I. Ripples on a Mountain Lake
Years ago, I had a dream about a shaman-like figure who floated above a mountain lake in deep meditation holding a guitar-like instrument. He would strum a chord, and the ripples from his instrument would propagate across the lake in resonance. I thought of this dream often, especially when our son was born frighteningly early, just 1lb., 5oz. at 23 weeks gestation. He would spend nine months total in the NICU. Due to the care of brilliant and dedicated medical professionals, he is now 4 years old, and doing great on supplemental oxygen. He was so fragile and sick for so long that the only place he could live was a hospital, a frightening place to be an infant. The sonic environment was awful; rooms are thick with a constant violent barrage of machine sounds, blaring alarms, and dizzying waves of harsh and severe-sounding medical speak coming from everywhere.

II. Tuning
In the hospital, I took inspiration from the shaman figure from my dream, and would attempt to “tune” my son’s sonic environment by singing simple melodies and drones in the key of the alarm sounds, and to the tempo of the machines that kept him alive. I would often sing a lullaby for my son in the NICU inspired by these sounds. One night, holding him, I was drawn to the periodic beep of an IV machine, and the constant chug of an oscillating ventilator. I sang soft improvised melodies in that key and tempo, feeling his tiny body resonate on my chest with his lullaby. The song felt like a medicinal song. A gift. A song of love and peace for a fragile boy. 

​

III. Chanting and the Machines
Being in daily rounds at the hospital felt like participating in an ancient chanting ritual. A familiar feeling to me as I was raised in a sect of Buddhism that featured communal chanting. Meetings would feature fast, rhythmic unison chanting from the congregation, creating grinding microtonal harmonies, sounding like the buzzing of a bees nest, and accompanied by the intermittent strike of a prayer bell. I would revel in these vibrations as a child, often lying on the floor to soak them up. At the hospital, the medical team would discuss our son’s medical history and strategies moving forward in a way that reminded me of these waves of sonic energy. They would then go to the cold, towering machines, machines that kept our son alive, to bestow upon them the agreed-upon settings. The machines would then leap to life, chugging along at the entered tempo.

IV. Voluntary Breath
Out of all of his complications from prematurity, our son’s lungs were, and remain, the most fragile. He spent his first five months on a ventilator, and for much of that time, it seemed impossible that he would ever breathe on his own. Breathing, an involuntary system, is something we do without thinking. But when we sit, and focus on it, it is a profound act. Liberation via meditation. Sit, and breathe. Anchor yourself to the one true moment and simply be. In these moments of radical presence, our breath is voluntary. Breathing in, hold, breathing out, hold.

​

V. Strands of Golden Light
One night, I sat by our son’s isolette, despondent and exhausted. He was quite
ill at the time, and there was a lot of fear. Slumped and ragged in my chair, I saw something out of the corner of my eye: strands of golden light coming in through
the window, twisting around each other, growing towards my son. The strands enveloped his isolette, vibrating and glowing. I continued to look away, experiencing them only peripherally. I finally looked at the strands, and they faded away.