a new idea.
Ancient traditions across the world observed animals, plants, seasons, rivers, winds and stars and saw in them patterns that could teach us something about being human.
Yoga was created through copying postures based on animals and natural forms. Chinese traditions described the human being through relationships with seasons, elements and the wider natural world. Ancient Egyptian thought, writing and metaphysics was saturated with animals, landscape, celestial cycles and the Nile itself.
The human being wasn’t separate from nature. We were inside it as a part of it.
And perhaps one of the peculiar tragedies of modern Western life is that we have become obsessed with ourselves, very good at analysing ourselves while becoming increasingly disconnected from the world we are made of.
We analyse anxiety. We analyse trauma.
We analyse our nervous systems.
And sometimes we forget to feel the water, fire, earth and air moving through us.
The Voice in the Field
And on that day my house sitting like a boat flooded by the Nile all around me, the profound magic in that relationship got me again, and I decided to sing into that field of animal, nature and locals sound all around me.
Singing to Nature as audience, is something I have done for decades:singing to beaches, landscapes, mountains, beside the sea, to animals.
I've climbed mountains and woken at 3 am to sit in sunrises, lugging portable microphones, amps out into nature, setting up for professional performance while people look on as if I am nuts ..
But it’s amazing what happens when the human voice is used not as performance but as a way of showing relationship.
It is kind of what the word SongLine has come to mean to me.
First given to me by an Aboriginal Elder up a hill at nighttime dancing his dreaming to the stars … and drawn from a worldwide tradition of peoples who sing sharks to the shore, sing with whales, even across distances between mountains ….
Not merely making sound in a place, but sounding with a place.
Listening. Offering something. And seeing what comes back.
On that afternoon, I chose to sing a low C — around 256 Hz.
There was no grand theory behind it. I had simply come to associate that low C with the heart. And using a collection of AH based sounds ..
A sound I call the Sun Sound … that opens the chest ..
So I sang.
And then somewhere in the distance, a donkey began to bray.Its voice seemed to land astonishingly close to the same tonal centre.It was far enough away that I couldn’t imagine it had heard my small human voice.
Then a dog began calling. And then, almost absurdly, the mosque next door began its call to prayer — again in the exact same pitch.
For a few moments, it felt as though the entire landscape had joined the note.
The field was singing back.
When the World Answers
I’ve experienced versions of this at other times:
on a Paris subway when violence seemed to be brewing;
out in wild desert where almost nothing stirred
;inside the mechanical drone of machines;
among choruses of birds in Bali
and of course deep in the ancient halls of Egypt in over 350 visits ….
where entire structures seem to echo and sing back as birds fly in ..
There are moments when the environment seems to organise around intentional sound.
There is something deeply powerful about sound, about resonance —
perhaps a link in the electromagnetic field —or collective consciousness …
a field theory we can’t quite name beyond metaphysics yet ..
Something that just gives me this extraordinary sense that the world loves to be sung to and sometimes sings back and that I have experienced out there in the sound field many times …
… something that rewards us with a deep feeling of meaning. That experience that we are part of something bigger, that we ARE nature.A piece of this living Earth — a pretty f*cked-up and lost piece perhaps,but a piece nonetheless. There may be interesting questions about resonance, attention, entrainment, vibration and the electromagnetic activity of living systems but the result of deepened meaning and relationship, like we have come home .. .is what’s important.
We Are Not Visiting
Something happens when you make sound into the living world.
The relationship stops being entirely conceptual.
You feel it vibrating through your chest, through bone, through skin.
Your breath enters the atmosphere.
Sound leaves your body and moves into air, water, trees, stone and space.
And suddenly the idea that you are “connecting with nature”begins to sound slightly ridiculous.
Because you were never separate from it.
And finding our way home may have something to do with remembering that.
Perhaps this is what our ancestors understood when they sang to rivers, animals, mountains, ancestors, gods and stars. They weren’t necessarily singing because they thought the world was silent.
Perhaps they sang because they knew they were part of the song.
And every now and then, if we become quiet enough to listen,
the world sings back.
The SongLine Path: Meaghan Maria is a certified counsellor, arts therapist, musician, audio engineer and mythologist. She creates original musical compositions and learning experiences, using embodied vocal sound and ancient nature consciousness inviting you to not only to listen but to experience the sound-field yourself to rapidly deepen breath, embodiment and meaning. Experience her mini musical work, Coming Home . . an introduction to the Songline Evolution yourself
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