The Heart of All That Is
A Black Hills Suite
Release date: December 24, 2025
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There are places that don’t just hold us; they shape us. The Black Hills are one of those places for me — an old and breathing presence, a geography of memory, sound, and belonging. Every contour of these Hills feels alive with story: the granite bones that lift through prairie grass, the wind whispering through pine and stone, the thunder beings rolling their drums across the horizon.
I have walked these Hills long enough to know that they are not scenery. They are a conversation. Every rise and hollow speaks in tones older than language, and if you listen — really listen — you can hear how the land still sings its creation song. In Lakota tradition, this place is called “the Heart of All That Is.” That phrase carries both geography and cosmology — it names not just a center of land, but a center of being. It reminds us that all living things pulse together in one great rhythm.
This suite is my way of listening back. Each movement began as an act of attention — to stone, to water, to wind, to silence. The pieces follow the Hills through their own cycles of rising and resting, burning and blooming, remembering and beginning again.
