by Kaitie Ty Warren
KaitieTyWarren.com
support: Patreon.com/KaitieTy
A 4-part Dreamtime layer song
©2024
Teaching page made: March 2025
“When we see with new and ancient eyes, we begin to sense our true interbeing — the reciprocity of the Earth not only receiving our care, but offering her love back to us.
~Sarah Bentley, leading Redraw the Boundaries at Heart Body Song in Austin TX, reflecting on the work of Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects and a conversation with Kaitie Ty Warren about this song.
From that sacred bond, we find the courage to redefine our way of being, to redraw the boundaries… to protect what we love, reclaim our wholeness, and help create the world we long for.
For so long, boundaries have been drawn for us — by systems, by patriarchy, by colonialism. This song is about more than resisting those boundaries. It’s about reclaiming our right to draw them ourselves. To protect what we love and those who have less power. To say: you don’t get to decide this for us anymore.”
The first recording below is of Kaitie Ty leading it for the first time at the Sisters in Harmony Retreat 2025, Los Gatos, CA. The second recording is of Rachel Bailey and Sarah Bentley co-leading the song at the 2nd annual Fall Equinox Community Singing Ritual with Heart Body Song, Austin TX, with Gregory Alexander on guitar and supporting vocals, and Dianne Preston on drums/percussion.
More tracks, information, and song origin are lower down on this page.
Part 1:
Whispered moments
And the memory of wholeness
In your heart
Part 2:
All is well
All is well
And the Earth will thrive
Part 3:
Thou shall not pass
Until you’ve learned
A new way of treating us
Part 4:
Redraw, redraw
Redraw, redraw
The boundaries now
Song origin:
This song arrived through the Dreamtime, across two different dreams a solid decade apart, but the whole song downloaded at once on the morning of June 30, 2024. You can hear the original recording from that morning here. It is almost completely clarified in this first ‘catch’ recording.
In June 2024, Kaitie was facilitating at the Sisters in Harmony retreat with Heather Houston, along with co-facilitators Becky Reardon, Melanie DeMore, Debbie Nargi-Brown, Amanda West, Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely, Michelle Nemasya Carpenter, and Beth Freewomon. On the final day of the retreat, she woke up from a dream culmination of the group conversation that had been happening throughout the weekend, through song and collective experience.
The first two layers (whispered moments, and the memory of wholeness in your hear/all is well, all is well and the earth will thrive) refer directly to what vision was emerging within the Sisters in Harmony collective.
The second two layers (redraw redraw the boundaries now/thou shall not pass until you’ve learned a new way of treating us) refer to the dream that happened in June 2014 and requires some backstory to tell.
The backstory:
In June 2014, Kaitie was a member of Golden Bridge Choir in Los Angeles, led by Maggie Wheeler who was friends with Arnaé Batson. Arnaé and Maggie were both protégés of Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock.
At the time, Dr. B had been recently diagnosed with cancer, so Maggie and Arnaé hosted the “I Really Do Believe” workshop in honor of Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell at Agape in June of 2014. Singers to learn practice songs by Dr. B and later we sang them to her over Skype.
This was the event at which Kaitie first met Arnaé. Kaitie and Arnaé would go on to become friends, both going through CCLT and becoming part of the Ubuntu Choirs Network, both facilitating at the first LA Community SongFest in 2019, and in 2025 both facilitating at the Sisters in Harmony Retreat. But before all this, Kaitie had simply sung with Arnaé at the I Really Do Believe workshop… and then, that week, she had a dream.
Kaitie dreamed she was attending or participating in an art show at a museum. The show was entitled “Women of the World” and Arnaé was the World in the opening exhibit. Levitating by wires from the ceiling, Arnaé floated horizontally, her left side curled into a fetal position and her right side extended (what’s sometimes called Superman pose). She was covered in body paint, looking like Mother Earth herself. Protected on one side. Powerful and boundaried on the other.
Maggie Wheeler was the gatekeeper of the exhibit, checking the masculine-presenting attendees who were lined up at the entryway. The clear message from both Maggie and Arnaé (and the Earth) was Thou Shall Not Pass Until You’ve Learned a New Way of Treating Us.
Maggie’s job, as gatekeeper, was to ensure these “men” who wished to attend the event were aware of and committed to adhering to the new rules laid out – the new boundaries drawn – about how to treat women, the world, their own femininity, before entering. And Arnaé represented it all.
Two days after having this dream, Kaitie struck her head on a concrete wall and was stricken with a concussion that would change the course of her life, putting her on the road to healing at deeper levels, which included moving to the Bay Area, founding Living Room Choir, and becoming the songleader she is today. She knew that meeting with Arnaé, and whatever the dream was representing, was indicative of a change in her life, but only over time was it revealed just how much of her life was about to change.
As she healed from concussion, Kaitie learned more about the fetal position and superman pose within her own body, and the right and left sides representing the masculine and feminine sides to ourselves, respectively: our own internalized paternal and maternal sides, and what conditions each are in. In Kaitie’s case, what came out in the somatic bodywork and the paintings she created during concussion, was that her left (feminine) sense of self was deeply wounded and needing to be wrapped in protection, while the right (masculine) side of herself was the one doing the protection, and the action, placing himself potentially in harm’s way and creating a strong boundary to protect the feminine side while she convalesced. Over time, Kaitie worked with healers to listen to both sides of this story, and bring them into a better balance of action, and softness.
In 2025, both Arnaé and Kaitie were facilitating at the Sisters in Harmony summer retreat, which is a “women-only” event, designed to be a space where folx who identify as women can expand more fully in community. It was exactly one year since Kaitie had received the song Redraw the Boundaries in the dream, and she had not taught it yet to the Sister in Harmony community. Now that Arnaé was present and the song had had a year to land, it was the perfect time to share.
Kaitie told the story, and Arnaé fully celebrated and embraced her role in it. The women of Sisters In Harmony sang the song and, as the 4 layers came together, the women spontaneously formed a circle around the perimeter of the room, creating a unified boundary. Those who were there that day will tell you: it was incredibly powerful.
The photo at the top of this page was taken by Sharon McCarthy and is of that moment. Kaitie is in the blue dress near the middle.
Update: A note from Kaitie October 2025
Currently in our country there is a literal, political redrawing of boundaries occurring. As I write this, Prop 50 is on the table in California and other states are following suit. This is in response to Texas redrawing its district boundaries in order to secure more support for conservatives; liberal states are now countering by redrawing their own boundaries. Sarah Sires Bently, whose Heart Body Song group is in Austin TX where this political boundary-redrawing began, wanted to bring this song to her group. Sarah reached out to me to discuss whether the “redraw the boundaries” line could be changed or reworked to not potentially be interpreted as being supportive of the literal boundaries that were presently being redrawn in her state. We discussed it, meditated on it, and what we both came to were these images:
The moment where protestor Ieshia Evans, dressed in a sundress and sandals, stood firm, calm, and tall as police, weighed down by their riot gear, rushed toward her.
And the pose Arnaé was in, in the dream.
We all have many sides to us. This song, and that dreamtime art show, are here to show us the new way: to firmly, steadily hold our ground against oppression, to no longer be knocked off balance within ourselves or out in the world, and to refuse any longer to let others draw the lines or create boxes in which we are then “allowed” to exist. It’s time for us to remember our wholeness, to redraw our own boundaries, and take back our right to exist in our fullness. This is for all of us, across all genders. This is a place of wholeness, and we are in charge of our own boundaries now.
Sarah has written a beautiful prose intro for this song, to contextualize it in the Austin community, and with her blessings I have shared it above, along with the recording of her and Rachel Bailey leading it in 2025.