A Year of Echoes

I’d like you to take a moment to think about how an echo can change from space to space. When I think of the concept, I think of a mountain man yodelling. An echo going on seemingly forever. There is something deeply majestic about this type of echo. The ringing you hear as you wait in absolute silence, grasping for the sound of the yodel to return back to your own ear. This visceral silence is then replaced by the magic of the cry returning. Life is complete.

Of course, not every room offers that kind of return. Some absorb sound entirely while others throw it back too quickly, often distorted and overwhelming. Over time, I found myself listening less for volume and more for resonance; searching for the places where the sound felt like it belonged.

When I entered the first room, I let out a screech. Not a guttural one, but instead just loud enough to prepare for the sound returning. As I paced that room, I waited. Seconds then minutes went by, and my voice yearned to return. All that could be heard were the clacks of my own footsteps. It’s not that the room is empty but rather built to soften. To absorb. Still, there is something unsettling to offer your voice to a space that fails to acknowledge it despite you trying so hard.

It was in these places that I kept trying to find an echo. Perhaps I did it wrong. I changed wording, I waited longer for a call back but in the end, some spaces aren’t looking for voices to echo. Some places are content in the silence they possess.

Other spaces were far too eager. The sound would return, bouncing off all four walls at once. The piercing sound was overwhelming. It wasn’t a beautiful echo like I imagined. This was no mountain yodel. In these rooms, it was difficult to tell which sounds belonged to me as opposed to others that shared the room with me. Sometimes, it was nice to be reminded that others existed in this search for yodelling but more often than not, it undermined the search itself. My biggest lesson here was that sometimes it’s easy to mistake volume as being heard. Perhaps it was not that I was being met but rather that my sound was immediately being bounced back in my own direction.

Somewhere along the way though, I stopped thinking about the echoes being something that happened and more about how I participated with them. This pivot changed the search for me. I realised that sometimes I was calling out to simply avoid the quiet. Other times where I felt the need, the desire, to test a space repeatedly as if I needed further validation for the validation I already received.

I think the greatest lesson I learned of them all is that not every room needs my own voice. Sometimes the silence isn’t something I need to solve. If I am being completely and utterly honest with you, I now believe that my favourite spaces are the ones I don’t go back to because of how beautiful the response is and more because of how much ease I feel to be understood within them. No longer do I evaluate a space based on their sound but rather how honest the return feels.

This was never really about echoes.

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Thank you for sticking this year out with me. As my tradition continues onwards, I share my year in review video of all the incredible moments I participated in this year, perhaps in a slightly less cryptic version then above. Happy holidays in whatever way you celebrate, and I’ll see you all in 2026.

With love,