The Wild Lily Institute
The Humming
“There is a bird—I have read of it—a small, elegant creature that sings sweetly and yet pins its prey upon thorns. A contradiction made living. I wonder if you would recognise yourself there. I wonder if you would say that beauty and brutality are not opposites at all, but companions.”
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Emily Isaacson, The Humming
About the Book
Between Bear Mountain and Jerusalem, between rain-soaked cedar forests and olive branches turning silver before a storm, two women begin a correspondence that becomes far more than letters alone. Emily writes from the Fraser Valley in British Columbia—by candlelight. Lilith answers from stone courtyards and desert thresholds where peacocks wander through fig-shadow and olive oil burns in clay lamps beneath darkening skies. Together, they move through questions of poetry and prophecy, asking what it means to remain fully human in a world that rewards distraction and fragmentation. Beneath every page runs the low continuous vibration they come to call the humming—the hidden resonance beneath the weather, memory, prayer, and the soul itself.
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Written in luminous prose that moves between the contemplative, the philosophical, and the deeply intimate, The Humming is a literary meditation on rootedness, artistic vocation, and the sacredness hidden within ordinary life. Candles carried through quiet rooms. Rain moving through cedar roots. Cathedral windows igniting at sunset. Olive trees enduring difficult ground long enough to become oil and light. As the correspondence deepens, Emily and Lilith discover that revelation is not spectacle, power, or escape from the world, but a form of listening sustained with enough patience that reality itself begins to speak. The Humming offers a haunting and unforgettable journey into the inward life and the enduring mystery that waits beneath all things.
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Potter's Press: 143 pages
Available now
Letters​
​VI. Lilith to Emily (May 6)
Unmeasured latitude.
A desert of pale stone and extinguished altars.
Moonlight laid over the remains of names.
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You have begun to understand, Emily—but you are still reaching for light as though it were something outside you, something that arrives. You do not yet see that what you call light has already been passing through you, altered by your form, made particular by your fracture.
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Here, there are no windows.
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There are only thresholds that do not announce themselves: a churchyard without congregation, a field where bells once rang and do not ring now, a place where even memory feels like an intrusion. You would call it desolate. You would soften it, perhaps—place a flower there, give it a name that might persuade it toward gentleness.
But I will not.​
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Emily Isaacson
Reviews for The Humming
I really liked the unusual setup of this book. Emily writing letters to Lilith, and Lilith actually answering her, gives the whole thing a strange intimacy. . . It took me a little while to settle into the format, but once I did, I wanted to see where their correspondence would go.
Jiminie Mochi, reviewer
The descriptions of Bear Mountain and the Fraser Valley were probably my favorite thing here. There is so much attention given to cedar trees, rain, birds, mist, rivers, meadows, and the changing light. I could picture Emily sitting with her notebooks and listening to the humming beneath all of it. Then Lilith's letters bring in a completely different landscape of desert, stone, heat, and eventually Jerusalem. I liked the contrast between the two settings because it makes the correspondence feel bigger than just two people exchanging thoughts.
Harmonia, reviewer
I liked Emily and Lilith as voices, especially because they don't approach the same questions in the same way. Emily seems to want to understand and preserve things through language, while Lilith keeps challenging that instinct.
Bulletproof Girl, reviewer
The humming itself is what made the book memorable for me. I liked that it isn't treated as something that needs to be neatly explained. Emily hears it around the mountain, after rain, alongside water and even in ordinary household sounds. I also liked the way the humming appears alongside completely ordinary things instead of only dramatic moments. It made the mysterious parts feel less like fantasy and more like another layer of Emily's everyday life.
Keon Hoo, reviewer
Lilith is easily the character I found most fascinating. She has a very strong voice and absolutely refuses to let Emily turn everything into something soft and pretty. Her thoughts about being reduced to the familiar image of Lilith as an enchantress were especially interesting. She wants to be understood as something more than the version other people have created around her.
Cess, reviewer
The letters are filled with ideas about art, the body, nature, spirituality, mystery, suffering, and the difference between witnessing something and actually living inside it. . . I especially enjoyed the parts where Emily is thinking about writing a novel and realizing that novels require a different kind of patience from poetry.
Zander Bloom's review
I loved the animals in this book. They make the natural world feel much less decorative than it might have otherwise. One thing that stood out to me was the idea that wild animals don't need humans to interpret them in order to be fully alive. That gave the mountain scenes a slightly unsettling quality instead of making nature seem like a simple place of healing.
Emma Wats, reviewer
What I appreciated most was the book's treatment of suffering. It doesn't simply say that pain makes someone deeper or more beautiful. Emily actually questions her own habit of making difficult things gentler through poetry and imagery, while Lilith pushes her to stop hiding behind that.
Abby Antonio, reviewer
There is a lot of intelligence in the conversations between Emily and Lilith, and I liked how differently they see the world. Emily's mountain, the Fraser Valley, her notebooks, candles, animals, and everyday rituals give her letters a very distinct atmosphere. Lilith's desert and Jerusalem passages feel harder and more uncompromising. The contrast works. . . For readers who enjoy literary correspondence, philosophical discussions, nature writing, and questions about art, I can see this being a rewarding read.
Kelly Sullivan's review
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×´You carried the candle through the house not as ritual, but because some part of you already understands that attention alters space. A room observed gently becomes different from a room merely occupied. The flame did not sanctify the house. It revealed the sanctity already latent within ordinary things.
This is why contemplatives withdraw from spectacle.
Not to escape the world, but to perceive it before it hardens into habit."
- Emily Isaacson