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100 Women | 100 Oceans Project
100 Women | 100 Oceans Project
 Old Ocean: A Song of Gratitude, Grief, and Ecological Witness
Cosmo Sheldrake’s Old Ocean is more than a song—it’s an offering. Released in early 2024, just before his album Eye to the Ear, it carries the salt-stained weight of love, loss, and fierce ecological tenderness. Composed off-grid in a solar-powered studio, Old Ocean is a meditation on environmental collapse—yet it doesn’t scream. It listens. Sheldrake’s signature layering of human and natural sounds (including whales, frogs, curlews, harp, clarinet) invites us into a state of reverence, not panic. The lyrics—"Old ocean, thank you for holding me. Won’t be the same without you"—read like a eulogy and a lullaby all at once. Sheldrake doesn’t ask for action before inviting presence. He begins with gratitude, which is regulation. Then he names the harm: acidification, coral bleaching, noise pollution, deep-sea mining. It’s trauma-informed truth-telling through melody. The music video, directed by Narna Hue, transforms the message into movement. Dancers and costumes echo marine rhythms—fluid, strange, and sacred. It is not just art about nature. It is nature, remembered. At a farm near Leavenworth, Washington, I had the quiet privilege, some fifteen years ago, to sit around a campfire at a Power of Hope Expressive Arts Facilitation camp with Cosmo Sheldrake and his older brother, Merlin. There was something about the Sheldrake brothers, the musician-composer and the biologist, even then, that vibrated with a kind of resonance I’ve never forgotten: a mix of brilliant mischief, wonder, and reverence for the invisible threads that connect things. That impression was layered, too, with memories from my childhood—of sitting cross-legged in my mother’s library, leafing through books penned by their mother, Jill Purce. Voice teacher, Family and Ancestral Constellations therapist, and author, Jill wrote about the healing power of sound, lineage, and ritual long before those ideas became mainstream. Her presence, too, lives on in the contours of Old Ocean. The Sheldrake family, including biologist father, Rupert Sheldrake, it seems, have long moved through the world attuned to what pulses beneath—be it mycelium, myth, or music, in waves. At 100 Women | 100 Oceans, we recognize this as kin work. Like Cosmo, we’re not asking before we’ve arrived. Presencing is the work. To be with what is—tender, entangled, unsolved—is a beginning. What will follow, will. Old Ocean is a quiet revolution. It doesn’t demand we save the ocean. It dares us to feel what we’ve already lost—and what might still be held if we listen. Watch Old Ocean here Sources:
#SoundEcology #MycelialThinking #SonicActivism #DeepSeaListening #OceanicAwareness #SolarComposed #EcologicalReverence #NatureInMusic #KinWork #WhatWillFollowWill #EntangledTenderness #RelationalEthics #RuralMothersRise #StoryAsMedicine #WitnessingTheInvisible
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