Image: Spoons and Light
An image of a friend’s musical spoon collection.
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Prepackaged and out of the box, we humans come with some amazing gifts. One gift that is often overlooked due to the media and our obsession with superstars is the gift of song. As someone who has always sung, I have often heard people tell me how lucky I am to be able to sing, and how they wish they could sing. This has always befuddled me, because everyone can sing. Some have more talent than others, it’s true, but I’m not speaking of talent, I’m speaking of the gift of song, something everyone is endowed with.
Why then, should you sing?
As a trained singer with my college degree in music, I have sung a gamut of styles from folk to opera and pretty much everything in between. In fact, in one video game that even my dear friend Aniket from India has played, Prince of Persia 3D, I sang in a middle eastern style of wailing! I have come to realize that the singing that makes me happiest is not the following of the written note. It isn’t the songs I’ve written or that anyone else has written. It is the song of the wild. The coyote howling at the moon. It is the raising of the voice in song, no matter how it sounds, no matter what note is hit, no matter whether it’s in tune, on pitch, dulled by misuse, sharp, shrill, full, angelic, none of that matters. What matters is that song vibration coming out of your throat is your ticket to happiness. Just try it. Open up your throat and sing for five minutes. Sing something never sung before. You don’t need words, you don’t need an audience, you don’t need to be anything other than who and what you are. If someone asks you to stop, ask them to join in or leave you alone to do this thing. Don’t listen to the non-believers! I guarantee you that five minutes of this activity and you will feel something amazing happening within you.
And then another thing I learned about singing. Singing with someone else is prayer. And communion. Call and response. Harmony. Can’t talk about a subject with someone? Try having a musical conversation, you’d be amazed at how much better the chat can go.
Have an altar in your home? Try singing toward your altar with your hands up in the air. Howl if you think you can’t sing. Twirl, go nuts, get ecstatic. Turn off your critic. Turn off the voices of those who told you not to sing one time long ago. If they knew what you do now, they’d let you sing. They’d sing too!
For health and happiness. Raise your voice in song, and do this every day. All your challenges will go a little easier if you let the your voice fill the air.
Three Graces Night and Day by Cat Vibert
20X24 oil on canvas
I heard the thought
That from the highest plane
The confusion becomes undistorted
And is all a part of the perfect order
www.catvibe.com