We’re here
for this song.
Hum Dome is a real space that we make, tend, & inhabit together in each session. The dome (from domus—home) holds us in our work of integration & expansion. Singing is powerful medicine. It is dynamic breath work and embodiment deep dive. We sometimes encounter challenging patterns as our voices open our bodies & shift the living field. We sometimes get a bit weird & wild as we listen & explore. The dome is a sturdy container.
The cardinal directions offer spatial & relational orientation. Natural cycles set our rhythms: we work with the sacred, nested metronomes of inhale & exhale, open & close, sunrise & sunset, waxing & waning, the turning of the seasons, our constantly circulating heartbeat. The central channel of the body—our resonant core—is a trustworthy axis we can always return to.
When we gather in person, we sit in a physical dome: rooted, adorned, & aligned. When we circle up virtually, we raise the dome energetically as we develop our container for the session.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “To Nature”
The Dome
The Medicine
We’re made to sing. Every culture & spiritual tradition sings. Song is our shared birthright.
Your voice is both a powerful tool that you can learn to wield more skillfully, and an animate force in its own right that can carry & change you.
Every body can make & encounter & be changed by sound, because sound is not just a phenomenon of the ears: it is a physical energy wave that moves all matter. The field of bioacoustics studies whole ecosystems signaling, mingling, negotiating, adapting, and orienting through sound.
Before humans even spoke, we heard Life singing and we sang back. Everywhere in the world, we sing to our babies. We sing in play. We sing to remember. We sing to catalyze & navigate altered states of consciousness. We sing in devotion (praise songs), in grief (keening), in meditation (mantra), to recall & express our lifeways & commitments (songlines), to deepen purpose & coherence (hymns, work songs, ritual invocation).
Hum Dome’s vocal & embodiment techniques emerge from many years of personal & group practice in devotional singing, Dzochen Buddhist toning, spoken word poetry and oral storytelling, liberatory somatics & mythosomatics, song circles, yoga, jazz improvisation, embedded listening, & animist folkways.
The living center of the Hum Dome practice is invocation: direct, experiential participation in the wider web that holds us in place & time, expressed in our sounds, words, sensations, shifting relational field, & emergent investigations.
The Bard
Welcome! I’m CdV. I’m a hedge bard, a hearth keeper, a mama, and a steward of land & the liminal deeply rooted in my little end-of-the-road mountain home—homeland of Nimiipuu & Cayuse people. This place is changing. I’m changing. So are you. We are in this fraught rich whirl together, feeling our ways. I try to act like it, and to meet you where you are in it: heart wide open, space well held.
In some ways, Hum Dome was seeded twenty years ago, when I was sixteen and first transformed a mountainside blanket fort into a consciousness-expanding bell-cocoon with beloved music-mates.
In other ways, Hum Dome has arrived spoke by spoke in the years since I broke apart giving birth to my son. Matrescence initiated me. Daily song-prayer & ritual practice have helped me feel the support that is always available, grow wiser & wilder where the floods came through, heal towards my next shape, & give back to my babies & beloveds. Thank you.
I feel our birthright of song as a golden thread that goes ALL the way back—to the very first hearth. I trust this homing signal absolutely. I hear my Cajun grandmothers & my German uncles & my long tangled lines of grain-reapers & orchard keepers, drunks & devotees, travelers & pirates, scholars & healers, all singing—harvest songs, love songs, songs for praising, songs for changing—despite & alongside the pain & harm, displacement & grief. The songs hold it all, & move it, & carry us.
We are Life, singing. I’m in service to this great song, and listening for it, always: in myself, in place, and in you.
I’ve carried my thread of Life’s song through decades of writing, land tending & food systems work, teaching & learning, Indigenous-led conservation & Land Back restoration initiatives (may all of us hear those songs), pilgrimage, death & dying, facilitation, soul initiation, ritual practice & community care. Now I work in place-based education; play my part in the Great Turning via art, a podcast, and writings; and steward Hum Dome.
If you’re here, you’re here on purpose. Welcome. I can’t wait to hear what’s moving you.
Ready to Sing Back?
Reach out with questions or to schedule an exploratory call.