Forest Dispatches: June 2025
Sound(s), Time, and an invitation to dinner
Hello friends,
Time feels like its racing. So much is breaking down before our eyes. Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Gaza facing the most inhumane conditions. American society appears to be facing a reckoning with itself—decades, centuries in the making. Staying grounded to support ourselves and hold the light for those around us feels important right now. In moments when the forest gets darker it can be powerful when we remember the Light on behalf of those suffering too much to do so themselves.
Here in Thailand, the seasons have changed from brown to green earlier than in recent years. I moved into a new home nestled by the National Park Doi Pui-Suthep mountain. Light Forest for me has evolved from a metaphor to a podcast and now a home. For a Bombay born, and Asian city bred kid, i’m a long, long way from “home”. I’m very grateful to enter this fresh chapter and be able to share from here.
Any notion that life in a forest village would be be quiet was quickly dispelled. The southeast Asian forest is loud, buzzing, and never really sleeps. Not unlike the cities i’ve lived in. Cicadas substitute for drilling (mercifully no substitute for honking). Dogs around the village howling in packs at various points in the day reminding us they were once wild creatures. Then there’s village neighbours blasting the same classics or singing on loudspeaker.
Tuning into the forest theres an unmistakable rhythms through the day. I get a feel for a time before mechanical time. When the sound of the birds, the direction of the sun, or just the the air carrying a feeling of where in the day we are.
Today, our timekeeping is based mostly on constructed standards of seconds, minutes, and hours, not accessible natural phenomena. Our modern infrastructure of precise clockware based on the oscillations of atoms and crystals enables people to show up for work at the same time, give directions, align on temporal measurements, and coordinate distributed software systems. (Saffron Huang, Summer of Protocols)
Of course this invention has given us so much including the ability to share this newsletter. But its worth reflecting on how much of what we’re yearning for today is a remembering of what we’ve also lost in the bargain.
Copper Turtle Hangdrum
When I play my hangdrum I enjoy feeling into the sound of the forest and put out a few tracks with my hangdrum aka Copper Turtle.
Cicada Haze captures the feeling of the Thai summer - hot, smokey, brown, and Cicada’s decibel bursting sound. I had the unexpected joy of collaborating with my sister Divya on this, you’ll find her voice layered through this song.
In May I returned home after a month away to find everything lush and green and wet. Wailing captures the melancholy of the monsoon.
The hangdrum is a generous instrument that just sounds good. I Invite you to subscribe to a dedicated YouTube channel for sharing more handpan and nature sounds.
Speaking of sound.
I invite you to tune into episode 12 of the Light Forest Podcast. It is a deep masterclass in how sound creates our sense of reality. And really useful instructions on how we can proactively tune into the vibration of our body and really feel into our true voice and emotions trapped by our subconscious.
Invitation: Discussion & Dinner on 27 June 2025
I’m organising this event in Chiang Mai, one of the speakers includes Dr Ora from episode 11 of the podcast, and the framing cosmo-local is the subject of episode 3 & 4 of the podcast with Michel Bauwens.
If you are in Chiang Mai or know someone here that might like to connect with such a community, welcome to join us.
TV Recommendation
I’d like end with a recommendation to an animated TV series Pantheon.
It is a show about UIs i.e. Uploaded Intelligence. Human “minds” uploaded digitally via a deep scan of their brains, killing the body, but allowing them live on in computer servers, no longer confined by the limits of the body.
The show probes into questions of what it means to be alive, intelligence, consciousness, romance, death, and the nature of the universe itself, with a healthy mix of geopolitics and Big Tech largesse that make this sci-fi feel very relatable to our present day.
It also brings up our experience of time.
Machines process information via electronic signals much faster than the electro-chemicals of our human brain, capable of experiencing decades and centuries in human hours. Just think for instance how much decades of information an LLM like ChatGPT is ingesting every minute. Our common experience of time is what binds us as a species. As we try to understand AI vis-a-vis humans this might be really important.
A good story creates an empathy which pushes our understanding of complex and not easy to feel concepts. I feel like this show does that. Its based on a series of short stories by sci-fi author Ken Liu who is also involved as an executive producer, so don’t be surprised to see Three Body Problem and Daodejing fingerprints through the story.
Thank you for reading.
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