My thoughts on Helena's thoughts...

After listening to Helena's brief presentation of her term paper "Sounds of the Earth in Myth and Oral Tradition", I just had to read it! The thing that caught my attention right away was the way in which she incorporated sounds into it. The echos, the river and the thunder. Sounds are so poetic and add so much to each and every experience. I am a person who loves sound, even silence to me is a sort of sound. The hum of fluorescent lights in the hall, pattering of the rain, a swoosh of a bird's wings. All those sounds can be so serene. What is it that calms babies? The beat of their mother's heart. Helena discusses the importance of sound before writing and how sound is involved in the Earth directly. Animals, weather, humans, and nature are all part of the sounds of Earth. Sound can be daunting or harmonizing. I got to thinking, the experience, mood, moment or place can impact how a person or animal reacts to that sound. For example, in the stillness of a forest when the rain falls lightly we are calm, if that calmness is interrupted let's say by a loud, roaring clap of thunder, we jump- we are then startled. The calmness turns to fear in a matter of seconds, all because of a sound. In a moment of excitement or exhilaration if we were soaring through the air, the rush of the wind and whistling or the atmosphere as we glide through the sky would add to the serene, yet exciting experience of flying.

Back to Helena's essay and Earth, sounds not only represent emotions, or invigorate those feelings/ emotions, but sounds represent the seasons. Sounds signal a season- whether the beginning or the end of it. As Helena pointed out, we know when spring is approaching because the birds sing. Fall is at its peak when the leaves are crunching inder our feet.

Sadly, science and technology have the ability to decrease the importance of sounds to people. Why listen to the trees or the birds to signal a seasonal change when we can pullout our calendar or surf the web to check the weather and Earth's position?!

Well, let's all go back to the storytelling tradition. Let's pretend even for a night. Don't look online to see when you can catch the full moon, instead, open your window, go up in the mountains and listen for the wolf howling to the full moon. Listen to the crickets chirping to signal to you when you can begin your storytelling around a campfire. I must say, this all sounds so much more exciting and appealing than getting online to find this information!

Thanks Helena for opening our eyes a little wider to the fact that nature has so much to offer us and to help us better understand what a deep connection nature has to the oral world!