Waking Lullabies
Community, ceremony, and Medicine Songs
Featured
But, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not waste your precious, powerful creative life force on imagining further horrors. Do not go read The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 as operating manuals for what to do next. What will unfold will unfold, and we will meet it. But this moment is this moment.
Let us not reduce ourselves to algorithms that can only create based on what has already happened. Let us remember all of the times that humans imagined things that they had never yet seen (and certainly couldn’t measure) and created massive beauty and magic.
We need your beautiful, limitless, POWERFUL creativity to imagine something different. Something more beautiful. Something more boundless. Something that focuses on the vastness of our shared humanity.
We have the power and skills within us to navigate this moment. We neither need nor will we be able to find instructions outside of ourselves, outside of THIS MOMENT. All that mindfulness meditation you’ve been doing? Now’s your chance to take it for a spin in the real world.
May this song help you to turn toward and touch the grief for what has been lost or abandoned, and also to return to the fullness of this moment. Breath by breath.
A “waking lullaby” is a song I carry with me to soothe and uplift. It tends to induce a deep sense of relaxation in me while I’m awake and going about my activities, especially when I sing it out loud and invite its vibration into my body.
And then I remembered: when a mind is foggy or confused and isn’t helping to solve the problem at hand, it’s probably the wrong tool for the job. So I stopped thinking about it. I journeyed. I dropped into my heart. I asked for help from…you guessed it…the Ancestors. ❤️ I asked what they most wanted to hear, and that night, in the shower (always with the water!), this song arrived, line by line, like a call and echo from the Ancestors themselves.
As I’ve wound along my path, I’ve come to understand the power of the thoughts in my head at any given time, especially those that get a lot of air time. And, since my brain happens to be wired to hold onto song lyrics and dialogue like a jumping cholla, I’ve got to be careful what I let in here. So, generally not murder ballads.