As an artist, I feel like I’m always collaborating with my muse. That voice that gives me compositional and lyrics ideas I never would have come up with myself! She’s always there when I need her and I’ve learned to trust her over the past 22 years, which is a good thing, because she recently suggested something that at first glance, might seem a bit crazy.
She asked me to listen in a way I never had. She asked me to listen to plants and trees. When I asked her why, she did not hesitate to say that they had something to tell me. Ummm… ok… sure…
As you can imagine, I had a lot of questions! Who would I work with? What plants would I listen to? What would the final product be? As usual, I waited to see how this would all unfold.
My first collaborator would be Regina (Gigi) Stroncek. During the pandemic, when live performances had ground to a halt and people were posting performances on Facebook, I saw a post from my friend, Gigi who had recorded herself improvising. I was very taken with it and with not a small bit of trepidation, reached out to her to talk about my idea. From the get-go she loved it!
Around the same time, my friend Dana Boyle began posting photos or her botanical paintings. I checked with my muse. Yes? Yes! Soon, Dana and I were sitting at Caribou catching up and I was telling her about this crazy idea! And just like that, she was in!
I had met our third collaborator, Tara Perron Tanaǧidaŋ To Wiŋ, when my choir One Voice was filming “ReMembering: Singing Water.” During the filming, Tara and I got started talking about medicinal plants. She said she had learned about Indigenous plant medicine from her grandmother. I heard myself ask her if I, as a white person, could learn from her. She replied, in what I now now as very Tara, by saying, “Of course.”
The four of us, Tara, Dana, Gigi and I gathered last May for the first time! More on that later! I promise to tell you how we are listening to plants.
What I didn’t know until we met together for the first time was that we had other collaborators that I hadn’t identified as collaborators yet – the plant relatives themselves. It wasn’t until that meeting and during a nap (my body sometimes gets super tired when my muse has big ideas to share) that I came up with the name and the tagline, releasing that the plant relatives we had just identified were equal co-creators!
And so they have been. During our second gathering, Tara shared some knowledge of our selected plant relatives with us and asked us to offer a stand of hair or a song each time we talked with them. Gigi and I have, since then, sat with all five relatives. We have offered a song or a strand of hair and ask for them to share with us what they want to say. We listen in silence and then tell each other what we hear. We have recorded our conversations and we’re eager to begin notating what we’ve heard.
One of the important things we all realized was that the project would span a year. Tara had told us that she had been told as a child that you don’t just visit your grandmother when she is beautiful. And so we will be visiting our five plant relatives often and in all four seasons. I think they might have different things to tell us.
I’m grateful to my muse for this journey she has sent me on. I’m grateful that I have learned to trust her. And I’m grateful to be working with these amazing collaborators (including our plant relatives).
To learn more about my project, visit Converging Consciousness: A Plant & Human Co-Creation.