My path in medicine has been balanced with a life in the arts since the beginning of my journey. I grew up singing, influenced by my musically talented grandmother and my mother, who was on the way to become a concert pianist when her life path got redirected by the arranged marriage to my father in Northern India. When I got to college, I studied theater and molecular biology. I learned more about how to be an effective doctor through my studies in theater than any class in biology. I learned how to listen, how to think about tempo and timing in the manner my presence impacted people. I learned how gestures can communicate whole other worlds and possibilities.
Before I went to medical school, I took a year off to learn to write songs and to start performing in San Francisco’s coffee shops. I was horribly nervous to perform in front of people, so I made myself commit to it until I was no longer nervous. In the past 20 years, I have released 6 albums, got signed to a label, dropped the label and went indy, toured in 29 countries, and performed for thousands of people. I have played in symphony halls and in slums, in rock festivals and on street cars. I have thrown my music into the world as a way to hear how it ricochets, to better understand myself.
This path—between music and medicine—has felt like the best way for me to be a doctor. The breadth of what I witness and experience has brought so much understanding of human suffering and what can help relieve it. It has also put me in deep proximity to the earth and her intricate systems of relationships, as I have traveled to meet with and learn from horticultural communities and Indigenous groups around the world living in ways that confer what I call whole systems health—where health emerges from systems harmonizing in a life-affirming way. Through music, I have become a biophile, and I bring that passion into everything I do.
Video still from Growing Upward by Zen Cohen
I released the last album Growing Upward with my band Rupa & the April Fishes in 2019. We toured with it as a set of seed packets, each song paired with a medicinal seed, setting up a “seedy table” after each show to share the knowledge of the medicines with the people who were excited to support us and to go home with a living memory of our offering. The tour was a great success, and we were ready to get back on the road again in 2020.
Then COVID-19 hit.
First the shows were canceled, and activists agitated cities to offer rent relief, knowing some of the first to lose their housing would be performers who had literally no income. Soon after the vaccine came out, shows started to reappear. But I knew the immunity would not be durable. Promoters began reaching out to get me back on stage. I refused. I could not imagine being the reason someone would bring COVID-19 back to an elder who would then die. So I stopped playing out. With the long hours in the hospital on the frontline of the pandemic, listening the sound of high flow oxygen in people who would never be able to catch their breath, watching the nurses crying in the hospital halls as they saw the next wave coming because people “just didn’t want to mask anymore,” feeling my own deep exhaustion—I stopped writing.
My ears couldn’t hear music. I stopped dreaming. My heart was breaking as I watched the disposability of people laid bare by a system built on crushing the most vulnerable for the benefit of the powerful. Around this time, I found my husband cheating on me, then lying about it. My world caved in on itself. The things I held to be true—the value of humanity, the value of myself—were not held to be true by the world around me or even the man with whom I had built a family.
That’s when the music went fully quiet.
Some people write music when they are sad or when they are in the throes of personal struggle. It is a way to cope and to channel grief. I write music when I’m feeling balanced, loved and safe. And the phrase “I write music” is not fully honest. That framing suggests far too active of a process. My experience is that I get out of the way, and the music writes itself. I have often said I feel like I have an antenna. When I am feeling vulnerable enough, the music shows up. It comes right before I wake up. I hear a whole song fill my ears before waking. My task is to get up and put it down.
When I first started hearing these songs, I used to be afraid they would run away before I could remember them. I would reach for a recording device to sing the melodies, countermelodies, and movements. But after some time, I noticed that the ones that wanted to be in the world could not be forgotten. They would keep coming back until I put them out into a form. These songs kept coming around until I literally expressed them, the way a breast expresses milk.
The somewhat subterranean and receptive nature of my music writing does not mean it does not require work. The work for me is preparing the stage. The discipline is to ready myself, to practice my instruments so when the music comes, I have the required abilities to get it out in a way that feels relieving instead of frustrating. This is a daily practice when I am in the midst of bringing out a set of songs.
As I regain my footing after shifting my personal and professional life to create the space I need to honor the most meaningful things in my life, I am reconnecting with music. I am creating the space to feel balanced, loved and vulnerable so that the good things can come. I have started dreaming again—powerful and symbolic dreams. As I wake, I can feel the trail of a melody just around the corner of my consciousness. I am listening, getting the guitar back in my arms, singing and reviewing the music I have written to this point. As I reconnect with my music and think about who I am today and what sounds may want to come forward, I share the process here to document and demystify the path I take, in case any one else is on a similar path and can glean something useful here.
Today I share the title track and video to the last album I released—Growing Upward. I wrote this song as a meditation on how we used to know how to listen and communicate with the more than human world around us, because we understood ourselves as a part of that world, not apart from. All of our ancestors had greater connection and reverence for the web of life. That connection confers us health, because we understand that to take care of the other is ultimately a way to take care of our selves.
I wrote the song from the perspective from a dandelion seed germinating under asphalt, pushing through the cracks to claim its existence. I put ancient sounds in my mouth to feel the roots in my own ancestry reach through this time/space continuum to another way of being that my cells still know even if my frontal cortex has forgotten. How can we tap into that cellular intelligence and allow it to overwhelm the neural circuitry that has been captured and restrained for too long by a binary cosmology of extraction, domination and violence?
Music, art, tending to the earth/more than human relationships and ritual are essential practices that help me loosen the hold of this web of thinking on my horizons. Sometimes that involves running around with your video artist friend Zen Cohen, crawling down manholes to creeks that have been incarcerated, singing on rooftops and sitting through 4 hours of body painting and another hour of scrubbing in the shower to get it all off. We do what we have to.
I have shed the things I needed to and have created the space to move into the next phase of my journey. As I continue this path, I will keep cultivating the practices to invite the cellular songs to come forward, the stories written into my DNA.
Growing Upward
So I wake I move through dark
Pulled by light
I push through I grow high
Open so wide I believe I died
So I sing for the water
And I sing for you who forget the way
Come through
[ Bol ]
Make no mistake
Break free from underneath
Like an earthquake see
You remember me
I’m here starting from the ground up
They keep killing us off with Roundup
We keep turning up and turning up the sound up
Break
Stop
Drop
Roll it up burn it down now
Burn it down to the underground
Where the roots are found
Where your phone goes dead
Where you lose your head
Listen up instead
To the mighty crackle of mycelial web
Breakdown
What’s that you say? You don’t know the way?
Did they sell your water and your DNA?
They calculate how to make you forget
Occupy your mind with rent and debt
Suffocate with a petrochemical net
Break it up
Interrupt the feed
Unplug the greed
Stop the bleed
Start with the seed
Be what you need
Get yourself free
आज़ाद हो जाओ
I stand with the water
I hear her sing
I fall and I rise
Cycling Life
So from my heart now
Take what you need
Until the day I release
Breaking the Silence: Growing Upward