The song, Celebrate Life came to me in 1993 during the time I was living in Washington State when I was doing in-home concerts with lots of audience sing-alongs.
The images in the song video come from my international travels and include penguins, a hermit crab, hedge hog, adult and baby stick insects, and sea lion in New Zealand, wallabies in Australia, ground squirrels, a hummingbird and peacock in Mount Shasta, orchids in Hawaii, humpback whale in Tonga, ducklings at the iceberg lagoon in Iceland. Celebrate Life is one of the songs intended to be part of the soundtracks for the High Tide Trilogy movies.
I wrote the song, “The Caterpillar” in 1983 while I was still married and at home with small children. From the very first moment of inspiration, I could see the song with visual images of the transformational stages: caterpillar, cocoon, emergence, and flight. So it was quite thrilling this past couple of months to finally get to witness the magic of this transformational process personally. I was able to photograph those various stages and finally put together the song video that I saw in my mind 33 years ago. A neighbor and new friend, Susan rescued three monarch butterfly cocoons and kept them safe from wasps in a terrarium. She called me when the cocoons started to show the colors of the butterfly within and again after one of them had emerged from its chrysalis.
Over the years I have had several encounters with monarch butterflies. One was particularly extraordinary and changed my life forever. In 1979, my mother loaned me a tape about energy by Shirley Luthman, and listening to it powerfully ignited my own transformational process. My mom also introduced me to Carolyn Conger and I began attending some of the intense, transformational spiritual retreats that she offered. She taught us to open to inspiration, information and guidance coming in all sorts of ways.
One day, I arrived at the cul-de-sac where my parents had recently bought a lot (Mystic Lane in Paradise, California). My husband and two daughters hopped out of the car. It was a hot day and the windows were rolled down. Before I could open the door, a butterfly landed next to me on the windowsill and I had a sudden, very strong, clear knowing that it would let me touch it. Because of my work with Carolyn Conger, I paid attention to that silent knowing.
My rational mind had some doubts about what was actually possible, so I slowly placed my index finger right in front of the butterfly. It explored my fingertip with its proboscis and then lifted one foot onto my finger and then another. I lifted the butterfly up so I could get a better look at it.
My older daughter, seven-years-old at the time, saw me and asked if she could hold the butterfly too. As if it were a cat or dog one could hold and pet. Reluctant to end this incredibly precious moment, I hesitated, but finally gave in and allow the transfer. With amazement I watched the butterfly cling to her little finger.
My four-year-old daughter ran up demanding, “Me too, me too! I want a turn!” and she, too, got to hold the butterfly. It flew off and then returned, this time landing on the windshield of the station wagon where my husband was now perched, sitting on the hood. He scooped it up and playfully placed it on his nose: man and butterfly, proboscis to proboscis.
The butterfly flew off and the next time I noticed it, we were all standing in a circle in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I happened to notice that the butterfly was circling us rather than randomly flitting here and there. Standing in the circle of my family, I felt strongly compelled to hold out my hand, palm up in invitation. The butterfly came and landed on my hand!
By this time I managed to adjust my expectations about what was possible and offered the butterfly to my mother, “You want a turn, Mom? The butterfly flew off and again circled us. Three different times I held out my hand and the butterfly landed in it. When it flew off the last time I knew. I knew with my whole heart and soul that there was a God, a Force, a Source - something huge, way beyond anything I had ever experienced before. That something was connecting everything to everything else.
It wasn’t just that the butterfly landed in my hand that was such a profound experience. It was the knowing that it would let me hold it, and that when I opened to the experience and allowed it, it then did in fact happen.
The first little concert I ever organized, presenting original music I had written was entitled, “In and Out of the Chrysalis.” My idea was that as human beings we go through the transformational process repeatedly. I’ve even experienced being in one stage (say caterpillar) in one area of my life while simultaneously being in the cocoon in another aspect of my life.
The Song of the Caterpillar seems to be a repetitive theme for me. Intending to be a fully realized, multi-dimensional butterfly, but wailing, “Oh why did this happen to me?” as it becomes obvious it’s time to emerge from the current cocoon of beingness and discover how to interact with life in a more highly evolved, expanded manner that has newly become available.
Minds and Hearts came to me in 1993 after a trip to Sedona, Arizona. I love this song and hear it performed and recorded so that it starts simply and then adds voices and instruments until it is being sung by a huge choir accompanied by full orchestra. It is intended to be the final song in the third movie of the High Tide trilogy.
This is the only recording that was ever made of it, caught by someone in the audience at a live concert on their boombox. The photo used in the video is of gorgeous artichoke blossoms that I photographed by the road in New Zealand.
The Earth Want Us All is a song I received in 2001 shortly after the Universe first invited me to New Zealand. I heard the term EarthSong in relation to the earth energy work that I would later be shown how to do in New Zealand. I arranged the song for performance at a Winter Solstice presentation in Ashland, Oregon later that year.
Photos of various places the Earth has requested that I sing to her in New Zealand, Hawaii, Iceland, Mount Shasta/Lake Shastina, and Australia.
I envision it as being the opening song for the third High Tide movie.
For more information why it's important to sing to the Earth, please check out the EarthWisdom Foundation website and watch the video Healing Mother Earth's Sacred Sites. Particularly the later sections where Bravado (aka Blue Thunder, aka Benny Beleau) explains why it is so vitally important for humans to vibrate the Earth with loving sounds, intentions and prayers.
I received the song, Place of Peace, in time to share it with a group that gathered to join with a world-wide peace meditation that took place in the wee hours on New Year’s, 1997. It’s a simple chant with lots of possibility for improvising your own harmonies.
Photos and video clips are from my travels to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Lake Shastina near Mount Shasta in northern California.
I received this chant in 1989 and created a slide show for it which was part of my final presentation for my master’s degree in Consciousness Studies that I completed at JFKU in June of that year.
Images for this song video include photos of many sacred places I’ve visited including a video clip of water emerging from the earth at the bottom of the spring at Upper Panther Meadows and flowing out onto the meadow up on Mount Shasta; Wangaloa beach rock formations, penguins climbing a hillside, river cave and kelp in New Zealand; waves and trees at Laupahoehoe beach, sea turtle at the black sand beach, Kilauea crater and lava flows on Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii; a root wrapped tree trunk in Australia.
The song, The Mask was inspired by a visit to Crater Lake in 1997. I was struck by the magical feeling of the sparkles shimmering on the water. A young boy shared my delight in them, while his parents never noticed.
The lyrics of the song describe the process that is happening for so many of us as we move into higher frequencies and experience ourselves as multi-dimensional beings.
Wilderness Is Calling was one of several songs that came to me after my trip to Alaska in 1993. It was performed by a small choral ensemble, The Riversong Singers, a group that I was blessed to have singing the choral music I was writing at the time. It was recorded live at the Wilderness Concert we presented a year later by someone in the audience on their boombox.
It will be re-recorded to be the song that Derek hears as he is called to his adventure in the wilderness in Australia in the second High Tide movie, "A Whale of a Tale."
The song, Run With the Wind, was received during the time I was performing and leading sing-alongs with two friends at “Howl-Ins” held at Wolfhaven in the Olympia area of Washington State in 1995.
Created for audience participation, the lyrics of the two verses express a central theme of the High Tide trilogy of feature length films: “Every person, every living thing has a part to play in the Master Plan. All we need to know to live that role is carried like a song on the wind…” and "Every person, every living thing has a path to walk in the Master Plan. If we find that we have lost our way, we can stop and listen for the wind..." The video clip at the beginning is of a breezy day at Castle Lake near Mount Shasta, in northern California.
I finally made it to the top of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii in Sept. 2015. Friends wanted to hold ceremony there, but when I arrived I felt pulled to go off on my own and sing to the mountain. Then I lay down and received this song. It felt like my heart expanded until it was so huge that I could no longer contain it in my physical body.
“With a heart as big as this mountain
I send love to all the Earth
With a love as big as this mountain
I call in light to assist her rebirth
Shining light as big as this mountain
I walk her sacred land
With power as bigs as this mountain
I call to each child, woman and man . . .”
The photos I used in the video are of Mount Shasta, another sacred mountain where I have been living while working on this series of song videos.
Very self-conscious and unsure about participating, I managed to arrive several minutes late at the home a friend for the sweat lodge ceremony she had organized. When I knocked on the door, her husband waved a hand dismissively towards their back yard, saying “They’re already out there. Just follow the path.” And shut the door.
It was a very dark night, typical to Washington State, and walking across the cleared lawn area, I soon arrived at blackberry brambles, totally unable to see any sort of path. I yelled, but the drumming and chanting had already started and no one could hear me.
Deciding that after driving for over an hour to get there, I did indeed want to participate if it was still possible. With that decision, it was like the earth let me know where the path was and without being able to really see it, I was able to follow it out to the point where I was close enough for the others to hear me when I called out. Then my physical eyes took over again as I stepped into the firelight to join the group.
Driving home that night, the first verse of Goin' Home came to me and (having learned my lesson) I stopped and wrote it down and continued driving. A few minutes I stopped again with the second verse. By the time I got home, the entire song had been downloaded.
In the second movie of the High Tide Trilogy, Goin' Home is the song that will accompany Sara through her process of getting lost in the forest, trying to find her way through blackberry bushes, and dealing with the mama bear and her cub who appear and lead her back to her father.
The meditative chant, I Am A Sacred Drop, was received in time to be included in a Winter Solstice celebration/gathering in Ashland, Oregon in December, 1997.
"I am a sacred drop of water in the ocean of life
I am a sacred flame that’s burning, I carry the light
I am a sacred breeze that’s blowing, gently touching hearts and souls
I am sacred soil in which new life can grow"
Little did I know how thoroughly I would come to experience those states of being during my time communing with nature in the wild places of New Zealand.
There was a moment of deep merging with the Earth in 2012, in which I could feel my profound connection to all life on the planet and to the Earth herself. I could feel the water that flowed in and out of my body and how sacred that connection was to all other life forms. That all of the elements connect us to the Web of Life.
I realized that sacred soil - the earth - flowed in and out of my body through the food I ate. The heat of the sun that was my only source of heat while living in my van for several months one winter. During my time on the big island of Hawaii in 2015, I became much more sensitive to the ancestors and Ancient Ones connecting through the breezes that arise when I am doing Earth energy work.
On one of my visits to Sedona, I arrived from the north, driving through Oak Creek Canyon. I had just had a vision of a process humans could use to gift the Earth with energy which I had been "told" was a Sound Sculpture. I was on my way to find other sound healers, hoping to find someone who could tell me more about what a Sound Sculpture was supposed to be.
It had rained just before I arrived and the red rock formations were stunning and called out to me. In the area near Slide Rock, the song, Sacred Mountain started downloading. I felt like I was falling in love with the rocks.
I found a place to stay for a month and returned the next day, driving back and forth through the canyon as I received the rest of the song.
I definitely experienced, "Heaven and Earth join in this moment, where future and path live side by side..."
During the summer of 1989, I took my two young daughters camping along the southern California coast. I was amazed to watch the various flocks of pelicans flying along the shore out over the water.
I witnessed one particular group that was spectacularly beautiful. Every pelican in the group was perfectly synchronized with all the others. They were flying close to the surface of the ocean and would rise and fall in perfect time with the waves that formed and disappeared beneath them.
I designed the song, Pelicans, to express they way they flew together and to celebrate the desire they planted in me to find other people with whom I could create similar beauty.
Pelicans also has a special meaning for me as it was the last song I sang to my father before he passed a year and a half ago.
“… Come and fly up high with me
Feel the joy of synchrony
Feel your wingtips touch the sky
Feel the joy of knowing why
We fly together
We fly in rhythm..”
After I left the nursing home that afternoon I stopped to spend time with some dear friends. As we sat outside in their beautiful garden, a bird flew above us and spread its wings in a way I had never, ever seen before. I felt like it was my father letting me know that he was flying free at last.
I wrote the song, Wild Thing, in 1995. It scared me, so I quietly put it away and never performed it or recorded it.
Recently, while I was going through my music to find the songs that I wanted to include in the High Tide trilogy, I discovered several including Wild Thing that weren't really appropriate to use in the movies, but that were definitely relevant to these transformational times and the Great Shift that humanity and the Earth are going through at present.
I have indeed gotten to know the "wild thing" within me that called out to me through this song. And what a blessing it has been to gradually embrace and merge with it more and more fully over the past twenty-one years!
The image I used for the song video is called Birth of the Dragon. It is a painting that emerged unintentionally and spontaneously while I was randomly using up some leftover dabs of paint a couple of years after writing Wild Thing.
I wrote this song in 1997 for my younger daughter to sing. It was an important song for me at the time, with ideas I wanted to share with her at that stage of her life. Recording it again recently made me much more aware of its multi-dimensional truths than I realized at the time I received it.
"I am so much more than what anyone else can ever see I am so much more the what people tell me I ought to be I am so much more than the things in life that have happened to me And when I remember that I'm so much more, that's when I set myself free..."
The photos of icebergs in the song video are from my trip to Iceland in 2009 where I was called to sing to the earth that was emerging as the glaciers receded. Icebergs feel like an appropriate image for how much more we each are than what can be perceived with the physical senses.
In 2000, I happened to meet New Zealand author and storyteller, Barry Brailsford, at the CWG Center in Ashland, Oregon the afternoon before he was scheduled to give a talk. I was there to check on a series of paintings of mandalas that were on display, and we got to talking. I sang some of my songs for him and showed him some of my other artwork. He told me I needed to share what I was doing, get it out to the world. He also urged me to come to New Zealand. Before we parted that afternoon, he gave me a small piece of pounamu, a form of jade that is native to New Zealand. Thus began the next phase of my spiritual journey, deepening my ability to commune with this magical, miracle-filled world that surrounds us.
The little piece of pounamu felt like a friend. It “talked” to me, saying “Come to New Zealand, come to New Zealand!!!” I kept it in my pocket during the day and slept with it in my hand at night. After three days, poof! It disappeared. I didn’t lose it. It simply disappeared. I felt validated when a couple of months later I met a woman whom Barry had also gifted with a piece of pounamu. I discovered that she had had a similar experience - her stone disappeared as well.
I had never traveled outside the United States at that point in my life and the idea of visiting New Zealand was a bit daunting. I had lots of loose ends to tie up and changes I needed to make in how I saw myself before I was ready to get my passport and attempt international travel.
I was also inspired to create “Leap of Faith,” a painting of twelve frogs.
Initially I was quite intimidated by my vision, because I had been painting mostly pure geometric type mandalas up to that point. “Frogs!?!? You want me to paint frogs?” But it was clear that this needed to be a mandala of frogs representing the various stages of commitment to taking a leap of faith.
It expressed the concept contained in that well-know quote by Goethe, “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
The frogs in the totally stretched-out position illustrated the state of full-out commitment, no going back. The others represented the various stages of preparing to commit.
I managed to come up with a design by creating a sort of template for each type of frog action that represented my own steps in preparing to face the unknown. I couldn’t get them to fit together as their feet overlapped. My mom suggested having three frogs turn around and face the lily pads in the center. I objected. That positioning didn’t fit with my concept at all.
And then I realized - the true message of the piece was that sometimes the leap of faith is to be still and meditate, going inward into the silence - when other aspects of your being are screaming to take immediate action.
The painting helped me release my need to control everything and allow it all to unfold instead. The song “Leap of Faith” popped into my mind one day, giving me a bit of chuckle about my whole self-preparation process.
It was four years later that the urge to visit New Zealand suddenly became so strong that I felt like I would die if I didn’t go. Trusting that it was now time, I answered the call, bought my ticket and went. As our plane drew near to Auckland, New Zealand, I felt Mama Earth reach up and wrap her huge arms around me with an incredible “welcome home.” I sobbed as the plane prepared to land.
That first trip to New Zealand changed me forever. The Earth speaks very loudly and clearly in New Zealand. I have been blessed to live there approximately 8 years out of the last 12, visiting sacred places on both the north and south islands and living in various places where I was called to interact and commune with the land. My time in New Zealand opened up a whole new level of relationship to the Earth and her energies, the elements and elemental forces and various her various creatures beings. After purchasing a small van, I spent much of my time alone in wild places, listening to the Earth and deepening my awareness of mySelf.
Here's the "Leap of Faith" song video that's on Youtube.
My Body’s Callin’ Me is a sing-along that was included in the television series “Wake Up Singing” that I created for TCTV’s community access channel in 1996. It came to me as a light, joyful way of reminding myself that the human body is the meeting point of the physical and non-physical aspects of ourselves. An illness can be a way-shower leading us to discovering new ways of authentically expressing our soul essence.
I had no idea when I first wrote this song how literally true it was and how important my connection with my dragon(s) would become. Merging with them was greatly facilitated by the time I spent in New Zealand and Hawaii.
"There's a time when you have to face the dragon that lives deep down inside . . ."
Song of the High Tide, was given to me on my last day on the island of 'Eua in the South Pacific in 2013. I had been communing with the humpback whales for two weeks and was blessed to witness a newborn humpback learning how to be a whale. I was told that the seed idea I had been carrying for several months was meant to be a full length feature film and the Song of the High Tide was to be the opening, title song for that movie. The incredible wave action in the video comes from time at spent at Laupahoehoe, at the site where a tsunami wiped out a village. The video ends abruptly because the wave was high enough to reach where we were standing and watching that morning.
The song, Web of Dreams, was inspired by something Brooke Medicine Eagle shared many, many years ago at one of her workshops in the Pacific Northwest. "We dance on the web we've woven with our dreams Dance with the sun and the stars and the moonbeams Singing the songs that create a new day
Singing the songs that guide our way. . . "
The elders of her tribe had told her, “It is important to hold the Golden Dream, the vision of the highest and best future you can possibly imagine, for the vision you hold forms the path that you then walk down.
The energies of the planet have shifted. The Earth is now operating in 5-D. Instant manifestation. Our thoughts, but most imortantantly the vibrational frequencies we hold are powerfully magnetic. While studying Huna on the Big Island of Hawaii I found this quote by Hale Makua which has been most helpful to me in navigating in these new energies: “Stand in you center and call your life to you.”
The photos in the video were taken during a magical foggy morning walk down the lane of a farm I was staying at one summer near Christchurch, New Zealand.
I totally resonated with this quote I came across: "For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” - Cynthia Occelli This revised version of Plant Your Seeds includes photos of milkweed pods in the stages of opening to release their seeds. These fluffy seeds are carried by the wind to the places where they can take root and grow to provide food for the caterpillars that will transform themselves into monarch butterflies.
I feel a strong connection with milkweed plants as my current "seed-releasing" process has been orchestrated by the Universe to correspond with that of the milkweed plants. While preparing this series of song videos for release to the internet, I wonder, where these songs will end up? Who will get to hear them? What ideas may land in fertile soil and benefit someone's life?
Huge blessings to all who listen to these song videos and share the links with others. The Earth's new higher frequencies provide potent opportunities for creating a new reality for ourselves by carefully planting the seeds of whatever we do want to create in our lives.
