We Are One: A Portal to The Portal

(Please read before downloading)

This is for you, for us. Let me tell you (or remind you of) the story of this encounter. If you’re listening for the first time, I encourage you to have a seat or lie down and let the sound of underwater embrace you, cleanse you, reorient you. I invite you to close your eyes and engage the fullness of your attention to experience this communion between me and some humpback whales, recorded in September of 2021 in the waters between Caravelas and Abrolhos in Bahia, Brazil. 

At first there were two whales, a mama and baby, who came to visit, circling the boat as I sang from the deck and diving and resurfacing in the vicinity of the recording equipment (a hydrophone and an aquatic speaker attached to cables leading from the water into a recorder and soundboard). While scientific research affirms that only male-assigned humpback whales “sing” in the sense of having identifiable, repeated patterns of melody with a beginning and an end, these whales were definitely vocalizing with me and we had a sweet exchange that lasted for about ten minutes before I heard them swimming away, their voices becoming more distant. (I couldn’t see them because I was inside the cabin of the boat like I am in this revelatory photo by Sergio Cipolotti). I turned off the equipment and pulled out my earphones to head back out onto the deck, and Zá, the owner of the boat and the tour company @scuba.turismo came running into the cabin to tell me that the whales were coming back. I plugged everything back in and put the headphones in to hear what appeared to be the same voices. As they had before, the whales began to make sounds like melodious sighing once I started to sing, and that is the point at which this track begins. After a few minutes of listening, singing, then pausing to listen some more and sing again, I could hear a different voice approaching the hydrophone. It was deep, rich and authoritative, carrying what felt like a distinctly masculine vibration and the confidence of an older being. When this whale eventually positioned himself near the hydrophone (hanging 10-15 feet below the boat) so that his voice was the most clearly audible, I got chills listening to the knowing beyond knowing flowing from his voice, and I understood with absolute clarity that this was the chief; the first whales had gone to call the venerated elder to talk to me. His vibration, his aura, engulfed the boat, and I felt that if I were to put my ear to its floor, I would feel the booming cadence of his heart inside my head. 

He had one thing to say for the first several minutes of our interaction, and I heard it and knew what it was without a doubt because I had heard it before, when I had used this equipment two years earlier and then listened back to the recording with the whales from that encounter. I meditated with it for weeks, focusing on that pattern, knowing that it was an essential message that the whales wanted to relay, and one day the clouds finally opened and I understood what it was. I knew it as surely as I know my own name, and understood that this was the overall message of this collaboration, the gist of what they want to relay (more on this here). The same three-note pattern I heard on that track was spilling from the giant right beneath me, and this time I could hear the words themselves being formed: We Are One. It is the simplest, most basic message, and its potency lies in the source from which its issuing forth rather than originality of content. It’s been said everywhere, a billion times over, though you might not have heard it quite like this before. And you might not hear it at all as I did/do; everyone has their own experience. 

Some of you have already heard the track and are returning to download it so that you can continue the journey, some of you are here because you haven’t heard it yet, but you already know you will want to listen to it again and again, and some of you are just here to support. Ease your way in with deepening breaths—I find seven to be ideal, each breath slower and fuller than the one before, so that the seventh cycle of inhalation and exhalation your heart rate has slowed considerably. The recording is raw and unedited, unmixed--full of the challenges that are to be expected when using new equipment for the first time, experimenting with dynamics between mic and speaker, and singing through a cb mic as opposed to a microphone designed for vocal performance. The melody moving through me was coming directly from the Middle Passage musical archive I’m able to tap when in the whales’ presence (more on the song here in the blog post, Lamento/Interstellar), and everyone—the water, the whales, the ancestors, me and my womb—was getting a healing from the exchange. It is 16 and a half minutes of pure, soul-to-soul interspecies reaching-out-and-touching. It is a capture of one of the most sublime moments of my life, and I share it here with the prayer that it serve as an access point to that sublimity, the bliss of knowing that Oneness is the truth and of attunement to the fact that Love is always claiming its victory somewhere.