A quick note…
I grew up surrounded by the stories my mother told — stories from her childhood, her family, and the histories she carried. Though her own personal stories—full of lived joy, fear, and pain—often feel faded and dull when I retell them, the histories and mythologies she shared were passed on with reverence: bare and true to how she received them.
As I’ve grown and learned more about the universe, I’ve come to believe that everything we are is part of a greater vibration — a vast, cosmic song that hums beneath all life. This song isn’t hidden or secret; it’s our existence. It is us.
We each hold power within us, but we become infinitely stronger when we release ego and open ourselves to the spirit that moves through all things, animate and inanimate. If we listen deeply to this hum, we are capable of profound cooperation and coexistence.
Resonant is a reflection of these ideas — a meditation on the song carried across generations, and the remembering it calls forth.
There’s a secret I keep locked in my bones,
A generational curse that keeps circling my blood,
Generated from marrow and memories –
The pale reaper revisits me again and again,
Dreams like fog wrapped around my eyes,
Bite marks littering my lungs, breathing broken.
I speak new mythology under night skies lit up by the Milky Way,
Carefully crafted from the bits and pieces
That my mother handed me;
Broken heirlooms covered in blood and tears,
Hidden in the whispers of my grandmothers and grandfathers,
Smoke camouflaged in the early morning mists —
Shards left along the path they walked, just to preserve
Some semblance of life.
The gospels I remember tell of calling Bears in by accident,
Owls and children mirroring each other’s calls,
Listening to the songs each plant carries inside;
Knowing that bare feet on open earth
Will bind you to every living thing;
If you listen close enough, somewhere in the back of your head,
You will hear a song, haunting and berceuse.
When you hear it, it will trigger a memory so ancient
You might even remember when the godheads
Breathed the universe into existence,
Exploding out into sudden nucleosynthesis —
Hydrogen, helium, and lithium
Littering the void, barely perceptible, a flicker against
Absolute nothing.
Your dreams carry an undercurrent of these songs,
Hummed in the corners of our kitchens
As we wash the dishes;
Triggering a remembering
When we plunge our fingers into soil.
My secret is that I know the song,
And the curse is that I cannot sing it for anyone;
It is a melody carried by the wind, harmonized in the trees,
The timbre of mycelium, the rhythm of footfalls.
The curse costs me the urge to pour it into the world,
The ache that shivers my skin when I hear echoes of it —
Like the girl singing into her fan on a shaky video,
That sharp breath of frisson that leaves me empty and electric.
I can only urge you to feel the remembering.
Memories nested deep in your veins,
Lightning strikes against your throat,
Lavender notes on your tongue,
Thunder drumming in your pulse.