This spring I returned to sing in a choir of my Homies called Jubilate!
It’s a different experience than chanting as a yogic practice. But it’s a practice still, singing harmonies with these women of all ages and stripes, songs about heart, about spring, and about what it means to stand up for what matters. This practice reminds me of what’s important, especially right now, when times can be pretty dark.
Last month we serenaded the local Marchers for Life, where about a tenth of the population of my town showed up. When we started I barely managed to squeak, flooded as I was by the tears and the beauty of all the layers of past and future that came together in the faces I saw. When I got home, it turned into a poem of impressions, a poem that could remind and inspire me. For Life. For Love. For these times.
One Foot In Front of the Other, and Lead with Love!
A choir of 30 women, named for jubilation,
We sing, sway, clap, and dance to the river of determined
Marchers for our Lives.
Arms linked, signs as varied
As their new bodies, their life-worn bodies, and in-between.
Pink flowers with the names of the fallen.
A skinny tween-aged girl carrying her advice:
Use Ur Indoor Voice. Don’t Yell at Us.
The songs, the river, the people keep flowing,
Never Turning Back.
We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting for, we sing.
Won’t Let Nobody Turn us Around,
Mind holds a prayer:
May I remember this.
The constant constant constant beat
The never-ending flow of
The pulse that holds it all. The refrain:
It is time now, and what a time to be alive
In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love
