When the Forest Sang
Thirty of us sat in a circle in a dark forest clearing in West Virginia. Singing was rising from the trees. Nobody could explain where it was coming from — it was a sound that had no source you could point to, and no explanation your mind could understand.
I had experienced something like it before. The first time, I was a girl on the bank of the Shenandoah River.
The water was swollen with summer rain, rushing muddy and fast. Beside me lay a large buck — softly moaning, quietly dying. I inched closer until my hand rested on the soft velvet of his antlers.
He permitted my presence, even seemed to welcome it.
Something moved between us in that silence that I have never been able to name. No words. No fear. Just the warm weight of his breathing slowing beneath my palm, and a presence so vast and still it felt like the river itself was holding its breath.
And then — he was gone.
I stayed a long time at the water’s edge. Not moving. Not thinking. Just knowing that something had called — clearly, quietly, unmistakably — and I had been still enough to hear it.
Photo of a fawn rescued from a creek that runs through our farm.
Photo by Stephen R. LaDrew
Those early years were full of callings.
The quiet at the top of a Shenandoah ridgeline when the blue mountains recede endlessly and you understand, in your body, that you are small in a good way. The smell of warm pine on a July trail. The thunder of hooves beneath me on a grassy airfield, the wind stripping away everything that was not essential, the horse and I becoming one animal moving through one perfect moment.
In those places, there was nothing between me and aliveness.
Nature didn’t ask me to translate myself. It simply called — and something deep in me answered before my mind could intervene.
Then life got loud.
I was capable, so I got busier. I was sensitive, so I reframed it as something to manage. I was restless, so I aimed higher. Career. Then another career. Psychology. Shamans. Healers on three continents. I collected wisdom the way some people collect degrees — always certain that the next thing would be the thing that finally made me feel whole again.
It never was.
Because the voice I was running from wasn’t a symptom.
It was the source.
I want to tell you about a night in West Virginia.
Thirty of us had gathered in a forest clearing for a ceremony in the Dagara tradition — a West African lineage that the elder Malidoma Somé carried from Burkina Faso across the ocean and into those hills. In a large clearing, we built a huge bonfire. We surrounded the fire with our chairs and drums. The light of the fire barely reached the edge of the trees.
At some point deep in the night, the drumming shifted — or maybe it was us that shifted — and the singing began.
Not from the circle; from the forest. It was not one voice, but many. Voices raised in a song more ancient than earth. It was both lament and joy and a sound that had no source you could point to, and no explanation your mind could understand.
Nobody ran. Nobody laughed nervously and broke the spell. Thirty people sat in the dark and let it move through them.
And something shifted in that circle that no workshop, no framework, no program had ever touched. Not because we understood it. Because we finally stopped long enough to hear it.
I have spent decades in the company of people who have their own version of that voice. You may know it.
It lives in the 3 a.m. waking with no name for what’s wrong. In the hollow feeling after another successful meeting. In the Sunday evening dread, the restlessness and longing you’ve rebranded as ambition, the ache beneath the accomplishment that no promotion, no vacation, no amount of achievement has ever quieted.
The voice is patient — patient as stone.Waiting, always waiting.
Not a problem to be solved.
A call to be answered.
And when we answer that call?
The executive who had been making million-dollar decisions for decades — and couldn’t make a single personal one — found his ground. Not through more analysis. Through listening.
The healer who had held everyone else’s pain for thirty years and forgotten she was allowed to have her own — found her center. Not through rest. Through return.
The creative who had been producing brilliant work that felt, underneath, like it belonged to someone else — found her voice. Not through technique. Through truth.
And in my own life: the work that once felt like performance became presence. The relationships that once felt managed became real. The prosperity I had been chasing stopped running.
Not because I finally got it right.
Because I finally stopped leaving myself to get there.
My work is helping people reclaim that voice, that power — and learn to live from it. Not someday. Not when things settle down. Now. Here. Inside whatever is.
I believe that reclaiming our voice is one of the most important things we can do, so on May 4th, at 6:30 pm, ET, along with my colleague Elizabeth Shoop, I’m hosting a free, live webinar:
Peace, Power, and Prosperity
No Matter What!
One evening. Real teaching. A practice you can use immediately.
With you in this,
Tammy
