Mountain Song: Prayers to Meet the Moment

Shireen Amini (non-binary using she/her) is a queer Puerto Rican-Iranian American, earth-loving song creator, rhythm maker, and community facilitator based on unceded Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and Grande Ronde territory, aka Portland, Oregon. As a human, she carries a deep commitment to her own liberation path and vision of a more just world. As an artist, she believes strongly in music’s power to propel cultural revolution. She blends pop, rock, hip hop, latin, and roots sensibilities with socially-conscious themes as a singer-songwriter and creates modern medicine music for community singing. In song circles, she holds transformational space, leading joyful, groove-based songs, evoking tenderness, and often engaging her participants in the rhythm and ceremony of it all. She also teaches drumming and facilitates grief ritual as part of her community-based music empowerment project, Shireen Amini Music Medicine.

Te Martin is a song-keeper and ritual artist. They were born on Ramaytush Ohlone land in San Francisco and have been shaped by Ocean, Redwoods, circus arts, and theater games. They facilitate oral tradition singing classes and workshops that focus on song as a tool for collective liberation, somatic regulation, and ancestral connection. Te served as co-organizer of Thrive Street Choir in the San Francisco bay area for six years, is a student of Gaelic song, and released their first professional music video and EP of original songs, “Water & Bones“, in 2021.

Sarina Partridge is a musician, song-leader, educator and activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She feels most alive when learning, creating and sharing songs — especially songs that grow out of time spent in wild places. Sarina composes and sings with a wide variety of music projects: community song-leading; harmony-rich original music with folk trio Heartwood; and performing and teaching of Eastern European and Yiddish song – her own musical lineage. Sarina has a passion for connecting people with their own creativity and with community, and uses harmony singing as a modality to help folks develop a sense of wonder and belonging in this wild world around us.

yeshe ( Y ) salz (they/them) is a facilitator, song leader, storyteller and community organizer whose life and passion is dedicated to building collective resilience in times of deep change. yeshe’s work meets at the confluence of trans-local coalition-building, queer ecology and cultivating cultural resilience through ceremony and ritual.  They come to this work through years of training at the School of Lost Borders, Work that Reconnects facilitation as well as years of song leading and climate activism in the California Bay Area and beyond. As a Jew committed to Palestinian liberation, yeshe’s song practice is currently most deeply rooted in carrying Jewish Niggunim (wordless melodies) into social movement spaces — especially here in Northern New Mexico — for our collective healing and liberation. yeshe currently serves as Interim Co-Director for Youth Passageways, a multi-cultural and intergenerational network culture-keepers, activists and mutual aid efforts efforts working to reclaim and regenerate cultural practices to sustain thriving, co-liberatory communities.