Singing the Dawn Chorus
on zen practice, the arts, deep listening
A few weeks ago, I took a week off to visit a Zen Monastery in the Catskills for a sesshin retreat. It was week-long meditation retreat where we sat for 9 hours daily, woke before dawn with the birds and dawn chorus, served and ate meals in a Japanese oriyoki ceremony, practiced body work and stretching, and worked outdoors in a dye garden. Fifty some participants all working in harmony, one organism, orchestrating this together.
Rewind a few years—I had first heard of Zen meditation in a Desert Island Discs interview with musician Thom Yorke, in which he named Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind as the book he’d bring if he was stranded on an island. It was 2019 and I was living in Williamsburg Brooklyn, going through a tumultuous moment with a band that I played with. I was looking for a break from a series of disputes we were having with lawyers, so I followed a feeling and took an impromptu trip to Big Sur with a copy of this book and my camping pack. There was something about waking up deep in the Redwood Forest, the nearby river streaming through the mountains, descending these magnificent cliffs down to the Pacific Ocean. A sunset that dripped below the Pacific Ocean line on this Westward horizon. I read this book here and took field recordings of the natural sounds for an album I’d just begun working on, Stillness In Motion. I felt reacquainted with my center.
In 2021, I re-documented this experience with a Sonic Walkthrough of my song Electric Petals for KCRW in Los Angeles—the sounds of Big Sur and the instrumentation of Electric Petals, unfurling, step-by-step through this landscape (starts at 02:43:00).
Redwood evening orchestra; Big Dipper peeks through the frame, a clearing in the canopy.
Following the spiral of curiosity. When I returned from Big Sur, I found a place to practice Zen meditation in Brooklyn on my bike route to work (as of course would happen, only in Brooklyn). This place held a focus on the arts, as the founding teacher was a photographer who wrote a book called The Zen of Creativity, and had a friendship with musicians I love such as Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk. This book gave voice to the depth of creative process in a way I’d never heard with such clarity. It feels like the Deep Listening that Pauline Oliveros taught, surely influenced by her time living at this Zen Arts Center in the Catskills.
In Zazen, or Zen meditation, I feel that I am tuning my perception, tuning my self, tuning (into) the world. In music, it has led me to ask questions like: why does art matter, considering the state of the world? Can sound heal? What is healing? It has led me on a spiral of inquiry, from working with a teacher of Zen meditation and the arts, to studying sound healing and musical traditions that have always considered the healing dimension of sound and music.
Art as a way of perceiving clearly. Just as it is. To merge with the resonance that we are expressing. Being sound.
On listening, Shunryu Suzuki shares:
“Sound is everywhere. If you just practice it, there is sound. Do not try to listen to it. If you do not listen to it, the sound is all over. Because you try to hear it, sometimes there is sound, and sometimes there is no sound.”
“Buddhists understand everything, every noise, as a sound which we make. You may say, ‘The bird is singing over there.’ But we think, bird, when we hear the bird. Bird is ‘me’ already. I am not listening to bird. Bird is here, in my mind already, and I am singing with the bird. ‘Peep-peep-peep.’”
So what is being sound as a way of listening? Maybe it is to deeply allow, to appreciate and be this evening orchestra of wherever we are.
Listening is a practice that we return to again and again. There are many ways of listening. As sonic artists, music makers, we sometimes try to understand the sounds we are hearing, hoping to integrate them into our own craft. This coming week I’ll be sharing a Notion template that I use as a digital Listening Journal for subscribers of Being Sound.
We start with this question: What are you hearing? What feels most resonant right now? The more we practice listening and noticing, the more we will be able to integrate these resonant sounds into our own expression.
As I returned to Brooklyn from this retreat last week, I fell asleep to the sounds of the city. Drifting into a dream, I noticed the song of those distinct birds of the early dawn chorus from Mount Tremper in the Catskills. Singing the dawn chorus. Just this breath, every cell, outward through the fingertips and toes; aliveness, vibrance, totally allowing.