Birds Only Sing when They Know They're Safe

Diplomacy, dawn, and healing through song

Long before sunlight paints the canyon walls or glimmers on the dew of grass and flowers or kisses mountain stones, the birds stir. One begins—a tentative trill, a cautious warble. Then another joins, and another, until a chorus spills into the thinning dark. Their songs flow outward like ripples on still water, a gentle announcement: we are here, and it is safe.

Birds only sing when they feel safe. I learned this on Sunday at a workshop with Sarah Knapp, sitting on the stony banks of the Illinois River in Southern Oregon. Sarah integrates her backgrounds in song, somatics, and circling beautifully, and this particular workshop was a beautiful grief circle and ancestor essence making practice on Father’s day, an invitation for us to speak and sing to our beloved dead and welcome them more fully into our lives. It was powerful, tender, and moving.

There is an infinite elasticity to the foundational formula of somatic healing, a simple recipe in which somatic healing emerges through anything that merges awareness, breath, and any combination of sound, touch, or movement.

Taking a walk can be somatic healing, when awareness is present with the breath and the movement. Singing a song can be somatic healing when awareness is present with the breath and the sound. Yes, there are classes and practitioners and many different ways to spend your money, time, energy, and attention learning and receiving support in somatic healing, but when we understand this formula, every moment of our lives can be somatic healing.

I think the birds know this. And I think they are healers too.

Their melodies are not just sounds but messages carried on the wind, weaving through trees and over stones. To receive their songs with breath and awareness is, too, somatic healing. To hear them is to know that life is present and unafraid. That helps me to be present and unafraid.

The birds are also diplomats. They move between worlds and bring life together. Their songs connect things—sky and earth, morning and night, one bird to another. They help different beings share space. A bird’s song can change the feeling of a whole place. It tells others: it’s okay, you can be here too.

That’s what true diplomacy is. Helping people feel safe enough to stay, to listen, to speak, to stay in relationship. Birds show us how to do that—gently, consistently, without needing a reason beyond life itself.

There is so much that I cannot control. When my mind, my awareness, is overcome with the pain and the sorrow of the world, and my deepest prayer is to alleviate the suffering of others, I have a choice. I can choose to spiral into despair and panic and overwhelm, which generally makes me quite useless to others. Or I can choose to embody that which I want to flourish in the world. Presence, peace, love, care. I can embody that with the gas station attendant, the grocery store clerk, the neighbor at an airbnb I’m only calling home for two nights.

There was a time, my first semester of college, when I wanted to be a diplomat. I wanted to contribute to the essential work of making peace through human connection. Every time I think about the nature of diplomacy, I feel truly and deeply moved. So much human conflict can and ultimately is resolved by people having the courage and skills to talk with one another. I remember watching The Diplomat (for the second time), and noting how much the show creators integrated physicality into the dialogue. So many critical moments to prevent war from breaking out unfolding between two people walking and talking with one another.

My trajectory toward serving world peace through the State Department ended when it fully hit me that my work would need to follow the policy choices of whoever was in office at the time, and my understanding of the pendulum swing of the American body politic signaled a clear no to me of that path. But when you’re following your most authentic path, in my experience, life has a way of showing us that the impulses that pulled us toward paths we haven’t walked still have a place within our journey. In my case, I’ve been involved in many international gatherings of peace leaders, ecological activists, and religious and spiritual companions, enacting a form of diplomacy and peacemaking that is profoundly authentic to me. This work has led me to speak at the United Nations in both New York and Bangkok, connect with incredible people from around the world, and learn a great deal from the cultures and peoples who have welcomed me in.

And today I am listening to the birds, the original diplomats, who cross borders and bridge worlds, who carry messages and sing peace and safety every day.

And each morning, my body, now reshaped by motherhood, joins in this quiet ritual. Since my son was born, I can’t not wake up before the sun. This is a rhythm I didn’t choose but now deeply know, and it’s largely what makes this writing possible. But before I begin my work, in that liminal hush, I listen. I know the birdsongs at home, and while traveling I’ve been listening and finding new and familiar songs in the dawn chorus.

The last few weeks I’ve been wrapped in a sleeping bag beneath towering cedars or curled inside my tent on canyon stone, listening to the birds.

Listen. Do you hear it where you are? Is there the message that in this moment, there is safety? Here, now, there is life? If you cannot hear it from the birds, can you find it in your own breath? Can you sing a song of remembrance, a song that shapes the world in the image of your vision of what can be?

On Sunday, Sarah shared that the louder we sing the more it tones our vagus nerve. How loud can you sing? How wide can you open your heart? How consistently can you practice that which will make you a more effective agent of love in this world?

These are the questions I’m asking myself, this first morning back with a computer after many nights and days lit only by the sun and the moon.

And I pray these questions for all of us. I pray birdsong for everyone. I pray that we may all feel safe enough to sing. That through our singing, our creating, our truth-telling, we may weave new worlds of safety together. That our voices, like the birds', become threads in the web of interdependence and care.

I’ll close by sharing

a playlist I made in January of 2019, building from the gorgeous inspiration of Regina Spektor’s song Birdsong which speaks to the cycles of grief and fear and beauty and full spectrum experience we are living in.

Will you sing it with me?

Here are the lyrics:

Out of the quiet
Out of the sunrise
I hear the birdsong
Give way to sirens

I hear the voices
Give way to silence
It looks like fire
But it's just sunshine

Waters are rising
Forests are burning
Hearts always hurt more
While they are learning

Saying goodbye to
The ones they have come from
Saying goodbye to
The ones they have run from

Out of the sirens
Might come the birdsong
Out of the silence
Might come the love song
After the love song
Might come the sunrise
After the sunrise
Might come the silence