Sing Out Loud

Life Share:  Sing out Loud.

It’s been a week since Granny’s passing.  It’s still sort of a dull shock, even though it had been expected for several years.  She was just so full of life that I can’t imagine that she faded away so quickly.  In Landmark, we are constantly working on our integrity.  That everything boils down to our word.  In my last seminar session, it was so clear and simple.  To be in integrity, if I say that I sing or that i’m a singer, then I sing.  It’s that simple.  All the stories in my head about not being good enough or strong enough or making someone listen to me.  They are just stories.  If I say I sing, then to be in integrity, I sing.

The seminar I am currently in is Causing the Miraculous.  Our homework every week is to have a miracle.  If we don’t have a miracle, to be a space for a miracle to happen.  Granny’s death is a miracle.  A sad miracle.  We only experience birth and death once each in our lifetimes.  Other’s birth’s and death’s, yes.  but only once for our own.  And the only thing that connects the two is our lifetime.

I’ve loved to sing my entire life.  It is at the core of my very existence.  I’ve always had trouble with vulnerability, so I never really shared it’s importance to me.  I’d just find avenues to experience sharing it.  A combination of a comment that my father made about him not really liking female singers (translating to me that he would never like my singing) and a choir director/music teacher that was just a terrible fit for me on a personal level spun a story that was so real that it was fact.  I wasn’t good enough and people having to listen to me would be a burden.  I used to think that I had stage fright.  But it was really just this story.  I love to perform on stage and when I can reach inside me beyond this story, i have no stage fright at all.

I gave a song as a gift for one of my closest friends a few years ago and one of the guests came up to me afterwards and she told me that she really enjoyed the song and that she had heard me practicing before the ceremony.  She had no idea that it was a live song.  She thought it was a professional recording.  I was completely dumbfounded and left speechless.  But in that moment, i started to explore why I thought my singing was a burden to others.

The experience came back to me of taking the songs that I had prepared to sing in church over to my Granny’s and performing them for her.  I was scared and convinced that no one really wanted to hear me sing.  That those that listened to me were doing me a favor.  So I sang quietly.  My Granny was having none of that.  She stopped me in the first chorus, exclaiming, “Good grief Girl!  If you are going to sing, you need to sing out loud!”  She was so matter of fact.  I was ready to run away and leave but she wanted to hear me.  So I sang again.  Louder this time.  She gave me confidence.  And it was something that I could share with her, that I shared with very, very few until later in my adult years.

About 8 years ago, I went on a Walk To Emmaus.  Which is one of the most pivotal journey’s i’ve ever been on in my entire life.  I came away from that knowing why I believed in the faith I did and was able to reconcile it and distinguish it from the right wing bible thumping hardcore heaven vs hell Christianity that is so far from the beliefs I hold.  In the ceremony for the last evening, as I walked in to the praise area, the music team was playing a song called “Remember Me”.  It reached right down into my heart and squeezed.  The thought occurred to me in that moment that my granny would love that song.

When my aunt called me and asked if I’d like to sing a song at the funeral, I said yes without a thought.  Of course I would sing because to be in integrity, I sing.  A process that usually takes me at least a couple of weeks to be comfortable enough with a song to sing in front of other people, I had two days.  I hadn’t even heard the song in years.  I’m also an empath.  I soak up the emotions in a space and process it for the universe.  So when I’m in the presence of tears, I shed tears too.  And this was my granny’s funeral, so I also had my own tears to cry.

So I had another miracle.  I closed my eyes and sang to my Granny, just like i was 14.  I remembered all the words, hit the notes and did not break down in tears during the song.  During the 2 days of learning the song, that had not happened.  I also closed my mind off to the story in my head about how I shouldn’t be able to sing while grieving; that I was cold and unfeeling; that I was wrong for having to keep my eyes closed.  I could feel her presence and knew that I was giving a gift to her, to me, to those that loved her.  I was providing a space for those that came to remember her to grieve while at the same time providing a tribute to her and saying my own goodbye.

As part of my Native American ceremony practice, I do something in honor of the person that has passed for a year.  For my father, I ate a butterfinger on the last Friday of every month.  For my Granny what feels right is to sing.  So I am going to sing.  I will learn a new song every week for the next year.  Not to perform and not to be perfect.  Just to have it to sing.  And I’m working on my sharing, so I’ll share the songs with you and why I chose them.  There was no other individual more comfortable in her own skin than my Granny.  She gave me one of the most powerful lessons in life - Sing out loud.

If you've made it to the end of this, thank you so much for letting me share.