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Last year I started noticing the thread of listening as a through line for my work. It was always there yet it wasn’t until I returned to the work of Pauline Oliveros and her sonic meditations and Deep Listening practices that it all came together like an unsuspecting crack of a lightening strike.

My listening became devotional after my dad died in December 2023. I was listening for him in my waking life and in the dreaming world. The more I actively listened, the more I received.

As a parts work/IFS therapist I spend much of my week supporting others in their listening to the parts of themself who need witnessing. And I am honored to listen with them, a practice of sending and receiving through compassionate and curious attention.

Before that, it was listening with and to the ancestors, guiding people to reconnect with something older. Further back it was working with horses, interspecies relating through non-verbal communication, and before that it was through my study of Butoh with the late Doranne Crable at The Evergreen State College. Each time I look back it is there again, led by my insatiable curiosity of being in a body on earth.

Most recently, listening has become a way to understand my self as an ecological entanglement with place and memory. Beginning last year I began messing around with things I knew nothing about like field recording. I get obsessed with learning. Maybe you do too? I’ve attempted ‘making sense’ of this obsession, less about figuring out why and more about the message of what I am being guided to deepen into.

What I’ve come to is that I need projects that are both art-based and also practice-led through the lens of research. Part of this deep curiosity that drives me is oriented around big questions that I want to explore rather than finding definitive answers to. And I want to do it through the act of making, messing around and experimenting, and documenting it as a devotional practice for the parts of me that are only now feeling appreciated for how much they love learning through creative practice.

What would it feel like to offer the parts of yourself the time and space to deep dive into your big questions through the practice and process of art-based research?

You, dear reader, are among the first to see the project I’ve been immersed in these past few months. Is it about listening? … but of course!

We Are A Murmuration

We Are a Murmuration is a dial-in phone line devoted to expanding our capacity for aliveness through the collective practice of listening, sounding, and sonic encounters with our more-than-human kin.

Each month, a new listening practice is offered - brief, poetic prompts that interrupt the seemingly ordinary.

You may offer what arose from this month's listening practice, or any sounds that give permission to be shared, from you or of the sonic field around/within you at this moment in time.

From time to time the recordings will be gathered into a collective soundscape, a living murmuration to be archived and shared. 

I’d love for you to participate in anyway you like, call, listen, leave a message and make some sounds, call as many times as you like, share it with people, it’s a free public offering. And if you do, I’d love to hear about your experience with it.

call: 505-557-2445 to participate

The We Are A Murmuration phone line is an ongoing research project. I’ll be sharing my questions, process and discoveries with you as it reaches the ears of others.

Practice-led Research Through Art Making

This way of thinking-through-making has become a new love of mine. It meets me in all of the right places. I get to squirrel away in rabbit holes and follow threads that lead to secret gardens and hidden worlds while creating a container for the research to exist within. At least this is my version of practice-led research. I envision it as a process of curiosity-driven play with endless questions to explore through the process of experimenting, ideating, creating, failing, and then asking more questions.

I’m dreaming up ideas for offering ways we might do this together. Interested? Stay tuned!

THINGS TO LISTEN TO AND WITH:

Participate in the 13th edition of Soundcamp’s Reveil - Dawn Chorus Day (May 2nd + 3rd) - Sign-up to livestream the sounds of the dawn from your location in the world.

Research For People Who (Think) They Would Rather Create by Dirk Vis - Read the PDF for free!

Deep Listening in Space(s) with Grace Woodard - begins this Wednesday (sliding scale + 1 free spot) - This workshop series will explore listening through sound, movement, and dreaming.

Listening with you,

XX, Adrienne