I Lay My Song, A Path Through Broken Winds
Some years ago when I was young, fresh with life,
I began to sing
I did not come from a singing family, yet I
remember the day the piano was rolled into our home. My parents neither
lauded nor condemned my exploratory jaunts into sound.
This gave me a space that opened spontaneously to my life, where I did
not have to announce or even know what would happen. It was an
immersion - without pretention or expectation.
What I do remember, and re-enact each time I sing, is the fluid quality
with which I moved, melting into a terrain of sound. It was a place and
a time of deep washing, a gentle though passionate rubbing of my being
on the rocks of a river that soaked and embraced me, then some time
later rode me back in its strong current to my place on that piano
bench, in a room with walls, and a life that ticked with regularity and
plan, distinctness and expectation.
I was born and raised in Louisiana,
though I have lived in New England for more than thirty years. I
grew up with one sister in a Southern Baptist family. My parents both
came from people rooted in the farmland and small towns of this rural
state. Childhood was quiet, steady, insular. My father worked with
farmers through the Department of Agriculture. My mother was a teacher
and homemaker. Dad's work required frequent moves. Being shy and
uninclined to sports, I turned to my piano and my sister for
friendship.
As I finished high school and studied to be a teacher in a small state
college, I lay down my relationship with music, setting aside childish
things to become adult. But music was more than a childhood pastime. It
was my soul that shimmered in the timbre of my voice; my love of self
and life was practiced in this deep and intimate relationship with
song. My creativity listed. My heart gradually and ever so subtly
closed down. I lost myself in those early adult years.
It was only by reclaiming my creative power in song and acting in
social movement that I found health again. Gradually I made my way back
to that piano bench, to the river that held it in such grace, that made
song the essence of life, a deep prayer that permeated every cell and
every space between cells with a fertile engagement with the simple act
of living.
My singing as a child, what I know now as prayer, was freed from the
language of church. It was buoyancy that held without confinement, that
affirmed my capacity to shape my heart into sound, that took my
burrowed and expansive treasure of being and poured it in real voice
upon the air - air that touched my piano, solid and wood - air that
floated my unexplainable self to whatever ears beyond the wall might
hear. It was an act of childhood courage and innocence to sing.
What I know now - it is still an act of courage to sing - to really
sing, in the way that disrobes the heart and lays its curve into the
world, that leaves the soul whole and the body shining. Such singing as
women leads us into confrontation with entrenched and unjust power. To
be true to its timbre, the human voice requires authenticity of body,
language, community. In this society, when we shape our body/sexual
energy with integrity, tell what we know with candor, and create
communities committed to the wellbeing of the whole, we invariably
shake the status quo.
The generation of women with whom I have come to consciousness are a
remarkable presence in my life. We each had our story and these stories
eventually brought us together. For each of us, our lived experience
gave us a particularity of entry into the circle.
War became my entry into social movements. Born in 1935, I was a child
in World War II. The vulnerability and empathy that came with being a
child, combined with the full exposure to broadcasts, newsreels, war
movies, letters and conversations - in a community depleted of men,
called to war, and held together by courageous and capable women -
seeded anti-war and feminist consciousness as an adult.
In the South, the close exposure to one another of black people and
white people, of rich and poor, gave me immediate and personal
experience of the severity and cruelty of racism and economic injustice
and how they intersected. This proximity also gave us the graced
moments when the Spirit broke through the human structures and we saw
ourselves in one another. The understanding of separation as loss -
loss of relationship, human resource, and soul - seeded work for racial
and economic justice.
Most institutions of my life - church, school, politics, economics -
gave tight prescriptions of what it meant to be a woman. The women's
movement broke this open. I began to see the lives of women in my
family in a different light - their strength, insight, courage. They
lived immersed in their society, yet in many ways pushed out the walls
of the tents of their culture. Like the river that gathered me from my
early piano bench, the current of liberating power came like a flooding
rush on the dredged and banked shores of patriarchy.
Gathering in circles and telling our stories swung many of us into
turbulent water. Seeing the patterns emerge from our separate tales
brought the beginnings of social analysis, the early startling insights
which became a journey, exciting, frightening, deeply compelling. Rage
flared and embered. At the same time some inner garden within each of
us emerged, revealing blooms. I found that rage rose where love was
denied, when that which we loved most was desecrated. Singing helped us
honor rage as a companion of women's love.
Over and over I turn back to that unrelenting and determined young
woman who would not give in, who refused to continue on without
herself, who dared through the pain to find and reclaim her generative
energy of life. Through years I have witnessed in my own life and in
the lives of so many other women what I can only call Life's Profound
Strategy. There is a place of ultimate dignity which cannot be
conquered or deformed. At our inner core we are affirmed to be for
ourselves and one another who we need to be. Life intends that we
hunger to live, to live with spontaneity and intent, in ways that will
not betray us and all that has brought us thus far.
The profound energies that have formed galaxies and spread open the
first pollen-hungry bud move within us. They have never once abandoned
us, though we have abandoned ourselves and one another and have most
tragically as humans succeeded in cutting certain ones of us off from
self-determination of our vital capacities, which is the spawning of
oppression. But always there is that which whispers through the chains,
"There is more to life than this. It was never meant to stop here."
In 1970, a young woman student minister asked me to do the music for
the first women's service at the Arlington Street Church (Unitarian
Universalist) in Boston, where I had moved with my family. Her only
request was that it be music written by women. Frustrated by how little
music I found written by women, I sat at my piano late one night and
sang all that I wanted to say to my three young daughters asleep
upstairs. This was the great turning for me - I began to sing from my
experience. My life changed significantly.
The women with whom I circled were eager to sing, especially to sing
songs that honored our experiences as women - words, images, values.
Women loved to sing together. All that we had thought would change
quickly, instead entrenched and bore down on us, and we found hope,
sustenance, inspiration, tenacity, clarity in singing. We bore witness
to our time through song.
For nearly thirty years I have continued to circle with women singing
our lives, living our song. I hope that we can engender beyond us the
act of singing together as a profound power and heritage - singing as
authentic community. To be a group of people is not enough. We need to
know why we come together, how far down we must dig to come upon a
common bedrock from which our lives are raised. We need to know how we
differ and value this difference. This means understanding conflict as
well as consensus. This means leaning into honest exchange, being
willing to look at the ways we cause suffering and oppression in
another's life, and to let this change our own.
Songs of themselves are not paths to the soul
Singing does not automatically carry us there. When singers become
the singing, however, some horizon, both inner and outer, opens and we
know, if only briefly, why we live. Such moments do not assure that our
plans will succeed, but we know what is worth doing. We have become
part of the singing river, the long voice that has held, washed, and
laid down ten million mornings of song, yet still rises with her bag of
sounds and rubs the currents of river and wind over bare rock, bearing
witness to all that exists in that moment.
I now name myself simply a woman of faith seeking with others to touch
what matters. My passion: freeing women's generative energies to act as
social, planetary, cosmic beings on behalf of ourselves, one another,
and the wellbeing of the whole. My ardent desire is that as a movement
we nurture the myriad ways of creative expression as paths to deepen
human consciousness, to envision a society worthy of this blessed
Creation, to act in ways that are transformative.
I plant my songs where women seek to lean strongly, confidently,
passionately into their love of life, knowing that it is our essence to
create. Generativity is a natural state of life. Living our lives in
ways that heal and uplift, that bring our human family to right
relationship and reverence, is deep and beautiful purpose.
The river sings on. . .
