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An island, three kilometres wide, rests separate from the Îles de la Madeleine archipelago, in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Accessible by ocean or air, about 60 people of Scottish/Irish descent live here. Rolling, treeless hills contain a small population of cows, littered among wild strawberries, clover, blue flag iris and small waterways.

"The island is dying," she said.

Daughter of the former lighthouse keeper, she was here when the island was thriving. Fishing—crab, scallops, whelk, mackerel, tuna and herring—farming and music was everywhere. Now, elders are passing, and children are leaving. The church, which used to be the centre of the community, now only opens for special occasions, like a birth or a death. In it, a pump organ that hasn't breathed for years.

I walked through the hills behind the community, some 200 metres above the sea. At the highest point, I felt the great wide breath of the ocean and, at the lowest, encountered depressions in the land of old burial grounds. The young calfs were curious about me and, slowly, I began to hear. There was still music. But it wasn't a folk song of gathering, or celebration, or feast, but a land song of erosion. Sea birds stacked on sandstone cliffs that changed shape everyday, ocean surf breaking and returning sound and sediment to the sea.

As the sun set, I journeyed to the church and sat down at the organ, allowing the rhythm of my footsteps from the hills to echo inside the machine. I wasn't creating music. I was offering my body's experience on the land through the medium of air. The drone that emerged resonated with the former heart of the community. One that vibrated wood and glass, breathing some life, but also honouring loss. A death was happening, but there was a wildness reemerging.

As I listened inside the island of sound, I asked: Rather than reassembling or holding, can I be present with the process of erosion as the fragments become part of the water cycle, flowing through all awareness? Can I truly be with the subtle emergence and dissolving? What is wholeness when nothing is ever complete?