CLEARING by Kenan Serenbetz

A few years ago, I had a health crisis in which I was unable to use my voice without great pain. In this difficult period, most of my regular pursuits were brought to a screeching halt. Grief and anxiety carried me into a new awareness, in which I registered for the first time the great diversity of life that our landscape holds. I plunged myself headlong into learning the names and characters of the plants who had surrounded me for years.

As anyone who comes to appreciate their local ecology knows, the learning process is fraught. Knowledge comes with sorrow. To learn the history of our land is to learn the history of colonialism and genocide, not only of native peoples and cultures but also of the plants, animals, and ecosystems that grew together with them. Mourning the devastation of climate change and habitat loss moves from general to specific, for unique beings and ways of life, with names and habits and stories.

We are tasked in our short lives with imagining a new way forward and fighting to bring it to fruition. But without awareness and specificity our imaginations are grasping at straws. It is not enough to simply wish for abstract conceptions of “wildness”, connection or preservation, or something “green.” True justice must come from relationship. This music, at its core, is documentation of my fraught and clumsy attempts to build that relationship. It is permeated with grief; I myself cannot disentangle what part of it is for the land and the beings that I was coming to know, and what is for the deep sadness and panic over the temporary loss of a vital part of my identity. It is surely both.

At its best, I hope this will serve as an invitation. Learn about the land you live on. Who lived here before you? What people? What animals? What plants? How have things changed? Who and what has survived, resisted, thrived? And most importantly, how will these relationships change you and the shape of your imagination?

-Kenan Serenbetz-

Kenan Serenbetz creates music that explores and extols the web of relationships that we share with all the beings of the earth. His work is rooted in preindustrial vocal traditions, ecology, and plant medicine.