Welcome to Planet Song, 10 years in the future

It is 2030 and we are doing a tour of communities, villages and towns that have been working with planet song. In each place we are greeted by a member of the community who shows us around and tells their story. 

Lyala, Grutinver Town Council

the council of all beings

Welcome, come in. At the moment we have a full council session going on. I know it looks strange with half the people in masks. They are representing some of our earth-spirit kin who wanted to be here today. We are exploring  a big proposal for the town and we have here today rain, rivers, fish, forest, mountain, birds, insects, mammals, microbes and compost. 

We are looking at opening up our drains. 

I know that sounds incredible but we have seen how storm water takes water off the land and causes riverlets and rivers to flow too fast when rain surges, especially when parts are concreted. This causes destruction to habitat, as well as undermining the built world. We want to keep the water in the landscape, slow it down - swales, vegetation, change the hydrology, but this too can create problems, and it’s complex.  

So our aim is to come up with something together - engineers, scientists, citizens, elders, healers, geographers and of course our wise earth-spirit kin who have long memories. And it's not just going to be from talking. Our kin are not shy when it comes to getting up and moving around, trying different relationships and possibilities, allowing emergence from complexity. We have a number of processes we use to generate information fields. We have already heard concerns of everyone, and how the way things done in the past have harmed. There was a lot of grief and healing, and I think today we all can feel the energy, the good will, the optimism. 

Shhh, the river is starting with a dance of ‘river over long time’.

Peter, Brightwhyn School

the Xhooli dancers

I first came to this through eco-therapy. A lot of our kids were feeling depressed and anxious;  feeling they had no future in a more and more scary world. So working with an eco-therapist we designed a program for getting kids out in nature - lying on the grass, under a tree, or further away in a forest. Not only did it help regulate their nervous systems and give a sense of wellbeing but a number of them came up and said that after a while they could hear a tree talking, or the forest, or a bird.

So we got them to write down these messages. Some wrote poetry, some song, some pictures. When we shared them with each other, we noticed fairly consistent messages. And then I discovered planet song who helped us build skills into sensing in the animate world around us. What it means to build respectful relations. How to safely use the body as a sensor. How to express these emerging truths with confidence. And for these kids that was a key to empowerment. They could dance the story, the blocks, the struggles, the desires of these beings. 

They were keen to present this form of sensing/expression to the school family, and that led to them being invited to different places - the village, councils, and organisations - dancing the energies and relations there. It is crucial to have witnesses that hold the space, feel the emotions, and energy shifts and enable transformation in themselves. When that happens we soon see a shift in the options that come available and the decisions that people make.

Now this group of kids are training the younger kids and this is a legacy we hope to gift to our wider community.

Angela, Howden City

voice of the mountain

I first came to this work through the rights of nature. I was very concerned about the threats mining and forestry were having on our eco-systems. I mean without them, humans are just not going to make it. So I was looking at shoring up legislation so companies couldn’t come in and extract as they have been doing. A key way of doing this legally was giving the mountain, or river personhood. Well that to me was just a legal category - a person has rights, can seek justice. It didn’t occur to me that a mountain could actually be a sentient being.

And I guess this is where, when I came across planet song it felt like a smack in the face. A wake up call. Crikey, how rude I had been to that mountain! What did it mean for the mountain to have a voice? I really thought about that. Did it have its own way of communicating? Could it talk through people? Was I it’s human? How did I know this wasn’t my imagination? 

Anyway, down the track our mountain does have personhood. We have a person elected each year to be the voice of the mountain, to represent the mountain not just where we do governance - parliament, council meetings, developments, forums, but also everyday things - health, education, recreation, gardening. It is a full time job. It requires aptitude, attunement and initiation. What we’ve noticed is that the person brings to the job all their own knowledge and processes, and the mountain recruits all of that in its communications. Our venerable aunty Villa brought so much grace, beauty and ceremony to the voice - it was the year of open heart. The year we had a clown was hilarious and we all needed that after the big floods. 

It has transformed our city. We love our mountain, and the mountain is ever curious about us.

Sven, Trombren Town

river as researcher

We are a small town, and many of us are concerned about the future - disappearing eco-systems, loss of species, depleted resources, changing weather, disrupted growing seasons. We have been part of the transition town movement - so have been making some small progresses - using bikes, some circular economy with clothing and household items, fixing things, sharing produce. 

Then we looked at the doughnut economic model. This gave much clearer analysis of our situation - what our ecological limits were. What our social needs were. It helped us to think very strongly what were our values. And we needed to measure things, find good indicators, to see how they changed. And this is when planet song approached us. 

What would it be like to add another layer into this? First imagine the world is animate and all around you are sentient beings who have immeasurable wisdom and knowledge of time scales longer than us. What might it mean to become partners? 

Whoa. That is a big idea. I had to stop and think. What would I want to know from the river if it could speak to me, or the soil, or the worms? Is it even possible? Could the river be a researcher? 

So we ran a workshop with people in the town coming all along the river. It turned out to be a bit of a festival. We had sensing exercises first, it seemed like playing. And then each of us found a spot to sit, or wade, or lie and just listen. And then we each gave voice, all the way down the river. It was beautiful and hilarious. Elsa cried because she could remember her grandmother talking with the river. And it seemed as if we all had tears to cry and the river held them. There was so much wisdom there. 

Come in now and let me show you this. This is our indicator wall for the river. How it is feeling. What it needs. We do one each week. Anyone can add to it - see a poem, a drawing, a letter from the river, a memory that someone has. People come and check it out. It is really social. It is the life of our town here. And over here is our insect memory wall. You can see what insects are now coming back compared to 4 years ago. And last week there was a picture of a fish. 

Oh, and we have a river festival each year. But it is more than the river, the river is just our heart and our blood. We feel as if we are the earth living itself into wonder. 

Anna, Geotypan Eco-village

forest on the move

We came together as an intentional community using permaculture to build food gardens to sustain us. We also co-owned some plantation and old growth forest, which had been neglected. One of the leaders at the time was adamant that we needed to restore these, to remove the weeds and enable the forest to thrive. But others of us were getting different messages or intuitions - the weeds were important, the forest was moving north.

Using planet song processes we were able to develop rigor and processes to explore the competing stories. We were able to sense where a massacre had been and help clear those energies. That enabled much more clear communication - no need to massacre the weeds. The whole forest had a request of us - to help it move north. We then partnered with a group up north to receive the forest - to help plant new seedlings and make way for its retreat to cooler climes.

Here, down south, the forest was keen to explore possible companion plants that could increase vigor on the fringes. We are now making flower essences from the new plants and they seem particularly effective in building resilience of our food garden plants and our children. By bringing an open curious research focus to what we are doing, and a belief that trees, plants, forest, soil are alive, animate and sentient has changed the way we interact with the more than human world. I feel my 4-year old who has been brought up to this basic understanding is a forest whisperer - and the forest always knows where she is.