The Song of the Universe
The Song of the Universe – Britt Baskerville
To me, the most obvious difference between city and country living is the sound. I’ve had my share of living next to freeways, railroads, subways, major streets, sometimes combinations of all. It got to a point where I start to hear a high- frequency noise anytime I returned to an urban environment. In David Abram’s, the Spell of the Sensuous, he speaks of how our cells evolved to interact with non-human animals. How our ears are attuned to hear the sounds of the honking of geese and the howling of wolves. It’s the sound of the farm that infiltrates my eardrums and lodges itself in my bones, so that I feel deaf and lost in the city with no birdsong to guide me.
First thing in the morning, it’s the rooster. We’re lucky to have roosters here who understand their role as alarm clocks. Every morning at sunrise, around 5 o’clock these days, the subtle shift in light streaming thru my cabin window and the crow of the rooster, stirs me from my dream state. Soon enough, the solar-powered door of the coop in the field below starts to rise, and the morning is filled with the sounds of chickens, shuffling about in their search for grubs.
Soon, the rest of the sounds start to take shape in my mind. The faint cheap-cheap of the newly hatched swallows on the wall outside my cabin (accompanied by a barking adult who swoops at me every time I leave). In the early spring, it was the turkeys who were the loudest, or maybe the frogs. Now, the cicadas have started to emerge from their dormancy to trick everyone around into believing they have tinnitus. Flies and bees buzz buzz around, with an occasional humming bird whizzing past. And all day long, various song birds play their tunes, adding to the symphony of the wind. Then, fainter, are the sounds of the sheep, who have joined the cows in the irrigated pasture for the first time here. Watching them interact from the hill is a constant source of entertainment. Every now and then, a loud bleat gets caught on the wind. Was that an elk bellowing in the distance? At night, the coyotes throw what sounds to be a killer party. Sometimes the dogs will insist on joining in on the cacophony. On a couple of scary encounters this summer, it was the sound of the rattlesnake that protected our volunteers from harm. Finally, there’s the wind chimes, the trees scraping across the roofs, the knocking of the woodpecker, who is no doubt filling the walls with acorns.
Once, during the spring term, we were all out in the field when a large gaggle of migrating geese flew overhead. It reminded me of one of my favorite poems by rural queer poet, Mary Oliver:
Wild Geese,
| You do not have to be good. |
| You do not have to walk on your knees |
| for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. |
| You only have to let the soft animal of your body |
| love what it loves. |
| Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. |
| Meanwhile the world goes on. |
| Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain |
| are moving across the landscapes, |
| over the prairies and the deep trees, |
| the mountains and the rivers. |
| Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, |
| are heading home again. |
| Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, |
| the world offers itself to your imagination, |
| calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – |
| over and over announcing your place |
| in the family of things. |
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things, she says they say. It’s a line that echoes in my brain, so that I may remember my place here. That’s what the sounds of the farm do to me. They remind me that I am a soft animal in the family of things, with my own song to sing.
Today, I sat in the orchard with the pigs, and listened to their grunts and snorts. I contemplated the ancient contract that humans made with animals when they began domesticating each other. This was a topic of much discussion during our Spring Term, as we had a combination of vegetarians and omnivores in our group. To some, knowing the animal makes it that much harder to eat later, but I find it makes me more into it. Not without some sadness, I find that my connection with this creature is cemented by consuming it. I recall late March when I helped clean and prep 5 geese and made a stew of their offal. After eating the hearts, I took a walk and saw their footprints in the mud on the road, and felt as if I had made them myself. As I sat next to these pigs, they became comfortable enough to resume their midday nap in the same shade of the cherry tree where I sat. I’m happy to know these animals are well cared for and the ancient contract is intact.
As farmers know their place as Stewards of the Land, this ancient understanding awakens in our cells. The first way I find this is with Sound. But what of the other senses?…
