Nature Could Care Less How I Sound.

I went for a hike recently in East Sooke. The trail was stunning. It was bordered by layers and layers of ferns, soaring old-growth trees, and huge boulders covered in blankets of thick moss. It was also utterly and completely quiet.

Almost too quiet.

And I LOVE me some good solitude. I also hike quite a lot, so I’m used to the beautiful, incomparable silence of the woods.

But for whatever reason, here on this trail on this day, the quiet was eerie. One reason was that there was unusually little birdsong or chipmunk chatter, and none of my favourite, the dynamic conversation of ravens. All I could hear was the sound of my own breathing and my sneakers along the dirt path… nothing else.

At a certain point, I started to feel a little unsettled by the quiet. Perhaps the knowledge that Vancouver Island has the highest concentration of cougars in North America had me on my toes. Were the birds keeping quiet because there was something hanging around that they’d rather not announce themselves to?!

As my cougar anxiety started to amplify, I thought it would be wise to sing. I guess I thought that if there was a cougar nearby, I should give it a little musical notice of my presence.

Have you ever tried singing when you’re hauling it up a steep slope, your imagination filled with images of cougars suddenly pouncing on you, claws out, fangs bared (extra big fangs in my mind lol)? Well, from experience, it sounds a little less like singing and more like a petrified squeak.

But I kept singing. I got a little louder, feeling my breath stabilizing as I let my sound out into the trees. And it did soothe me. It actually helped me to feel strong and soothed all at once.

I sang random melodies, hummed, chanted. Some of it was barely phonation. Some of it was soaring and loud. And I started to feel less afraid.

I have to admit I felt a tad sheepish singing away in the woods all alone like this. And as I continued to sing, cougar fears assuaged, I started to feel some pressure to make a beautiful sound. I was surrounded by beauty, so surely I should contribute to that beauty through how I was singing?

And then it struck me out of nowhere: nature doesn’t care how I sound. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean in an unfeeling, cold, hurtful way. No, this was a relieving, freeing, belonging kind of neutrality.

In that moment, hiking through the forest, it just felt clear to me that nature could give a rat’s ass about what I think beautiful singing is. That sounds harsh, I realize, but for me, in that moment, it was liberating.

Nature has no opinion on my resonance or breath management. She isn’t pleased with perfect pitch or seamless legato or beautiful melody.

Nature’s only interest is life. She doesn’t have prerequisites to belonging. She also doesn’t have preferred landscapes, favourite animals, or flowers she deems the prettiest. Nor does nature prefer me to sing in a particular genre. She doesn’t like it best when I sing high rather than low. She doesn’t think my sound too dark or bright. She doesn’t think I have good singing days and bad singing days.

Nature hears me sing and I imagine says something like, “It’s as it should be.” Why? Because nature’s only requirement of me is already fulfilled in the fact that I exist. Singing is just an extension of fulfilling that requirement through expressing that existence in a sound, through a song.

In this moment of realization, I almost laughed out loud that I had started to get preoccupied by how beautiful or not beautiful my singing was. Surrounded by those towering, wise trees, the idea felt preposterous.

So, liberated from these constraints (and fairly convinced that if there were cougars in the area, they didn’t mind I was there), I kept singing just as naturally as a bird would, and just as free from evaluating myself.

What might it mean if we brought this accepting, embracing neutrality toward ourselves and others?

We might stop feeling the need to qualify our singing (“I’m just a beginner,” “prepare yourself,” “I’m not that great,” “my voice feels off,” etc.) to protect ourselves from the all-too-common criticism waiting to be thrown our way.

We might miss a note, sing out of tune, or quaver from nerves while performing and not feel the shame spiral (you know the one, where you want to be swallowed up by the earth).

But perhaps most profoundly, the experience of acceptance and belonging, of our own and others’ voices, might flow into the rest of our lives. We might really see ourselves. We might really see others. And when we truly witness someone with openness and acceptance, empathy, understanding, and connection become possible and powerful in new and surprising ways.

So the next time you sing and it doesn’t come out as you’d hoped, maybe whisper to yourself kindly, “I’m nature,” or “It is as it should be.”

If you notice yourself judging another singer or feeling an aversion to their voice, get curious. Let go of the judgment and see if you can really see and hear them in their full humanness and in the beautiful vulnerability of their voice.

What nature taught me that day reverberates with me still, but I find that, once again, Mary Oliver speaks to what I experienced best:

“You do not have to be good.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
— Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”