Austin — Today is the first day of this year, this year being the year of my opening into 15 minutes of singing every day. I start in my house, on a humid Saturday morning with the sprinklers running outside and the morning sun showing mullions of old metal casement windows through white curtains. I walk around, bare feet on my Texas wood floor singing, a lot of rhythm today, holding it down with slaps to my chest and shoulders. I find I often go to the sounds of Africa and the Middle East when I sing. In a week I go to Africa for real.

This singing for 15 minutes without stopping will be a daily practice for me over the next year, like any such practice, a carving out of time to remember who I am, a returning again and again to now and a training of my musculature for waking up.

Today I leave the front door open, after feeling the impulse to close it, to keep my singing private. But then I remember that one of the reasons I’m doing this is to draw myself out more, to express more colors, so I had better get used to opening doors and windows. And I remember that there will be many times this year when singing in private won’t be practical, and yet I will do this practice.

Time to wake up and wake up more. The next sound shows me when that is. Let the singing year commence.

sep 18 sounds like this

Austin — Sleepy, I start today with those effortless morning stretch sounds, intrinsic to the re-habitation of my body after sleep. After a while I bend forward toward the floor and the sound pours into my head, producing a muted flugelhorn, Ethel Merman in a metal box. I follow. My top lip, a summer awning, stretches taut over the front of my teeth, my mouth open in an ooh shape, boxy, ridged, a clear vibration in my palate and scalp.

This becomes my instrument for a while, all I need. I explore where it can go. There’s something satisfying in its contained power, something to ride like useful anger.

As I sing today, at times I catch myself thinking of what I will write about and find myself needing to bring my attention again and again back to the open field, the vibration of sound, the feeling of the air. This returning is a normal part of this practice, any mindful practice, but with a different nuance here…like if I don’t fix on a salient idea while I’m singing, I won’t have one to relate when I’m done…undoubtedly the mind at work, digging imaginary potholes. I sense that if I move straight from singing to writing I can trust that something will be there to write.

Returning to now, I look over to the window, and see the aloe vera I planted last week, juicy and self-sufficient, small blue pot. It fans, five fronds in the same plane drawing me back to stretches, upward arms, extension, upward scales, up and out.

sep 19 sounds like this

Austin — Today I walk out to my messy studio, across the pebbles separating it from my house. A spider has made a substantial web overnight, which I find by walking into it. The web is thicker than most—my body apparently knowing about web thickness—and I do a vigorous shaking dance, a bit violent for this time of the morning, suspecting that the associated spider must be big too. Another spider I don’t see.

I start out all vowels, air and mountain tops. The land of vowels is expansive and alluring, rewarding. Each has a different general flavor and a million variations. Traveling between them has an ease about it. The only consonants around are there to gently propel me to the next vowel, not to stop me and check for my passport.

I do come down eventually, into a village somewhere where the language is thick and the message emphatic, spoken and sung. I come to made-up languages easily and discover stories through them, something like dreams, not grounded in the explicit but perhaps even more true. Having been through vowels already, I can hear them carry forward into this village and I notice how where I’ve just been always colors where I think I am.

sep 20 sounds like this

You leave and I walk back to the studio, starting today’s practice with sighs, as effortless as I can, simply riding breath, floating on thermals. I wonder why sighs are always high to low.

For a while I put aside the impulse to turn these glissades into “music,” to add acrobatics, because it feels hurried and needy, takes me out of the moment. So I follow more rounds of breath.

Then I explore the transition from no effort to effort, extending some of the sighs, letting them move up and down a bit, adding an m here or an n there to add propulsion.

A few minutes later, I think of you and my notes get sad, bluesy, this continued floating on breath helping me distinguish the nuances my sad from yours.

sep 21 sounds like this

Another phone call. This time I answer and say yes with mild protestation. I hang up and stand there with my feet self-bound.

My singing starts out a dark fiery red, rage. The fuel is plentiful and lasts for the whole 15 minutes. Fuel not just from this morning but from years of second guessing my native responses. I inflate to twice my size. Guttural. Russian. A war general flaming a city.

I finish, boiling and clear, walk out and finally say “no.” I’m surprised by how clear the reasons are, how connected to what I want, how good it feels to say. I teeter a bit as I consider how it’s landing, the auditors clamoring for a voice. But I don’t feed them…just let my words ring in the following silence.

sep 22 sounds like this

Today my mind wants to be original and cohesive, but my body offers none of that. I go from thing to thing in my singing, generating ideas and instantly judging whether it’s good, worthy of sharing. Some days it feels like all this practice does nothing cumulatively to quiet the mind, like it has a mind of its own and I only get to watch when it is loud or quiet on its own volition.

I get bored easily of what I’m singing and then shift for the sake of shifting.

A small eye in me sees this familiar place of self-critical boredom and I remember to once again feel my feet on the floor, the quality of the air against my skin. I remember to stay with what is happening and then stay some more.

I try shifting my mouth into a smile posture and keep it there while singing. This makes me laugh a little and take myself a little less seriously. It also makes it hard to be self critical.

Near the end of the 15 minutes, I land in falsetto, sliding around and feeling the variety of sensations as it rings in my mouth, then my chest, then my nose and my upper palate and skull. So much internal variety for such a narrow band of sound.

sep 23 sounds like this

Austin — I get the idea to play with silence in my singing practice today, which turns up my ear volume. As I’m slipping on my leather sandals, I hear a scratchy sound on the living room floor and catch, out of the corner of my eye, a tiny gecko dragging a leaf on his tail, the leaf amplifying his presence 100 times. Would I have heard him otherwise? Now he’s under my red upholstered chair. I lift it and cover him in an Ikea glass for transport outside. I heard you, my little bug eater.

I sit on the floor of the studio and start by just listening. It comes in layers. Computer hum. Surging garbage truck, a cheeping bird, then a cawing one. The collective hum of it all.

I sing a phrase. Then I listen again, and notice there is a small transition in awareness from the singing to the hearing, like I’m hearing less while I’m singing and need tune back in after. Each time I stop singing, the world fades back in. I continue this pattern.

Then I try to keep the same quality of hearing while I’m singing that I have when I’m quiet, which dials me quickly into the moment, right on the edge of what sound is next. I lose my mind for moments, swimming in just this experience of sound and silence. I decide to hear more today.

sep 24 sounds like this

Today it’s words as I begin, mostly made-up sounds with English words falling into the mix here and there. I love the adventure of this, riding my surfboard right on the tip of my tongue, not knowing if a “real” word will come out or not, playing the tension between emergence and design.

When English words do appear they instantly orient my mind toward their meaning, so that all the made-up words in between exist in that territory, become about that story. I realize how powerful the words we all know are, how much weight each one has. They are just sounds but when we all agree to use one, it becomes a little magnet that picks up the metallic fuzz of meaning through our cumulative experience of saying and hearing it. I watch which ones come up, the more I let go the more I sense them coming from the same place as dreams.

Sometimes a story will take root and I will follow it for a while. Today there is one about a grand auditor coming to the planet to audit the ocean, test the sky and ask who’s in charge here. I notice it takes a little effort to stay in the trajectory of the story and the payoff is worth it, until I feel the activity too centered in my brain and not the rest of my body. At that point, I let the story go and drop again into the fomenting pond.

sep 25 sounds like this

I start singing in falsetto, notice that and bring my focus back to my feet. The falsetto stays. Slow.

Then I notice a pedal-like sensation, where when I put more pressure on one foot it surges my voice, like revving an engine. This pushing is satisfying, pulsing sound up my body to my mouth. I feel more vertically connected.

I notice I’m mostly paying attention to one foot so I scan over to the other and then produce lower-range sounds. For a while it’s a dialog between these two feet, high and low.

Often, my focus will stray from my feet to what I’m singing. That almost ever present impetus to be “interesting” is right there telling me to develop the notes into something more elaborate, more enigmatic, more beautiful, like there is always an audience there ready to give me a lifetime summary judgment. As I return my attention downward, this sub voice files a parting protest, wanting to raise a sign saying, “even though this sounds utterly the same and boring, Will is a really good singer.”

I’m back to my feet and start walking very slowly, a walking meditation with sound.

Then I let go of this idea and just sing, my foot focus releasing to the broader dance. My feet are louder now in the overall mix, like a new word you learn and then hear everywhere.

sep 26 sounds like this

A spontaneous yawn sets the course for my practice today. I let my face welcome it and then another. I goad them on gently, sipping air into my beach ball open mouth, until my internal yawn maker takes over and pulls in a little more. My rear jaw is jacked open by this air pump, releasing night tightness.

Then that moment of slowing right before the cusp of the falls, when the structure can hold no more air and gives way to the great release, returning air to the room on the most naturally supported sound I know. There is no strain anywhere in yawn sounds. They are animal.

Yawns are contagious even when I’m alone. One leads to the next. The sound vibrates my whole torso. My eyes water. Each one feels like an internal massage, stretching my chest, my belly, my head.

Then I play with the tails of the exhale sounds, keeping effort low by smiling a little and letting it end when it ends. This is languid, my head becomes loose on its neck.

I’m aloft.

sep 27 sounds like this