Soul Medicine Chants

Music has been woven into my life since before I was born. I came into the world with my dad singing me the song he wrote while mom carried me in the womb, and every day of my life included songs spontaneously sung, harmonized with family, pounded out on the piano, repeated on the stereo, sung in choirs, churches, praise bands, jammed on porches, at fire circles, and left to swirl in my head as I dreamed.

Raised Mennonite by two musicians meant music was as essential to my growing up as the air we breathed. I was on my mother's lap as a toddler as she played piano in front of audiences and during piano lessons, and by the time I was 4 I was taking lessons from her. At age 6 I started flute, and added the piccolo when I started high school orchestra (in middle school). 

When confronted with the shocking news of my Grandma's terminal cancer diagnosis as I entered high school, I threw the music theory and training I had aside, and instead, I ran off to the private practice rooms and started playing the music that bled out of my soul on the piano. I remember telling people even then, that it was how I prayed--art, allowed me to see my prayers. Volleyball allowed me to rage my grief and prayers. Writing let me pour it all out, nature let me be held by the divine, but music--music was the prayer that was a conversation. The one where I heard something back. Not in something separate from me, but in the surprising notes and melodies that floated out of my fingers, a melody that changed something in my body.

Along with opening up to my intuition as I played piano and flute, I also found myself singing my prayers as I walked, sat on the edge of my family's pond, and as I got older, on my drives to and from work and as I walked through our family's mountain land. Carolyn Hillyer calls these bone chants. Now I know. Then, I was frustrated that I could never actually "write a song" because these bone chants were brilliant as they came out of my mouth, but then they left on the wind, a prayer sent to the world.

It wasn't until 2022 when I finally responded to the longing in myself to pick up a drum,* that I truly realized how song and vibration are a portal for me in conversation with the sacred beloved. I began to allow the bone chants of my childhood to return to me, and sometimes, they allow me to remember them and they become anchoring prayers I return to daily. 

May these chants be in service to interconnection, wholeness, aliveness, beauty and love.

*Many cultures have drums as sacred instruments. Many have been oppressed for expression of their sacred practices by white colonists, who did the same to their own carriers of sacred practice. A deep bow to those who have never forgotten, despite the persecution. A thank you to the Coast Salish people, from whom I purchased my drum. 

Video credit from the Green River: Taryn Rose