Building a community with mothers and babies in a context of postnatal depression: A story of cooperation and relatedness in human kinship.

You are floating and being rocked by the gentle waves of a body ocean. Initially, in an endless silence. Slowly you start to hear things. You are listening. You listen to the pumping noise of blood circulation, to the rhythm of a heartbeat, to the sounds of digestion but also to a voice. Sometimes multiple voices. But that one voice keeps on returning. This voice is the stable factor in your early and tender life and facilitates you to make the difference between day and night. Between active and passive. It provides you with the first rhythms of life. After a while you start to recognize this voice that brings you familiarity in rhythm and melody. You even start to recognize the timbre. And then, suddenly, you want to get out, searching for that same voice. Ready to give birth to your own sound. Ready to harmonize.As a human person, we are born in a relational world. This article will bring a story of relatedness and cooperation on different levels of society and human kinship. It will describe how a cooperation between universities created artistic space to enhance the intimate social bonding between mothers and babies. Behind the narrative of the story, this article attempts to explore our human capacity to connect with the social environment from birth onwards. It will show that we appear to possess a so-called communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2008), a body alphabet of rhythms and tonalities to engage spontaneously with our social environment.