Tiny Songs

Even the tiny sing. Elephants may make oil paintings, but dormant prairie seeds sing, and their songs create images, ultimately renewing Terry Hermsen's activist/poet's hope for healing our planet's ailing ecology. His encounter with Cadine Navarro's installation, It Sounds Like Love, reminds him that art can open doors to understanding, inviting solutions. We are taken into sacred spaces: gallery, classroom, home, the world in Tiny Songs' multi-genre pieces: haiku; epigraph-inspired essay-meditations and longer poems; images of floating ink paintings prompted by recordings of the seeds' songs, unique as each plant's essence; photographs of people responding; and young students' own inspired poems. The collection offers a conversation we never imagined. But Navarro did, and Hermsen absorbed the wonder, becoming a conduit of the singing-seeds journey.