For the Summer Solstice 24` Sama co-created a nature deep listening immersion to honor the land that we get to play and dream in at Waking Life. In the months leading up to the festival, professors from the The Polytechnic Institute of Portoalegre supported us with sonically mapping the lake and its surrounding areas. **We created a sound library with the sounds of the birds, and the bees, and some raving frogs, and the twirling wind dancing with the leafs on the trees. We listened to the whispers of many magical forest creatures and their friends. Tried to make sense of them, and then decided to play around and sing them a song instead…**We invited our friends from across the globe to record some spoken word, having them translate it to over 14 different languages. Here’s what they said:
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“Enchanted land is not only land that has been sung to, but land that has had its song listened to, and sung back to it.”
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“Awakening people to the song of a place can save it…and it can also save us.”
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“There is a difference between enchanted place, place that has been sung to repeatedly, honored and cherished, and place that has been forgotten, cast aside, used up…the place itself hums, reverberates with enchantment.”
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“Yes we need to make the seismic environmental shifts necessary to preserve the global ecosystem, but we also need to ensure that as we do this, there are enchanted forests for us to walk through. We are going to need the qualities that enchantment imbues in us. We are going to need patience and the ability to listen…We are going to need leaders who have listened to birdcalls and the sound of running water. More people who have embedded in their bodies the feeling of enchantment…and can instill in others the wonder of preservation rather than just the tedious work of it. This is the womb from which the spaces of tomorrow will be imagined.”
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The text is a series of excerpts from The Emerald Podcast’s episode: “Enchanted Lands: Remembering the Holy Hum Between Person and Place”. Thank you, Joshua Schrei.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4fUUpFHEyEys4i8EolDX5d
We then overlayed the sounds of the birds and the bees with our voices and the sounds of our bodies. Our breath became entangled with the twirling wind, and our heart beats danced to the rhythm of the dancing leafs. It all came together as a dreamy overnight deep listening experience at Tudo Bem. You can listen to it here:
https://soundcloud.com/sama-earth/enchanted-lands-waking-life-tudo-bem?si=086bd82e5cf04848930ded82ffea812c&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing