THE UNSTOPPABLE STIRRING is an emergent multi-media song-cycle that weaves poetry, vocal and filmic improvisation, reciprocal inter-species conversations, and autoethnographic narrative to explore kinning with the Living World and one another.

Its purpose is to aid humans to recognize our profound connections to all life forms and to become more honest, effective change-makers (and kin) in the face of extinction, threats to democracy, and the imperative to dismantle systems of supremacy and greed. Understanding these ills are inextricably connected, the Project takes a mythic approach to healing the human heart.

Begun as expressive autoethnographic research in October 2021 with initial presentation at Symposium:Extinction (Borrowed Time conference, art-earth, UK, November 2021), THE UNSTOPPABLE STIRRING has grown into a longer-range project with early selections shared in public performance, video (November 2021) and printed photo essay (May 2022).

Here are some “first fruits” of the Project and Living Questions guiding the process thus far.

Living Questions

If we are in the beginning of the 6th extinction, how does this reality dawn on humans viscerally, non-verbally, imaginally, beyond heralding calls to awaken, voiced daily by activists, artists and the news worldwide?
To what degree are we humans, with capacious conscious and unconscious intelligence, registering shock waves far beyond our immediate environs in or out of rhythm with sea-level rise, extreme weather and loss of species?
What are the songs and gestures emerging from earth herself?
Who among us doesn’t wake in the wee hours, antennae trembling? Feeling the willful close-minded habit to notice or avoid anomalies shifting, to feeling the surf, the interstitial fluid, the connectedness of all things, the porosity, the evidence of heartbreak?
What about action, inaction, activism, denial? How do we cope?
How might listening lead to art and art lead to listening?
And allowing such expression, how will I—through this
sharing—and we—be moved?

Judith-Kate Friedman
Mossy Rock, 2021

Rocks [folk-blues vocals and guitar]

When I hold the rocks that have lived for millions
Eons and eons of stories pour forth
Long before the clocks knew how to give us tears
or count the days since we were born

Now you laugh, you always laugh when you catch my eye
I’ve learned you laugh even when I’m not lookin’
But your intention is to cut through lies
and remind us we’re cookin’

There’s no snow on the mountains in the summer anymore
What about the alpine meadows? What is all this sorrow for?

When we treat the earth like a prisoner of war
Tortured deep into a fracking plunder
Broken bones of the ones who were
are waiting for the rescuers of thunder

I am kinning, we are spinning in this thinning place we keen
Miracles come shining through us when we bring an end to greed

When I hold the rocks, I feel an old refrain
A living pulse can’t be extracted from its vein
Feel it for yourself, underneath the ground remains
Cherishing our sources makes us sane

Time elapsing, ice collapsing. Is it true we’ve only 8 years more
before oceans drown devotions and mighty seas devour the shore?

When I hold the rocks that have lived for millions
Eons and eons of stories pour forth
Long before the clocks knew how to give us tears
or count the days since we were born