- Azul Carolina Duque
(Below is the script that you can hear me narrate in this episode.)
Its January 20, 2026. I was going to publish this roundtable called death as transformation later this year to inaugurate the 7th season of the conscient podcast but I changed my mind – imagine that - and have added it to season 6 because I’ve decided to take a long break from producing both of my podcasts and my Substack in order to do some thinking and meditation and self-care but I wanted to get this very special episode out to you now in case I decide not to continue with the podcast after my break.
It's one of those pivotal moments.
Here’s back story on this episode.
In November 2025, Artistic Director of New Adventures in Sound Art, Darren Copeland, asked me if I would like to participate in an episode of his monthly Making Waves radio program, which is broadcast on WGXC 90.7 FM in New York's Upper Hudson Valley and also available as a podcast.
Darren wanted to talk about one of my favorite topics, climate change and asked me what would I like to talk about specifically? And to my surprise I immediately answered: death.
I went on to explain that I meant death in the sense of how our spirit and consciousness continues when our body goes back to the earth, and what might this spirit and consciousness sound like? I was also interested in how this heightened awareness might help us relate to complex issues like climate change and societal disruption.
So I helped Darren select an expert panel of sound artists and on December 2, 2025, I moderated a 55 minute recording for the December 13, 2025 edition of Making Waves that featured three former guests of my conscientpodcast : Azul Carolina Duque, who you can hear on e211 art as medicine, Kenneth Newby who you can hear on e207 living with grace and Wendelin Bartley who you can hear on e222 restoring our connection with nature.
So what you’re about to hear is a rebroadcast of this conversation.
This conversation is quite magical because we were able to share some very intimidate stories about our own vulnerabilities, our relationship to death and how our practices as sound artists relates to this transition.
You’ll hear that I ask each of my guests to respond to this 12-word sentence by a friend of mine, Tim Brodhead:
And won’t worry the episode is actually a lot of fun and quite enlightening. It’s really more about transition than an end. I’m so pleased that it concludes this chapter of the conscient podcast and in a way begins whatever might come next.
Thanks so much for listening. Thank you Darren, Azul, Kenneth and Wendelin.
See you next time.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
00:00:02 - 00:01:03 Claude Schryer
Episode 244. Roundtable. Greetings. It's January 20th, 2026, and I was going to publish this special roundtable called "Death as Transformation" later this year to inaugurate a seventh season of the conscient podcast. But I changed my mind. I'm known to do that, and tagged it onto this season, the current season, six, because I've decided to take a long break from producing both of my podcasts in English and in French, as well as my Substack, a calm presence, so that I could do some thinking and meditation and self-care, and self-care the way I learned from a course called "Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet." But before signing off—and I wrote my last Substack about this called "pressing pause" if you're interested to know more—before stopping for a while, I wanted to get this episode out because it was ready, and I think it's particularly relevant to the times in which we live. And for me, I guess it's a bit of a pivotal moment. Some thing happened on December 2nd that changed my life in a good way. So here's the backstory. In November 2025, artistic director of New Adventures in Sound Art, or NAISA, a fellow named Darren Copeland, a good friend, asked me if I would participate in his monthly radio program called "Making Waves" that's broadcast on WGXC 90.7 FM in New York's Upper Hudson Valley, which is also available as a podcast.
Darren said, "Would you be willing to come on the show and talk about climate change?" And I said, "I always like talking about climate change." He asked me what I would like to talk about specifically, and I, to my surprise, responded, "Death." I went on to talk about what I meant by that—death in the sense of how our spirit and consciousness continues when our body goes back to the earth. And I was interested in how the spirit and consciousness might sound like, what are artists doing in and around this phenomenon of transition. So I also mentioned to Darren that I was interested in heightening our awareness of how our approach to death might help us understand complex issues like climate change and societal disruption. So death was a bit of a through line. And so I worked with Darren, and we invited a panel of sound artists, and we had this conversation on December 2nd on Zoom. And I was the moderator, and we talked for about 55 minutes, which was broadcast on December 13th on the "Making Waves" program, but now is being rebroadcast, if you'd like, on conscient. So the three guests had all been guests on my podcast before, and they are Azul Carolina Duque from episode 211, "Art as Medicine," Kenneth Newby from episode 207, "Living with Grace," and Wendelin Bartley from episode 222, "Restoring Our Connection with Nature." And so it was a real pleasure for me to reconnect with each of them and to be able to quote from our initial conversation and bring that into the mix. And the conversation was quite magical because we had not rehearsed. We just spoke our very intimate stories about how we feel about our relationship to death, some of our vulnerabilities, some of the way that our art practices relate to this transition. So interesting territory for artists to explore, and there are also excerpts of some of the compositions and artworks by my guests that give you an idea and a flavor of the work. And the premise is very simple.
I gave them a 12-word sentence that a friend of mine, Tim Brodhead, had mentioned to me a few months ago, and that is, "Death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end." So they started from that as something to respond to, and it just went on from there. And don't worry, the episode is actually a lot of fun and quite enlightening. It's really more about the transition part than the transformation part than the end part. And I'm so pleased that it concludes this season, season six, that went on longer than I thought, but also this—let's call it a chapter of Conscient Podcast, the 345 episodes that I've done since May 2020. So that's kind of come to an end. I'm not saying I won't do more, but it will be different if and when I start it up again after my period of reflection and self-care. I want to thank listeners for hanging in there, for sending me feedback, for accompanying me in my unlearning and learning journey. And for this episode, warm thanks to Darren Copeland, Azul, Kenneth, and Wendolyn for their collaboration and for their insight. Happy listening. See you next time. Death as Transformation.
00:06:40 - 00:06:46 Darren Copeland
Welcome to "Making Waves," a show about sound art produced by New Adventures in Sound Art. You're hearing the opening from "Chasm" by Kenneth Newby off his album "From Solitude," music for Spectral Orchestra. Today's episode is guest-hosted by Claude Schryer. He produces the conscient podcast about art and the ecological crisis. Claude has invited three Canadian sound artists to have a discussion in response to this statement: "Death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end." All three artists have been on past episodes of the Conscient Podcast: Azul Carolina Duque, Kenneth Newby, and Wendelin Bartley. Initially, "Making Waves" invited Claude Schryer to chair a discussion on climate change. This discussion touches on the climate crisis, but through the subject of death: death in the sense of how spirit and consciousness continues when the body goes back to the earth. What might this spirit and consciousness sound like? How might this heightened awareness relate to climate change? Here's their discussion.
00:09:18 - 00:09:49 Claude Schryer
Hi everyone. Bonjour. My name is Claude Schryer, and I'm speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinaabeg Algonquin Nation, otherwise known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. And it's my pleasure, my great pleasure, and I think it'll be fun today, to moderate this panel with three friends of mine. They're also colleagues in the sound art world: Kenneth Newby, Wendelin Bartley, and Azul Carolina Duque. And you'll meet them in a minute, but I just want to give a little bit of background. All three of our guests today have been on my podcast, which is called conscient. And for those who don't know, it's about art and the ecological crisis, the relationship of art, what is the role of art, what are artists doing to change the world, that kind of thing. Conscient.ca, check it out. And I've produced about 350 episodes, and I was just about to take a break, and then Darren Copeland called me and said, "You want to do a show on climate change?" And I said, "Of course." But what I really want to talk about is death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end. And I had just had a friend say that to me, and I said, "That's what I really want to talk about." And of course, climate change is a very broad topic, and everything is interrelated. So I think we will get to climate change, but we're going to talk about energy and consciousness and how our guests relate to that and how it might or might not appear in their art, in their sound art, and other things. And those who know me will know that I've always been interested in metaphysical and spiritual things, and that's one of the reasons I was attracted to electroacoustic music, because of all those possibilities of expression. And it so happens that tomorrow is my today is December 2nd, is my 66th birthday, and as I get older, I'm thinking about what happens when you pass and what remains. And I've always had a feeling about it, but I'm thinking about it more. And in fact, I'm taking a course now called "Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet," which I recommend. It's really interesting. It's based on the work of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village group in France. And it's a journey to nurture insight, compassion, community, and mindful action. So it combines Buddhism and social action. And one of the things they talk about is the Diamond Sutra, which is a ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist text that focuses on emptiness, reality, and wisdom. And what caught my attention with the Diamond Sutra is how it questions notions of self, that ongoing issue of separatedness. I can't pronounce it. How we are separate from the world, which we're not, and what it means to be human, our relationships with other living beings, the more-than-humans, and the notion of lifespan. What is it actually? What could it be? And this was written so long ago. It's so impressive that humans have been thinking about these things for a long, long time. So that got me thinking about spirit and consciousness and what happens when your body goes back to the earth. What happens to that energy? Energy of the earth, creative energy, all of that. And so I asked my guests, and I'm so happy that they accepted the challenge to share some thoughts. And I don't expect definitive, final answers, right? So we're having a conversation about how the issue resonates for them or the topic. And so I'll ask each of them to have opening thoughts, and then we'll have a free-flowing conversation, and at the end, we'll try to wrap it up. And I think the hour will fly by, and I want to thank Darren and the "Making Waves" people for this opportunity to have an open conversation about things I think we all care about. So I'll start with Azul. Now, Azul, I've known for a number of years now, and she was a guest on episode 211, if you want to go back and listen to it. And it was called "Art and Medicine" and was recorded on September 16th, 2024, in Victoria, where I think you are today. And I'll just read you a bit of what Azul said because it really resonates for me. "What is a medicine that I can bring, not from a place of heroism, not from a place of savorism, but from a place of genuinely, honestly inquiring, asking, what is the medicine needed right now that my art can bring?" So Azul, how do you respond to this idea of death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end?
00:13:55 - 00:17:05 Azul Carolina Duque
There's so many inroads to this question and so many ways to feel about it, of course. And I think the one that is coming to me now, based on the quote that you just read, I forgot that I had said that. I think death might be one of the most relational acts possible. And when you were speaking about everything is interrelated, this course that you're taking on Buddhist philosophy and thought and teachings, the idea that we are related to everything, deeply entangled with everything. And so I think death is that threshold moment where that illusion is dissolved. Of course, I've never died or not in this form of Azul, so I don't really know what happens. But death as that moment of redistribution of nutrients, of memory, of rhythm, of vibration into the wider field, right, from a unified illusion of a single self into the remembering of an entangled self, I guess. And so also death as a teacher. I love to think about death as a teacher of surrender and a trust in the intelligence of the regeneration. And so I've done a lot of thinking and feeling and some accompanying of death in learning and training as a death tula. And I also work in relationship to the climate collapse and the polycrisis that we're living through, which is not only a climate situation but also a deeply social and political crisis that we're in. And so I also want to bring this conversation of death into I want to politicize the conversation about death a bit because it is sacred, and it is also deeply political, as in the death that we're experiencing right now, the genocides that are happening right now in the world are not natural. They're engineered. They're not part of a sacred cycle, or at least I don't see it that way. It's death that has been weaponized inside a system that cannot metabolize its own hunger. And so the last thing I'll share about this is that I do have this deep devotion and commitment to protect life and honor death, honor a good death. And right now, so many species, ecosystems, and people are being denied a good death, of that sacred moment of encounter with deep entanglement. And that is something that I don't think we should take lightly or be careful to spiritually bypass in our conversation. I think that's what I'll share for now.
00:17:08 - 00:18:18 Claude Schryer
Thank you. Kenneth, we only met a few years ago, and you're a media artist, composer, performer, educator, interaction designer, audio producer, and other things. We sat down yeah, we sat down in your backyard for episode 207, the day after I met with Azul, called "Living with Grace." And I'm going to read you a little bit of something you said that's quite relevant to what we're talking about today. "The planet's not dying. Our place and our version of it may be dying. So how do we deal with that? How do we accept and live with the knowledge that our version of it is dying?" It's not something to panic about in the sense that the whole thing is going away, hopefully. We don't know. But I think the notion of living with grace, living without fear, trying to live without anxiety, because those are just places where we flounder, shut off, and develop toxic escapes. So Kenneth, how do you respond to this idea of death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness and not an end?
00:18:20 - 00:21:08 Kenneth Newby
I feel that in our culture, we're typically afraid of death. It's not something that people like to talk about or address. We tend to ignore it largely. And I think if you go back to the early Greek philosophers, Socrates said the purpose for philosophy is to prepare ourselves for death. And they had a culture that would help us prepare for death. And I think now more than ever, we need to be thinking about what that means. Your question, what is it, death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end, it proposes a kind of many, many potential metaphysical answers, and none of which we have much confirmation for about what happens after. But what we do have is that we know the transformation part. And I think that's what we should be focusing on, is what is that experience like, and how do we make a good death, and how do we confront, engage with that experience in a way that is conscious and not fearful? And that's the place where my work for years now has been trying to use music as a vehicle for meditation, for inner experience, for guiding one towards that deeper place where we confront something that's potentially fearful, but perhaps it's better thought of as something that's sublime in the sense that it's awe-inspiring. What is that transition going to be like, and will we be ready to confront it? And of course, picking up on what Azul has alerted us to, we're in the middle of a collective dying of some sort. The old systems are dying away. The planet is crying out that our weight is far too heavy on it. And we need to find a way to make that transformation for ourselves and the rest of the world. So that would be a top-level answer to your question.
00:21:11 - 00:21:16 Claude Schryer
Thank you. Wendelin, how are you? We've known each other for 40 years or so, going back to our time at McGill University in the '80s. And you're a composer, a sound healer, a performance artist, and many other things. And you have a book coming out, which you can tell us about later. I know your work to explore the human voice and its relations to rituals, the sacred spirituality, ancestors. And we talk about some of that in episode 222 called "Restoring Our Connection with Nature," which we recorded in Hyde Park. And at the end of the episode, you sang to the pond or the lake that was there. It was a very beautiful moment. So I want to read a short excerpt of one of the things you said. "How do we restore our connection with nature?" Because I think that part of the crisis that we're in, especially with the climate, stems from the fact that we've been disconnected from our relationship to nature. So how do we restore that? How do we get back in touch with non-human beings? And I'm sure you meant more than human beings there. So what came to mind when I proposed this death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end?
00:22:36 - 00:26:26 Wendelin Bartley
Actually, the very first thing that came to my mind and it's interesting, Kenneth, that you mentioned the Greeks because the first thing that came to my mind was about the Eleusinian mysteries that were celebrated for 2,000 years, at least. And they were celebrated outside of Athens at Eleusis. And I visited there 20 years ago and had an incredible experience with my voice there, where I felt like all this energy just came rushing into my voice in a way that was quite overpowering. Anyway, the reason I bring up the Eleusinian mysteries was because the whole point of becoming an initiative and initiate in the mysteries was to lose the fear of death. And I think it was Socrates who said something about happy is the person who has seen, who's gone through that process because they no longer fear death. And I think that what happened we don't totally know what happened at Eleusis in that process. But I have written about it in my book because I'm telling the story about what happened to me there. And so I just wanted to actually read a little bit of some of the material I found because I think it's relevant to this idea of energy consciousness, transformation of energy, because it's a description that this one author wrote about. And he writes that the mysteries focused on an encounter with the organic light. But this was like a luminosity that was and some described it as a soft, rushing fountain, others as a torrential downpour of brilliance. But then also the sound, the organic light was also heard. It was described as a silence that rolled like thunder, a stillness that sang. And within this stillness, layered tones emerged, vibrating with deep intelligence. And so really, what was revealed was the soul of the Earth, the knowing that our perception doesn't originate with us but flows into us from the Earth, from the cosmos. And so really, it's connected to this, what you quoted me as saying about restoring our relationship with nature. And one of the ways that I approach it is by using sound as a mode of communication between my essence and the essence of what I perceive as the sentience of the Earth, of the elements, of the water, the trees, rocks, whatever. And so that's how I've cultivated my own relationship and helped to guide others into that experience as well. But in terms of the death, I think it's thinking about death, I think it's this idea of the energy that those people experienced at Eleusis and how, as you said, Kenneth, it was a whole culture that cultivated that preparedness and opened themselves to seeing beyond what we see now into this light, into this sound. Yeah, that was the first thing that came to my mind.
00:26:29 - 00:28:48 Claude Schryer
Well, we'll expand on all of this. I love the quote because it has a reference to vibrations and sound. And that's essentially what we've chosen to do mostly as artists and teachers and sound in one way or another. Azul does a lot of things but includes at least my exchanges with her have been around sound and all of the healing properties of sound. So we won't be able to cover all that, but the episodes that I referred to do go a bit more in depth. What I find interesting for me is why that sentence just shook up my life. It was a friend. We were having a conversation. And it just all of a sudden, I said, "Well, why don't I think more about that? What have I been doing all my life in not being more connected to the good energy that I have and that it will inevitably go on somehow and just celebrate that, be as good a person I can, and then leave the planet as peacefully as I can?" And yet, we have all this dogma around the fear of death that Kenneth and all of you talked about. So that connected with art is interesting because in our art making, we are inevitably talking about the things we are passionate about and trying to explore, maybe the things that we fear. And in my own work, I've always felt that in field recordings, there were spirits. And it's really hard to talk about this. People think I'm insane. But I feel it. And I've always felt it that when I'm capturing a sound, first of all, I've learned through a colleague of Azul's, Vanessa Andriotti, how to ask permission because I didn't do that before implicitly. Now I do explicitly say, "Does this feel right? Should I be recording this?" And then I receive information from the real sound and the recorded sound in ways that are artistic. I don't even know if I don't think it's art. I think it's just life. It's just the way that the vibrations are received in my body. Maybe they're resonating with my ancestors, all that kind of thing. Anyway, let's do another tour de table and have further thoughts. I'm sure you've scribbled some notes. Azul, where are you at in this conversation? What do you want to add?
00:28:49 - 00:31:43 Azul Carolina Duque
Oh, so many thoughts. I mean, both of you, Kenneth and Wendelyn, spoke about preparing for a good death. And it makes me think about the Huniqui community in Brazil, indigenous community in the Amazon. And when we they were our research partners for many years. And when we went down there and had our conversations with the elders, we said, "Well, what is the purpose of education?" And they said, "Well, education should be there to prepare us to have a good death." Well, actually, no, they said, "To prepare people to be good elders." And then we said, "What does it mean to be a good elder?" And they said, "To have a good death, to know how to have a good death." And so the relationship between life and death is such an intimate one. Death is the greatest teacher of how to live a good life, which is, I think, Claudia, what you were sharing. And it feels so inspiring and beautiful to me to think about the role that music plays in all these cultures that have such deep, rich, complex relationships with death that are not fear-based, where grief is an entity that you engage with. And so I'm thinking about the work that I've been doing recently. I've been training on being a song catcher. So working with songs as living entities, which is Claudia, you and I have done some work around that together. But working with the intelligence that a song brings. And some songs are grief songs. And so they move the grief around. And they help us collectivize our heart so that we can grieve together through song, not through language. And I think the other layer there that is interesting is that language, which is what we're using now to communicate, can only get to certain dimensions or layers of reality or layers of emotion. But then song, in my experience, can really work through much deeper and wider levels of dimensions of emotion and experience, which is, I think, what we were talking about, Wendelyn, in sound healing. And so songs who have their own intelligence and who come and do work in our plane, it can help us have a better relationship with death, with ourselves. And the last thing I'll share is, Wendelyn, you said well, you were quoted about, "We've been disconnected from nature." And the way I feel about it is that we are nature. There's no division between humans and nature. And so we have been disconnected from ourselves, ultimately. And that disconnection from the self, again, leads to a disconnection from death, which is also another part of the self. And I think, yeah, sound and art is just essential to having those relationships and those conversations.
00:31:47 - 00:31:48 Claude Schryer
Kenneth?
00:31:52 - 00:34:05 Kenneth Newby
I'm struck by what you said, Claude, about when you're recording sound in nature and feeling that there's something special in your relationship with it. And so my metaphysic, which I think is increasingly supported by some science, is that mind and matter are inextricably bound up together and that it's mind all the way down. And I have always felt that music is one of the best vehicles for encountering and exploring that relationship with mind because music, since I was a teenager, music seemed to me to be a kind of thought unfolding. Music is mind or a manifestation of mind, perhaps more than most other art forms, partly because it's an image of time itself. And time, it's an image of the becoming that's unfolding, this extraordinary thing that we're a part of. It's an expression of the rhythms of nature, the resonance that we feel when we encounter another living process. It's extraordinary. And music, being in the expanded sense of all of the sounds that we encounter, they're all evidence of that unfolding, that process that we are a part of. And so music, that's been the motivation for me, probably, to continue to make music, to try and explore that quality of music that is really very, very good at reaching inside. It takes us in as well as connecting us with what's outside. And we're at the boundary of that inside-outside place and have the gift of being able to experience it and reflect on it and play with it.
00:34:08 - 00:34:10 Claude Schryer
Wendelin, do you want to add something?
00:34:10 - 00:39:08 Wendelin Bartley
Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on what both of you have been talking about. Music and, Azul, you mentioned the song. And it made me think of the Keen, the Irish Keen in particular. I recently took a course with a woman who's done PhD-level research into the tradition of Keen in Ireland. And we learned some Keens. And I learned about the tradition of it. And it's very complex. And it's not just kind of a wailing sound. It's like there's a very deliberate and quite complex structure to what a Keen experience is about. And I learned how to sing some of these songs. And while I was taking that course, a good friend passed away. And I just found it so helpful being able to drop into that Keen, that’s in Gaelic. And I learned to sing in Gaelic with some help, of course, because it's not an easy language. But there's something about the song that is meant to help the spirit leave and go to the next manifestation. And that's the whole point. It's sort of about grief, yes, but it's also about helping that person cross over. And yeah, so I think that sound and music and also, thinking, too, when you were talking, Kenneth, about music and the way that you articulated it, I was thinking about my own experience, again, at Eleusis because there was something that happened in the sound that I was making. And it was and it reminds me of that level that you can get to with sound as into this kind of pure essence of vibration, and especially with the voice, I find. But I'm not saying that's only with the voice. But because it's coming from within our bodies, there's something connected between the voice and the soul and that somehow the voice is an expression of the inner life. And so there's some way in which we can get into touch with that deeper spirit self within us that I think is what is the essence that does live on, does move into a different state of being at death.
00:39:17 - 00:39:21 Claude Schryer
Personally, I'm a big fan of silence on radio. So I'm just going to indulge myself here.
00:39:24 - 00:39:25 Kenneth Newby
Dead air is not so scary.
00:39:27 - 00:39:59 Claude Schryer
Dead. Air. Right. Well, I think you've said a lot of what I wanted to talk about already. So that's already an achievement. Yeah, I'm interested to hear more well, just any further thoughts because as you listen to each other, we kind of are going deeper and finding affinities. And maybe you have questions for each other. But who wants to jump in and take this a bit further?
00:40:03 - 00:41:20 Wendelin Bartley
I'll jump in. Azul, you mentioned that you work as a death doula. Is that correct? And in preparation for this conversation, I talked to a friend of mine who also does that work. And she works in hospices. And she's also a sound healer, colleague of mine. And so she works using her voice with making sound to help people transition. And anyway, in the course of our conversation, she mentioned the presence that comes into a room when someone has died and that that's I was surprised when she said this. She said, "That's the reason I like doing this work, is to be able to experience that incredible sensation.. being encompassed by love or some other pure vibration of well-being that she experiences when she's with someone." She said, "Almost that you can step inside the room and feel it, step outside the room, and then it's gone." So there's something about that. And maybe you could say more about that because you have more experience than I do. I was just recounting her experience.
00:41:22 - 00:44:40 Azul Carolina Duque
Yeah, well, so the way I phrase it is I've studied and trained as a death doula with other death doulas. But the path I've taken, actually, is to use sound in spaces of hospice and to go into a space of you could call it improvisation, but it, I think, is much more than that and just channel with my voice what needs to be channeled in the space. And usually, it supports people to relax into letting go of that connection between the body and the spirit because there's a lot of grasping and holding on very tightly for all the reasons that we've spoken about already. And life has taken me into spaces of supporting people that are going through abortions so in that threshold of life and death, too. And the way I've naturally went about it was I just found myself using sound and using voice. The training I took supported me with learning so much about grief and death and the process. But then when I was actually there, it was the relationship with song as living that came through. And I think, Claudia, that really relates to the quote that you brought at the beginning about, "What is my medicine? What is the medicine as an artist that I can come here to offer?" And that's one of the medicines that I stumbled upon that surprised me. But I got really excited, Wendelyn, when you said presence because it's largely I think that is at the essence of what supporting transition has taught me, is that it is a quality of presence. And it is when my spirit is present so fully in the room that the spirit of the other human also feels present. And in that connection between spirits and the music is a bridge. But it's not the song that is doing it. It's not the sound. It is not me. It is the quality of my presence and the presence of the person who's there that then allows, I think, allows for a surrender to happen and a transition to happen. And what I'm trying to research in my own work right now is how can those types of teachings be translated into the greater deaths that we're encountering right now in society with the systems dying, Kenneth, that you mentioned? And how can we learn to let go of them because we're holding so tightly to structures that no longer serve us? But also, how can we honor the irreversible deaths of ecosystems and of cultures, of languages? How many songs? The tradition that you were talking about, Wendelyn, that tradition many traditions like those have already been lost because of colonialism, the continuation of colonialism. How much knowledge about death and song and spirit are we losing? And so that's also part of how can we bring all this medicine that we have as artists to be present in those transitions? And I'm curious, Kenneth, what you think about that.
00:44:41 - 00:45:49 Kenneth Newby
Well, I'm reminded of what Wade Davis reminded us of, that when we lose a language and human languages are being lost at an alarming rate, that every time we lose a language, we lose a whole cosmology, a whole set of stories that are unique in terms of understanding our place in the world. And a lot of those are very old stories from cultures that lived in a better balance than we do now. So we're losing essential knowledge when we lose that cultural information. And that's been a concern of mine for many years, is that notion of cultural information and information in the sense that Gregory Bateson taught us that information is the difference that makes a difference and that cultural differences make a difference in that they're significantly different from what we know in our own culture. And they have much to teach us, that what we have now is definitely not the best approach to living in the world. So yeah.
00:45:52 - 00:47:00 Wendelin Bartley
Yeah, and I think that was one of the reasons why I was so drawn to learning about the Keen because, absolutely, it was lost and stamped out deliberately by the Roman Catholic Church. And in fact, one of the ways it survived, surprisingly, was the Keene survived was that the words were translated into some well, there was a whole body of Keens called the Mary Keens. And so there are all these lyrics about Mary and her grief at losing Jesus and so on. So those stories were implanted within the old Keens. And that was kind of one of the few ways that at least some of those melodies survived. Yeah, they were encoded, right, so they could survive. Yeah. So yeah. And this woman, Mary Mclaughlin, she's done a lot of work at trying to reclaim that tradition, yeah, because it was considered demonic or whatever, evil or whatever. The church really did a number on it.
00:47:00 - 00:47:15 Azul Carolina Duque
Yeah, and the church really did a number on our relationship with death altogether, right, the fear and the binary of heaven and hell. And it really distorted it quite a bit. Exactly.
00:47:17 - 00:50:38 Claude Schryer
Well, recognizing those situations, what I'm finding interesting is well, I'm in retirement now, so I'm in a very privileged time and space. I went to our cottage recently, and I burnt some of my archives because I felt that those relationships needed to go back into the earth. And I keep them in my heart, but I didn't need to have all the paper and all the stuff, and nobody else could really use it. So I think we all have our own forms of ritual and procedures not procedures, but ceremonies to make sense of the world. And the arts help us. Sometimes they hinder us as well, right? The arts are not an absolute good, right? Some of the stories are reinforcing the things we just talked about, the power of the church and all that. But I think we're learning to work our way through it. That's why this course with Thich Nhat Hanh's group has been so helpful to me because it allowed me to think about deep listening in a new way. I thought I knew quite a bit about listening. Well, not so much. So many interesting things that came through Thich Nhat Hanh's experience with the boat people and other situations where he had to take his Buddhism and activate it. The world needed to change. And he and his fellow Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, needed to engage. So that, to me, is interesting because I'm a student of Zen. And I'm thinking about what to do with the rest of my life. And I do this podcast, and I do this and that. But what is most useful, and what is most relevant, and where you do the least amount of harm at this point in your life? You can not travel. You can do this and that. But then the deeper questions need a lot of letting go, letting go of my education, letting go of the assumptions I have, which moves towards emptiness, which is a form of fullness. And so I wish to everyone listening the time and space to reflect upon what your life really is right now, who you really are, and what you want to do with your time, and how can you help heal the world, not in the sense of preserving the systems that are toxic, as we've talked about, but actually living truly in harmony with all of the vibrations, let's call it, of the earth and of the cosmos, right, because the earth is not isolated either. It's part of a system of systems of systems. So it's just too bad we're not as literate as we could or should be on these things. But we're working on it. We're talking about it right now, right? So we're coming near the end. And I know Azul has to go back to her studies. And by the way, Azul, I wanted to just recognize that you're part of a collective called The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. And that has been very helpful to me. There's a course called Facing Human Wrongs that comes out of University of Victoria. And other tools, there's a new book by Vanessa Andriotti called Outgrowing Modernity. These are all ways of understanding the complexity that we're in. And they're very, very helpful. And so I appreciate and it's not really education in the conventional sense. It's more like a welcoming into other ways of being and other ways of seeing things. And then you kind of work your way through it. Does that make sense, Azul? Did I say that correctly?
00:50:40 - 00:51:43 Azul Carolina Duque
You did, except there is a bit of an update on that, which is that the collective is closing. Actually, we've reached the end of our inquiry together. And so from now onwards, it will be the former Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. And what we're doing now is we're each going our way to take the pedagogy that we developed over 10 years and take it where it needs to go, take different shapes, and yeah, go, yeah. We're in that depth. And part of our pedagogy was hospicing systems and hospicing. So we recognized when it was time for this inquiry to transform, quite literally. We said, "This shape has done what it needed to do in the world. And now let's transform, dissolve, die, and let the spores grow in other places." So yeah, I'd say it's actually the first time I see it in public. So here we are.
00:51:44 - 00:52:39 Claude Schryer
Well, I had heard rumors of that. But I'm glad you clarified that it's a positive thing because I've been part of collectives where there was a natural end. It's not that we couldn't do more. It's just it felt right to stop at that point. And then there's breakoff groups. Sometimes people collaborate two or three together, and off it goes with the energy, the natural energy. Let's do one last tour de table. I know we're almost near the end. And any final thoughts? And in my podcast, I always try to have action points and what should people do. And this is not an easy one to do. It's like, "Have a good death." Well, it's not that simple. But I do invite you to not so many give advice, but to anything that you would think is useful for people to think about further or documents or questions that would take us even further and down this path.
00:52:40 - 00:55:28 Kenneth Newby
Well, two things. To answer your question directly, I'm a member of a group here in Victoria called EPIC. It's the Elders' Psychedelic Inquiry Circle. And as the name implies, it's a group of elders. I'm in my 69th year now. So these questions around what happens at the end are becoming ever more present in my life. But we gather every two weeks or so and discuss the usefulness of the psychedelic experience in a variety of healing modalities. But also one of the topics we've addressed on several occasions has been the issue of dying and how those deep experiences can act as like they did in the rituals that elucidate a rehearsal for encountering that final transition and learning how to be there in the face of that sublime experience without fear. And so there's that. And the other thing is, Claude, when you sent out your initial invitation, you had two questions. And we haven't talked about the second one, which was, what is the sound that comes out of this transformation? And I don't have an answer for that. But I've always had this sense that I agreed with the old Vedic statement, "Nada Brahma, the world is sound or God is sound." And I link that up with my own well, we know that everything is some form of vibration. And perhaps it is ultimately a harmonic series with the fundamental being the wavelengths of the universe and the harmonics mounted on top of that in an infinite series. And the beauty of the harmonic series is for anyone who's ever listened to it, it has this extraordinary quality of resonance. It's because it's such a profoundly fractal structure. Every harmonic within the harmonic series is itself the fundamental of another harmonic series. So it's an infinite collection of harmonic series. And every sound that gets made in our experience is but part of that ultimate vibration that's everywhere. So there's my metaphysic. It's somewhat supported by science and somewhat supported by intuition. And it's guided the way that I've made music for most of my life, fascination with that pattern. So they're my closing ideas.
00:55:32 - 00:55:56 Azul Carolina Duque
I love that, Kenneth. And I think that question I think the way I read it was, what does it sound like? It was like, "Well, death is not the end but transformation. And what is the sound? What does it sound like?" And my thought was, well, it sounds what you just said. It is vibration. It is vibration.
00:55:56 - 00:55:57 Kenneth Newby
It's a great chorus. It's a great chorus.
00:55:58 - 00:57:25 Azul Carolina Duque
It's a great chorus that's going on. Yeah. And then I thought, well, any space from which any sound that comes from the depth of silence, perhaps I just came out of an experience of 10 days of silence through the Vipassana course, which is also a stream of Buddhism, Claude. And I learned so much about silence. And I thought, as a musician, I need to spend as a young musician, I need to spend time with silence because I never have. And the songs that came from the depth of silence felt much more connected to that chorus that you're talking about, Kenneth. And maybe I can do a short offering. Let's see if I can bring something from there. I think that's a possibility of what it sounds like.
00:57:25 - 00:57:30 Kenneth Newby
Thank you. I'm sure that's part of it.
00:57:31 - 00:57:33 Azul Carolina Duque
Little snippet in a corner of something.
00:57:41 - 01:00:31 Wendelin Bartley
So yeah, it's a profound question. What does it sound like? Because as we, I guess, just experience, it drops us into some place, some space, some presence that's kind of undefinable. And so perhaps that's really the relationship to the first question about what is this transformation of energy that happens. It's like this I don't know. One thing that comes to my mind is I've been working with brainwave entrainment and listening to some soundtracks created by this man. Jeffrey Thompson is his name. I've been doing a bit of studying with him. He's incredibly astute about the depth and the depths of the science that he works with. But the vision is all about kind of being able to entrain people together so that we're in a more coherent state collectively. And when I listen to I listen fairly regularly to one of his soundtracks for sleep. And as a musician, it's a very odd experience because when you listen to music, you more or less can follow the flow of what's going on with the sounds and how they relate. And that's part of the listening process, I guess, is just entering into that space. But whenever I listen to him, I can't do that in the traditional way of listening to music. I don't know what's I actually don't know what's going on. And I asked him about that. He said, "Well, just thank you. I'm doing my job because what I'm trying to do is get you beyond all that other stuff that goes on." So I think that that space that's being generated in my consciousness as I listen is part also of this field of vibration that we've been discussing. And being able to step into that even while we're still alive and have some experience of that, some reference point for that, perhaps could be one way to prepare ourselves as they did at elusus. Because they did step into some, as you said, a rehearsal. I think that's the word you used, Kenneth, like a practice run of being able to confront that luminosity that you greet, that greets you.
01:00:35 - 01:00:51 Claude Schryer
Well, on that note, I think we'll wrap it up because I want to thank you so much for your time. And we'll keep the conversations going. And I hope our listeners tune in. Take care, everyone.
01:04:18 - 01:04:53 Darren Copeland
You've been listening to an excerpt of Wendellyn Bartley's composition Stone Mysteries from her 2012 album Sound Dreaming. Prior to that, of course, was the discussion hosted by Claude Schreier from The Conscient podcast with Wendellyn Bartley as well as Kenneth Newby and as well Carolina Duque. They were exploring the statement, "Death as a natural transformation of energy and consciousness, not an end." And that brings Making Waves today to an end. We'll return one month from now. Thank you for listening.