Mother Alice Dreams
This is the first in a series of sound studies that invite us to journey into the life, dreams and creations of Mother Alice Coltrane, a visionary musician, spiritual mother, and super creator of a musical genre all her own. This first sound study, Mother Alice Dreams, was curated while sitting with the powerful stories of mothers in our congregation and other mamas in my village who are navigating complex, liberating, and soul-awakening life journeys right now.
Early Sunday morning I was listening to a voice note, imagining that I was actually sitting beside the beautiful woman softening into her tears on the other end of the line, our breaths collapsing the miles of ocean and continent that physically separate us. As I listened to her tender and illuminating share I began to hear the opening chords of Alice Coltrane’s Journey In Satchidananda. It came to me like how an herbalist might sense ginger to soothe an upset stomach, or offer turmeric paste for a wound that is inflamed or swelling. I thought it was also the spirit of Mother Alice offering her brilliance, majesties, and music as nourishment for our discoveries as creators in this now. I felt Mother Alice revealing herself to me as our next creator foremother for the Sitting With the Mothers, a collection of stories and practices inspired by ancestral mothers that we began exploring last year.
In Mother Alice Dreams I am listening for gentle progressions of energy, tempo, and depth that support a soft and gradual expansion into breath and movement. I piece together 6 of her works, in their entirety and without editing or mixing on top of her compositions. This sound study is an experiment in sonic storytelling through flow. Where does each piece begin? Where does it take us? What does the journey bring to light about ourselves? Whether listening to Mother Alice Dreams while writing, or lying on your bed and breathing into your womb, or swirling through the open space of your room, the music is an offering for deepening presence, healing, and visioning within your sacred creation labors.
Mother Alice’s music is a reminder of the magic of our breath to transform any moment, from the cellular biological planes to the invisible cosmic planes. When we are in the thick of our storms, when we feel overwhelmed by all the decisions that seem like they have to be made today, when we are spinning through the dizzying currents of what was and what we hope to be, our breath is what carries us and allows us to flow through the waves of all that is without becoming locked and knotted in our bodies. The mystical tremors of Mother Alice’s harp, the soul-deep twang of the bass lines, the pulsating rhythms that come and go like the tide—all of this serves to bring us into a fuller, more inspired conscious collaboration with our body and its capacity to hold what it is we need, and also to release whatever we don’t. Mother Alice Dreams is a discovery in breathing, and moving, and living into the majesty of ourselves, re/claiming our multitude of selves as essential parts of the divine whole.
listen
Soundtrack | Alice Coltrane The Ankh of Amen- Ra | Journey In Satchidananda (feat. Pharoah Sanders) | Blue Nile | Ptah The El Daoud | A Love Supreme | Lovely Sky Boat
download
Do you know the story of our Giving Well? Watch The Birth Of The Giving Well.