The Intimacy of Sound
Come in, close. Listen.
These are the birds I had coffee with as buttercream rays woke the Sonoran Desert. For months, as the pandemic kept me from cities and people, I learned their names. Curve-billed thrashers, black-throated sparrows, yellow-eyed juncos. A cardinal landed often on the low branches of a mesquite behind Ruby the van, cocked a coral crown, almost but not every time taking flight if I moved. Silky flycatchers flitted low between patches of prickly pear and cholla, showing no sign of it if they noticed me. Hummingbirds drew nectar from ocotillo blossoms like flames, and from time to time, one found its ways into an open van door (and an exchange of surprise) and back out a window.
These are the chants on the streets of Denver, where I came up from my solitude for air shared by others, whose voices called for change. The silence that followed was an ebb of respect as we passed blocks where people slept in a mini-city of tents, a virus their temporary stay against eviction. I stayed in my van below my brother’s apartment window. Even when flashbangs just blocks away shook her frame and my hanging plants swung like pendulums, the steady tat-tat-tat of the crystals in her window was home. Outside was a cacophonous throng that raised a swelling within me, a river of both hope and sorrow. In Ruby’s belly was respite.
This is the rain drumming on my fiberglass rooftop earlier this week. I pulled my soft, warm blanket up to my shoulders and lay in stillness. I thought of the months I’ve spent here near the Puget Sound and my sisters. I thought of my nephew and of his lego Dobby (yes, the house elf) in a basket beneath a helium balloon floating lazily among floors and rooms for days. I thought of my toddler niece pausing from a weeping session to fist-bump me and smile before returning to her wail and of the carpet of black hair on the head of her sister, just weeks old. I thought of the river of rain washing my solar panels and how it would flow over Ruby’s sides to seep into the soil, trickle to the ocean not far below, or rise back up into the atmosphere.
And this (for those listening to the full recording at the top of the post) is my voice, coming from a desk beneath a row of string lights. Night draped its soft cloak over Ruby and me hours ago. The spice from a rooibos tea mingles with an orange blossom candle. There’s a break in the rain. If you listen close, you might hear the compressor on my fridge kick on or my chair’s response to the way I sway in little circles as I record this piece.
What do you hear in your soundscape?
This post marks six months of the Rolling Desk. I wanted to give you a gift. You’ve opened your inboxes to these missives. You’ve read and shared and engaged with my work. Through you, the Desk is growing. And so, I offer twelve pieces, essays or poems, enhanced by sound. (I’ve included brief intros too.) Listen to them separately or all at once, a waterfall of sound. If you, like me, enjoy listening as you wash dishes or walk or drive, this should be a treat of an hour or so. You’ll be transported. These pieces will take you from the bustling streets of NYC to a South African wildlife preserve, from Oaxaca to Lagos, from a lab outside a chemo room to a couch taking in emotional comfort food. They’ll offer (to list just a few) a love story or two; an invitation to boredom and laughter; the possibilities of yes; reflections on being of two worlds and, thus, in some ways, both and neither; and, in the words of one of the beautiful writers included here, Chloe Hope, “the sacred in winged beings and morning light.”
A Sampling from Substack’s Soundscape
“The Sparrow” CHLOE HOPE
“Embracing Serendipity” CHRISTOPHER ANSELMO
“Let us begin” (paid) IJEOMA UMEBINYUO
“An update from the wilderness” NARINA EXELBY
“The Grandmother You Never Met” MARC TYPO
“Language Lessons” SHERMAN ALEXIE
“Cadaver Dog Kindergarten” KAT ALBRECHT
“When You Can’t Walk Away” ANTONIA MALCHIK
“Lifetime Christmas movies are my certainty anchor” MADDIE BURTON
“Hombre Argentino” MARINARENA
“boredom, dissonance” FRANCO AMATI
“Love Continues To Save Me” ANDREA GIBSON
Melodic and lyrical,
’s, “The Sparrow” contemplates the spectrum contained within each of us. Listen to get lost in the pleasure of watching a fellow creature flit about its life, to discover “the sacred in winged beings and the morning light,” to lose calm to annoyance, to rail against injustice, to consider your own complexity beyond understanding. has inserted a recording at the end of “Embracing Serendipity” like a bonus track. Anselmo’s voice is calming, contemplative, reminiscent of This American Life’s Ira Glass. Listen to see how a series of yesses can lead to a man who can barely walk rushing from place to place in the Big Apple to meet possibility.To listen to “Let us begin” by
is to be transported—to Oaxaca (where it’s recorded) and Lagos (her home) at once; to that velvety liminal space between public and private you can find at spoken word in dusky cafés, and back to a time when, per a short text text that accompanies the recording, the poet felt differently. I won’t say more out of respect for the paywall on this recording, but I’ll say I found Ijeoma’s Long-Form Thoughts in my first perusal of Substack. “The Inheritance of Voice,” part essay / part poem, took my breath away, and I took out a paid subscription right away. reads “An update from the wilderness” from South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park, surrounded by birds and monkeys who might sneak into her tent. Listen to find yourself trekking through Welgevonden Game Reserve with “the new heroes in the plight to save rhinos.” Exelby’s richly detailed essays and gentle voice transport you. (The posts are moved to an archive for paid readers in a week. Listen to the latest to decide if you want to delve further. If you do, among my favorites is “This is not a story – this is the truth: Aki Embah and orang-utan midwife,” from Borneo’s Batang Ai National Park.) buries recordings like gems in the letters he writes to his newborn son. The poem “23 Weeks Old: This is for when you ask for her” (in “The Grandmother You Never Met”) speaks of grief mingling with celebration, of the difficulties Black women face around birth, and of the remembering we do for the next generation. I can’t not mention the delight of the brief recording in the middle of “Three Months after I Met Your Mother,” where we hear the voice of the romantic interest, the partner from these letters, which are also a love story.“Language Lessons” by
offers “twelve tiny essays about Native American life.” Listen to “fancydance” to an imagined group called “The Rez Pistols,” to hear the narrator riff on “the secret song of my heart, Going, going gone,” to consider what’s lost and what’s found when we are of two worlds, to hear worlds in mere paragraphs. (Alexie’s pieces showcase the magic that can be found in the flash of micro essays.)Recorded in British Columbia, Canada, and in a voice laced with amusement and love for a dog,
’s “Cadaver Dog Kindergarten” is part of a series exploring both training animals for search and rescue and a career transition. Listen to meet a pet detective and her dog and for the joy that comes from following your passion.Take a walk with
. The recordings of her essays, like “When You Can’t Walk Away,” feel like a sweet hangout with a wise soul. See how the snow and the train and the magpie around her are laced into the moment.’s recording of “Lifetime Christmas movies are my certainty anchor” mirrors the tip it offers. Listen for nuggets of wisdom on embracing life’s profound uncertainties, like the nourishment of emotional comfort food, tied up with a bow of humor. reads delightfully compressed poems, sometimes to music, in pieces like “Hombre Argentino.”Embrace paradox with
in “boredom, dissonance.” Listen for an invite to be wherever you are, to be bored, to laugh till you pee, to not hit excellent and be just fine with that. And don’t miss Amati’s notes in the post below the poem.“Love Continues To Save Me” by
is gold. Listen to contemplate resilience and vulnerability and love and what it might mean to be “a walking PLEASE HUG ME sign” in moments of excruciating uncertainty. While you’re there, check out “A New Kind of Bucket List.” Lyrical wisdom here—both timeless and timely, as many of us contemplate aspirations and goals going forward in a new year.I’ll close with a riff on recorded voices
In 2017, I joined a group founding a low-power, Spanish-first, multilingual radio station (KZAA 96.5 FM in Santa Barbara, CA). Together, we fathomed what the station could mean to listeners. How would it feel to slice potatoes and husk corn in your kitchen to the sounds of local news in the language you spoke with loved ones? To drive to work to the rhythm of syllables your Chumash grandfather’s tongue has labored not to lose? To hear someone who sounds like you being addressed in their pronouns as they discuss experiences that reflect your own? To hear your own emotions mirrored in experiences that don’t?
A voice is a singular thing. Only your vocal cords are folded just so. Nowhere else on this planet or beyond but inside you can their exact thickness and length be found. And a single phrase on your tongue contains treasures for listeners beyond words—hints of the soil beneath your feet or the experience at your back or the emotional weather moving through you. A recorded voice brings, say, me, from a hill overlooking the Puget Sound to, say, you, in Mumbai or Barcelona or Perth, in West Virginia or California or the Scottish Highlands. It brings my today into your tomorrow.
My family has recordings of my Italian/Jewish/New Jerseyan grandfather singing songs his great-grandchildren will teach to theirs, “Mares Eat Oats” and “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” and “Thoity Poiple Boids.” His sweet, gravely voice crooning those ditties is one of my favorite sounds in the world.
I sometimes feel awkward making recordings of my essays. But it’s also fun, and it makes me stretch. And I was reminded recently that there are those who can only listen. It makes me happy to offer something better than an AI robot reading my words. Two things I learned in my brief radio days and my briefer podcast dabbling: Almost no one likes the sound of their own recorded voice, at least not at first. But other people do, unequivocally. We need to hear each other.
Maybe the longitudinal shape of a sound wave is part of what makes a recorded voice so intimate. It comes straight for us once set in motion by a vibrating object, like my vocal cord or the strike of a metal beater against a triangle. Never troughing and cresting the way visible light bounces to our pupils, a sound wave inchworms forward, compressing and expanding, traveling in the same direction as the particles of air or water it disturbed. The energy moves, from an ear down a narrow passageway, to vibrate once more, this time, an eardrum, moves past bone and fluid and over tiny hairs to become a nerve impulse. And then …
I’d love to know in the comments, what’s a favorite sound? Voice or otherwise? Have you recorded a post? Links welcome.
**Also: Come create side by side (Sat., Dec 16, link below)**
Please join me next Saturday, December 16, 2023, 9 am–10:15 am (PST). We’ll write or paint or draw. We’ll be silly and serious. We’ll build off each other’s creative energy. We’ll vibrate each other’s ear drums and share (if you want to). The stakes are low, the benefits, many. All are welcome. Subscribe for free or paid (additions to the tip jar are, to quote my 12-year-old nephew, who made Dobby fly, “Sick!”) to get the link in your inbox (+ prompts and a little extra) the morning of.
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88106490341?pwd=JjTL0poB1SbaAeCD8aRpSZLVsMuJjp.1
Bonus track, “Thoity Poiple Boids” MY SIS, HER KIDS, AND ME
What's a favorite sound of yours? A recording you love to listen to or want to share? Links welcome.
This is so wonderful Holly. I played the first clip accidentally through the tv speaker, not knowing my phone was synced to it. My cat Otis was sitting quietly in front of the dark screen watching the rain when out of the nowhere, birds singing! He was as stunned as me...and then he had to go searching for the source.:)