I was there when it started. And by there I don’t just mean that I was at the Egret Lake Conference Center on the fateful weekend—two hundred artists, arts teachers, and arts administrators can all make that same claim. No, by the luck of the draw, I was assigned to share a room with Larson Teague and was not ten feet from him when he worked out his idea that, I think it’s safe to say, changed the world.

The timely theme of the Arts Leadership XVII conference was “The Arts Respond to the Climate Crisis.” We heard presentations and panel discussions and took part in workshops and Q&As and brainstorming sessions. Now it was Saturday afternoon and we had several hours of free time before the conference-ending banquet. The night’s festivities would include a talent show—a fun finale to each year’s conference—and I stood next to Larson when he added his name to the sign-up sheet.

“What’s your act?” I asked.

“Not exactly sure,” he said with a laugh. “Something kind of…different.”

Back in our room I laid on my bed with my laptop and caught up on some email while Larson hunched over the little desk and scribbled in his notebook.

“What are you working on?”

“Getting my ideas straight,” he said. “For tonight.”

I fell asleep and when I woke an hour later, he was still at it. I don’t think either of us had the slightest idea what was being born.



The grand ballroom buzzed with the conversations of diners. I shared a round banquet table with Larson and six others. The wine flowed; desserts appeared—all that remained was the talent show.

The MC, a pro with an easygoing persona and a cordless mic, climbed the three stairsteps to the stage that shined almost silvery under the bright lights. He cracked a few jokes then did a nice job of introducing the night’s acts—talented singers and musicians, a guy who made balloon animals, a juggler, an actor who performed a monologue, a couple of pretty good standup comics.

I leaned close to Larson and said something about it getting late and that surely it would be his turn soon. He whispered back that he’d chatted with the MC before dinner and suggested his performance might be a suitable way to end the show.

After the applause died down for a woman who made soap bubbles as big as beachballs, the MC said, “And now for our final performer. Please give a big hand to Larson Teague.”

Larson took the cordless mic from the MC and faced the darkened ballroom from the middle of the stage.

“Late last night I walked down to the bench that looks out over the lake.” He held the mic close to his mouth, his amplified words breathy, as if he were whispering intimately into every ear. “And sitting there I thought about what we’ve been focused on all weekend, what we’ve done to the planet.”

We had no idea where he was going with this and hung on his every word.

“I remembered when I was a kid,” he said. “I came to a place like this for summer camp. Riding a horse, paddling a canoe—never happier. But what if it all falls apart, withers away? Everything we love, all the great stuff we created, generation after generation. The party’s over. No more summer camp—and ten thousand times worse. I cried so hard I couldn’t see through the tears. Sorrow and grief and guilt and shame.

“What I was feeling—” his voice trembled, and he paused to gather himself. “It’s a sickness, a soul sickness. Psychologists probably have a name for it—despondency, desolation, hopelessness. Or maybe it’s the jumble of emotions any sane person would feel looking at what we’ve done, the mess we’ve made. Am I the only one or have you felt this way too?”

His eyes moved from table to table, where heads nodded and soft voices murmured in ascent.

“So I invite you to try something with me. I want us to sing, all together, and give voice to those feelings.”

He walked to the bench at the piano and sat down. After slowly pulling in a deep breath he started to sing a single note, a simple ah sound. At first there was only his solitary drone, booming over the PA system, but others joined in, then more and more, and soon it was all of us like a great wind coming from everywhere and nowhere. Larson took the microphone away from his mouth and his voice melted into the vast, pure, amorphous tone. Unguided by the hand of a choirmaster, our wordless song swelled upward and fell to the darkest and most painful depths, the harmony of deeply damaged souls, a spontaneous lamentation.

The woman to my left started making a sort of huffing sound and raised her napkin to dab at her eyes. How long the singing continued I can’t say for sure, ten minutes at least, maybe twenty. Nor can I put into words what I was feeling, what seemed to have taken over that room. Whatever it was, it didn’t exist on a verbal level. But there was no mistaking that something was happening, a purging, a catharsis.

Like the slow decay of a thunderous chord played on a grand piano, our song subsided. Eventually we sat in the cavernous ballroom surrounded by silence. For minutes more no one moved. Then people reverently rose and drifted off.

Back in our room, Larson and I agreed that neither had ever experienced anything like that before. I asked him where the idea had come from.

“Last month I was in Japan, Hiroshima,” he said. “I toured the atomic bomb museum. Afterward, outside in the Peace Park, I stared blankly at the memorial sculptures—overwhelmed, numb, unable to grasp the incomprehensible suffering, the absolute horror of the bombing. Just then a street performer came up, a butoh dancer in tattered rags, her body covered in mud and ashes. She started to perform. Her slow jerky movements were, I don’t know, terror-stricken, tormented—the way she held out one gnarled trembling hand. On her face I saw all the suffering in the world frozen in a silent shriek. I thought nothing could express what was eating at my soul, but she did.”



Soon after the conference ended, Earth chants (as they were soon dubbed) started springing up and, with startling rapidity, became a global phenomenon. Millions of people. Hundreds of millions of hours of mourning song. A secular sacrament. Chanters appreciated and protected the no-frills, no-leaders structure of their gatherings—no hucksters, no sponsorships, no endorsements, no tie-in deals allowed. In interviews, Larson often talked about adopting what he called the Craigslist ethos: do a simple and useful thing. Do it well. Don’t screw it up.

Journalists seemed almost constitutionally unable to keep themselves from making comparisons between Earth chanting and the spread of COVID-19. “While a vaccine stopped COVID,” one of them gushed, “nothing seems likely to stem the spread of Larson Teague’s highly contagious response to the dispirited melancholy we suffer from the creeping cataclysm of climate change.” Others called it an anti-pandemic, a pandemic of healing.

My favorite place to join in this rite is back on the shores of Egret Lake, where the conference center’s owners have shown the generosity to keep a small lakeside field open to the public. There at the water’s edge is the bench where the idea for Earth chanting first entered human consciousness.

The last time I met with Larson we sat on that bench. I asked him what he thought, looking back, about his gift to the world.

“What we want, what we absolutely must have, is reconciliation,” he said, his eyes squinting as he looked out over the water. “With the planet, with other people, with ourselves.” He shrugged and laughed and looked at me. “We just needed a tool.”