I will jump at the chance to tell you a new thing I am doing in my life right now. I’ve always wanted to find ways to sing the songs I love. This class has helped me enormously in that area. I used to think about putting a notice on the bulletin board but never knew what to call the types of songs I wanted to sing. Then a week or so ago; a Thursday or a Friday, I told a woman I would like to have her over with my sister and maybe another friend and we could sing.
I thought maybe we could sing some of my own songs and some of the Carolyn McDade songs. Carolyn is the friend of mine I’ve spoken about that has songs like “Serenity”; an example being, “Serenity isn’t freedom from the storm but peace within the storm, within the storm, peace.” or that song, “So Great A Love”, that goes like this: “What shall I do with so great a love, so great a love?”
I told them I also wanted to sing some of the old sacred songs like “In the Garden” or “Come to the Church in the Wildwood.” So, in everything I did during the next few days, I’d mention it to the women I was with.
Wednesday at 10:30 I cleared my patio, brought out two folding chairs to sit beside my four patio chairs. A woman had given me a martini glass with a four-inch red rose for my birthday and I set that on a small black table in the centre of the circle of chairs. My sister actually showed up at ten a.m. We sat in the sun talking for a few minutes when a woman I met in choir came and joined us. Then along came a woman who says she does not sing; but brought her camera as she likes taking photographs. So, we started singing as other women appeared; pulled up a chair and joined the circle.
Some women came that I know from tennis, some from golf, two women from down the street and a woman who teaches yoga and healing through gong sound vibration. My next-door neighbor joined us. We sang “On the Wings of a Snow White Dove” and then “If I had the wings of a dove, wings that would take me where I want to go, I’d fly to the utmost way out into space, no, no, no, no, there is no hiding place,” and then one woman saying, “Let’s sing, Kumbaya.” So, we did!
Twelve of us sat in the circle. I had the exact, right, amount of chairs. I remembered all the women’s names as I introduced them around the circle. No one had the words or music and we managed quite fine. We sang, “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Going to Let It Shine” and then to my telling them how I could always see Divine in others but not in myself until this song came from inside one day. “I am divine inside of me, I am divine inside of me, I am divine inside of me, I am divine within.” We sang it and it sounded beautiful.
I made a list of songs and we never even got through the list. Some said they’re coming back again; same time, same place. I want you to know you are welcome to join the circle this coming Wednesday between ten and eleven thirty a.m. Know we will be singing songs you in my writing group have helped me feel comfortable putting out into the world like the one from a week or so ago which I’m still enjoying:
“May I sow love, in my everyday, in all that I do, in all that I say!”
Thank you to each of you.
January 23, 2017
ellensagh 