in a fit of catharsis and in the quietude of whatever the fuck this season has brought to fruition, I offer this sonic experiment, originally aired in July 2024 on Spit in the Ocean No.23 via Lower Grand Radio. Here I read poems and journal entries about place-based devotion, love, family, and eros alongside a menagerie of song samples recorded in caves, a love note from my darling, a Shaker prayer whispered, and even one courting song to Bees I learned from Svetlana Spajic in 2020.
Aside from this, I write with a newly harvested grief. As I was traveling back from a tour in CA, my kitten Hymn died suddenly an hour before I got off the plane. It happened on the anniversary of another loss acutely present in my heart that day. I returned home to his body in the backseat of my truck, my partner in shock and tears. I can’t say that death has or ever will come at a convenient time, and as I grow older and effort to become one with the melodies of change, I also seek acceptance in timing. I know I talk and write about cycles a lot, I think about wheels, orbits, and spirals as a way to locate myself within a poem, ecosystem, relationship, or tribulation. I continue to be greatly humbled by the divine timing of things.
In the past month, I reconnected with beloved friends I haven’t seen since moving back to New Mexico. I witnessed thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese migrating south of Albuquerque and a Starling murmuration peak above my head at dusk in west LA. I have been thinking about the insistence of return, both eternal and rare. For instance, the way spirits of other people, pets, and lost loved ones get channeled through light, sound, dreams, images, and sometimes other humans unknowingly. Eternal return not only exists as a Pythagorean-related philosophical theory of events inevitably reoccurring over time… as the sun performs its solstices and equinoxes in an infinite loop, but I imagine can also exist in the form of intergenerational tendencies.
I consider eternal return in the migration patterns of birds and in the majesty of flowering trees. I consider it in the refinement of a seed’s nature to express itself and in the fulfillment of our ancestor’s wildest dreams for us. I consider it in the emergence of revolutionary movements and in the eerie combinations of fate we encounter with others across time and space.
