Song for A Baby Whale (Canção para Um Bebê Baleia)

Shining together through their synchronized, undulating blackness, they epitomize bondedness. This mama, whose heart is among the world’s largest, and her child, who is clearly, to her, among the planet’s most precious, provide me the gift of witnessing a magnitude of affection that transports me to another time…Through the ocean that my eyes have become I see my mother and her only child, on a slow trek up a hill that to me is a mountain and her slender—no, skinny—but oh-so-sturdy back is my transportation as I hold onto her for (she is) dear life. Point of origin for this body, Love incarnating Love, connecting me to the lineages leading to Earth’s original people in human form, we are at this level of warmth, care, and trust I observe beaming from the bodies of the whales; at four I already understand that she wants the world to see me as I am, a being of the highest value, worthy of protection and celebration, same as this humpback mama wants for her baby. I can feel my heart beating against my heroine’s spine and hear hers echoing mine, their polyrhythm a talking drum summoning me back again to another point on a spiraling timeline: I am on that boat, not this boat, and the tears salting my eyes are for the mother from whom I was stolen, the one whom I looked upon as beauty  itself because she was/is, she who in her breadth of wisdom and attunement foresaw this moment  and rooted in me a Love so indelible that not even an Atlantic could pull our hearts out of sync with one another. So I search for the song inside that pulse as I watch the whales prance, and the sound that sylphs from my throat is for all these adored children and our venerated mothers/parents who nurture us, and for those in need of nurturing. A song of welcome and “we-want-you-here” for the young ones of the world, from the biggest to the smallest, “Song for A Baby Whale (Canção para Um Bebê Baleia).”

This is the song I’m singing in the majority of the video registers of some of my most intimate and intense moments with the whales. I dedicated a paragraph to it in my last blog post (Grupo Competitivo/Come Together — Michaela Harrison), and it has since resurfaced, asking for more attention to its relevance. I wrote about how it’s one of the Middle Passage melodies, a dna-spun un-coiling of the blood memory the whales and we contain (perhaps not the exact notes, maybe a different refrain) of the sounds of slavery at sea, commanded through my throat by one ancestor/previous/current self who stood mesmerized by the scene described above, even as those chained alongside her shuffled, shoved; We Are One. Song for A Baby Whale has become my most trusted way to call the whales vocally. Singing the wordless tune draws them in every time. They get it, they feel it, they understand its significance because they were the conductors for its transmission. One time I sang it and there were ten or twelve baby whales who showed up with their accompanying adults and flexed their nascent breaching skills around the boat in every direction, a wonder that I wish I had the prowess to relay in full to those who will never live it personally, which is most humans (for now). What I am able to do is infuse it into the goldenness of the melody each time I send it forth, always with the prayer that some degree of that resplendence will be absorbed by those who hear it, the resplendence that I relive whenever it vibrates through me. Is it a siren song? Yes, in the sense that it lures and lulls, one sung to float the listener with ease into a conscious embrace with the Oneness, an ego death breath, long enough to allow for a dazzle of the vastness of the uncountable cosmoses--a sip of the Beauty, the Beauty, the Beauty. And rebirth. A song for the baby that is ever alive in each of us, for the baby that each of us is in the face of the Singer Of The Original Song.

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I started this post in late October with the definitive intention for it to be a way to further ground my singing of this song at the Jefferson memorial in the historical and current contexts of my home town and the situation on our home planet. This place reeks of colonization’s and enslavement’s foundational funk at the root of the “world’s most powerful nation.” Reeling from the decades-long brutality of gentrification’s forward march, Washington, Disctrict of Columbia was a few months into official occupation by the National Guard when Marie Casimir @marieacasimir (my dolphin!) and I filmed the video attached below. (Though my practice run, filmed in July with the luminous Jeremy Mines @jeremymines_, preceded their arrival). Their summoning was intended and understood in large part to signal a move to stamp out D.C.’s “dangerous” elements (read: remaining native Black folks and the vestiges of Chocolate City), and fired up a resistance movement that had been building for years, with Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams  among those emerging  at the forefront. There’s a pall hanging over D.C. and its environs that’s unlike any I’ve ever experienced, though it is reminiscent of what I felt as I wandered through ancient Rome’s ruins. In taking a pause from the post, I allowed myself space to really feel into what is happening here while accompanying my mother on her healing journey, through surgery and a cancer diagnosis. She is my focus, and I’ve been expanding into the level of energy required to hold her through her health challenges and my own while shielding us both from the sickness seated so nearby. I’m coming back to the blog in the last month of 2025, and though I know I declared somewhere in an earlier post that I was doing away with references to dates and measurements in service of the illusion of linear time, I’m altering my stance on that for now, as the dates and the “timing” of all that I’m bearing witness to feel relevant for this record. I write in the wake of the favela massacre at Vila Cruzeiro in Rio, the killing of Demtrius Alston, Kevin Booker, and David Warren Childs--three Black men--by DC police, and the gunning down of Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe, members of the National Guard working near the White House, as ICE agents continue their crimes against humanity in cold blood. Now the massacre of Jewish people celebrating the first night of Hannukah in Sydney, and the mass shooting at Brown University. It’s with the weight of the genocides in Palestine and Sudan, the pummeling of Congo and Ukraine over minerals, and the ongoing gang violence ravaging Haiti hanging in the atmosphere that I’m pushing this out. With each passing day, the list of atrocious violences seems to expand. I offer this song to pierce the pall. I remain committed (in all my S.L.O.W.*ness) to my assignment as part of the chorus of voices revering the medicine that is inside and all around us at all times. Shouting, as my people would say, about the opportunity that is constantly being presented: to choose to seek out and meet up with glory day after day. A process, with choice at the core, and practice at the helm. All these lives lost, across species…So much blood spilled…so many sacrifices. For what? I honor the sacrifices of my relatives across identities and physical forms by (voting, marching, signing petitions, singing at rallies, donating to causes I support, such as Water Is Life Gaza – 100% of profits & proceeds go directly to @waterisifegaza and) continuing along the spiral of awakening to the Oneness of all being and the Love that moves its aliveness.  Singing I pray, that what I offer may travel outward in ways that affirm, amplify, and serve the miracle that Love is.

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When I first sat in the chapel at the castle in Praia do Forte (the town in Bahia where Whale Whispering is based), I instantly felt the reverberating immensity of the volume of prayers that had been raised there during the time that it served as a refuge for those toiling unpaid at what was once the central plantation hub of Brazil’s expansion and wealth-building. Its domed roof and open structure reminded me of a smaller version of the Jefferson memorial, where I sang for the first time late on a summer night shortly after graduating from high school. The sanctity, the richness of those acoustics came back to me at the fort as I lifted my voice up to the ancestors whose voices still echo there, sprinkles of whalesong in their tones. I was feeling the ones who had been tortured on the plantation’s grounds and connecting them through my heartspace to the ones whose blood, sweat, and tears built the country of my birth as they swelled the wealth of the ones like Thomas Jefferson, whose own children were his property. The irony and the urgency of his words, etched into the memorial’s walls to enshrine their lasting impact, have never been lost on me. I brought this song there in answer to the gaslighting and attempts at erasure that are rampant with regard to the history and perpetuation (via the Prison Industrial Complex--shout out to the L.C.I.W. Drama Club--and other systems) of enslavement in the U.S. I brought the whales of Bahia with me, set their wailing loose with mine in this building where the architecture allows for the ascension, spreading out, and showering back down of sound sent skyward. Raining back down to wind around the columns and penetrate through the pores in the stone, saturating the soil of this sacred site where two rivers conjoin. Piscataway land, Nacotchtank territory. I’ve been keeping community with the souls of Indidgenous people of the staticky-with-Spirit power grid that D.C. is for as long as I can recall. Before my toddler self knew how they were called, I knew they walked with me too. Back in the chapel at the castle, I hear strains of the Tupinambá hailing and preserving the forest with sound technology that rises like sap from the roots to the leaves, the flowers, the fruit…Their songs filter into what moves through me…(what am I but an estuary?)…Passing between the pillars of the chapel, my praises pour out into the jungle that’s been vanishing with this lullaby intended to awaken. May the forest remain, return, recover, and, thriving, be sustained. May the jaguar remain.

As I write this, I’m missing Bahia’s warmth. This winter feels extra-cold for so many reasons. The chill permeating the region isn’t fresh to the season, though; it was detectable even on the swampiest of summer days as avarice, deceit, rapaciousness, and cruelty celebrated their way through the hallowed halls of federal buildings and beyond. From a whale’s eye view I work to keep a lens on compassion by considering that the cold ones too are on assignment, representing ways of being that are so clearly rampant among humans, ways that at the very least exist as potential inside every one of us, ways that have been on a protracted run of tipping the scales toward mass destruction and global harm. With regard to the site, I’m most interested at this point in the invitation that exploring the fervent hypocrisy memorialized at this monument offers for sincere exploration of our own hypocrisies and for honest examination/continuous transformation of the vibrations we each contribute to the hum of Earth. Also, acoustics, obviously. This is why I wanted to stand in the Jefferson Memorial with my head thrown back, my voice hurled up while whalesong bounced off the columns in sacred geometric formation and echoed out across the Tidal Basin; sonic intervention with a frequency of Love is the mission I’m on (child of the ‘70s that I am). Having grown up singing in church, I love my reverb. It’s audible reflection, and self-reflection is such a key factor in finding my way along this path I’ve chosen, which includes having been born in this hotspot on the blue globe.  

This is my D.C.

My mother Brenda, and my father, Michael (ibaye) both natives, gave it to me. It’s Bertie’s and Buck’s and Walter’s and Blanche’s and Smallwood’s, those Great Migrants who came sewing their soul into the fabric of the capital city from points south and southern, hauling their heirloom quilts with them. It’s Brownie’s and Dainty’s and Troy’s and Imani’s and Carole’s and Patricia’s and Belle’s, and belongs to all the other family, friends and neighbors who have kept the machine running across centuries, trusting in the security of those good government jobs until they turned out to be not so secure after all. It’s Aunt Daisy’s, for each and every day she got on her hands and knees and scrubbed the Bureau of Engraving’s lobby floors; I wonder how many of the people looking down on her as they passed by realized they were in the presence of an actual queen?? So I sing it up for them, some sweetness to ring out from sea to shining sea, from the river to the sea, from diversity, unity; E pluribus unum as the humpback chorus accompanies me, or I back up their ??*!+()&? We

Are

One. Let the blue veins in the marble and the crystal flecks in the granite transmit this vibration through the psionic circuitry underneath my feet here in Egypt on The Potomac (Browder, 2004). Let the waters of the Patawomke (my River of Swans) and the Anacostia wave it out to the Chesapeake, then on to the Atlantique and from there every estuary, every basin and bay. Let the whales’ voices waft inland from every shore, on clouds, in fog, in mist, as dew, through air, communicating ours and our world’s worthiness of the utmost nurturance, of the tenderest care.

Song for A Baby Whale (with whalesong) at the Jefferson Memorial #whalesong #whalewhispering

This video is the first in a series of sharings related to activations around D.C. that I’m calling Monumental Love. The track playing in the video is “September Song by Humpback Whales of Bahia” (YouTube Music)  , which I released on most streaming platforms a few months ago, and is an exquisitely transporting meditation soundtrack, all whalesong. It was recorded at the peak of the birthing season, when whale babies abound. While I listened through headphones as various whales crooned, I felt an intention chiming out to the new ones of every species, an emotional/energetic reflection that, via my attempts to get into its vicinity with words, translates like lyrics to a song for a baby whale:

You deserve to live unpoisoned,

to grow safely in your way,

to weave wonder through your waking,

You are welcome here, bebê.

Axé.

*S.L.O.W. (Sound, Light, Oneiros, Water) is the name of the framework the whales gave me for organizing the technology of Whale Whispering as a set of shareable tools and applications. We began to work with this during Submersion, the first Whale Whispering cohort which took place earlier this year and was so many kinds of phenomenal. More to come on both.

P.S.-Thank you so much for taking the time to read my blog. To all those of you who have supported this work in ways too numerous to count, I am so, so grateful for your presence, your trust, your engagement, your generosity. To those who are new to the blog or to my work, I appreciate your interest. If you feel moved by these words, by my work, please consider sharing it, commenting on it (respectfully), making a donation, listening to/downloading/helping other folks find my recordings with the whales—let me know. If you are among the folks who are inspired or influenced by Whale Whispering but have yet to acknowledge it, I encourage you to go ahead and give a Black woman her due. As I deepen into a new level of care for/with my magnificent mother, uplifting feedback on what I manage to share of this fantastic voyage is a lifeline that motivates me to keep pushing, keep birthing, keep swimming. One Love