Tierra Valiente is the Heart of Doe Paoro’s New Album

[This is a guest essay from Doe Paoro (Sonia Kreitzer); all words are from her!]

Img Cred: Yael Marantz

Over the past two years of working on my upcoming record, I’ve found sanctuary and orientation in Toni Cade Bambara’s call to action: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” At this moment, I feel artists are being entrusted with more than the responsibility of soberly reflecting the state of the world. We are also called to stretch the bounds of imagination to summon and seed into being more life-affirming, just possibilities. 

My new record is about collapse – about living in an era where so much is unraveling. We’re witnessing the rise of fascism, accelerating climate catastrophe, concurrent genocides, opening the Pandora’s box of AI, and the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands to feed capitalism – just to name a few. And yet, alongside the devastation, many are awakening to understanding how quantum our entanglement is with one another. While billionaires build their siloed survival bunkers, countless others are turning toward community and  discovering the resilience  that emerges when diverse individuals come together in coherence, solidarity and kinship with each other and the more-than-human world. 

Living Through Collapse was created from this witnessing, recorded between Los Angeles and Costa Rica. These two locations deeply informed the pulse and emotional landscape of the music. In Los Angeles, I felt the grief of inhabiting a dying empire – a city scarred by wildfires, pierced by the violence of ICE raids tearing families and communities apart, and overshadowed by our government steadily stripping away rights as it descends further into authoritarianism.

I have been fortunate to be spending most of my time in Costa Rica, where I am part of a community called Tierra Valiente. Envisioned as a “Center for Applied Cultural Transition” within the context of late-stage capitalism, Tierra Valiente is rooted in the understanding that the world as we know it is composting, and must compost, in order to give rise to something new.  Together, we are experimenting with decolonial ways of living beyond the oppressive logics of racial hierarchy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It is a humble, ongoing experiment, we  don’t claim to have the answers, but we hold a shared prayer to walk in this way, to continue to unlearn, remember and co-evolve in service to life. As part of this commitment, the land we steward is held in trust rather than as private property, we sustain a mutual-aid network in the community in which we’re embedded, we are actively regenerating land and protecting cultural and biological biodiversity.

I find it seductive and enlivening to spend time in a place where people are committed to these intentions. At Tierra Valiente, the spaces  themselves are designed according to the principles of biomimicry, imbuing a sense of  freedom and beauty when moving through them. For example, the roof of our dining area is modeled after a Tabacon leaf, and there’s a childlike joy in gathering to eat beneath it. We also host gatherings with different wisdom keepers and educators. Most recently, we held a  gathering on ancestral lineage healing and each year I  host a voice activation circle to welcome the  New Years. We don’t call these “retreats,” because our aim is not for people to escape or retreat. Rather, we invite people to come here to root and remember who they are beyond the conditioning of dominant culture. This place offers, I believe, a landscape for generative dissolution.

The voice of the land here is beautiful and loud. By day, cicadas and birds weave their songs. By night, the frogs gather in a great choir. Their presence creates a natural orientation, reminding us to become right-sized, to recognize ourselves as one voice among many in a vast, animate chorus.  When I first tried  recording vocals here, I grew frustrated, unable to capture a track without the sounds of animals in the background. Then I realized that was the problem. We are always erasing them. So I chose to include the jungle’s voices in this record, and I believe the music is stronger and more loving because of it.

This record is an offering to hold space for the grief of where we are as a global family, while also attuning to the infinite possibilities of where we might yet go. In the rainforest, my dreams speak louder and in the company of friends who share similar dreams for the world, I found myself able to dream bigger than ever before. That spirit lives inside this music. My hope is that listeners can  hear the dreaming woven through it, and feel empowered to dream alongside us.