Mad World... Mad World.

That song ran through my brain this morning...

Denver. I've not watched continuing coverage. I do not CARE to know more about the shooter. I have the sense that this is what he wants--for us to know him. I don't want to honor someone who opens fire on a theater full of people.

Last night I went to my women's singing circle. We meet every single Thursday except Thanksgiving. Year round. We sing songs to the earth, to the power of sound, the energy of music. Yes, indeed, we sing songs that would most definitely seem like earthy crunchy granola songs, and songs of an aging hippie freak. We do it unabashedly and whole-heartedly, with the knowledge that we are powerless to change anything beyond ourselves and one another.

I have never been one to think of group activities as being sacred at all, but this has become for all of us, a time when we put all family, individual, societal details aside. We simply sing. We try very hard not to have conversations between songs. Many songs are chants, and at times, when we hit our groove, even with eyes closed and the four or five-part harmony, we breathe together. We rise and fall in volume together, and we end together with no one directing. If, during the healing song section, you sit or lie down in the center, I know first hand that you can literally feel the sound waves or the energy--I don't know or care what it is. You feel it hit your body like the best massage ever.

When I first went, I admit that I DID have trouble singing "women's" songs. I have my prejudices and, to me, calling to Earth Mother, and deliberately excluding men felt somehow weird. I've always sung in mixed choruses. After the third time, however, I said, "Oh, Jeannette, GET OVER YOURSELF. You are the woman who didn't stop to realize you were singing 'she don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie... cocaine' at the top of your lungs with your 12-year-old son in the car! And you have trouble with singing 'Mother Earth, feel me. Take my body and heal me." REALLY?"

And something unlocked inside and I let it go. How good to find these tangles inside that seem to stubbornly hang onto old and silly preconceptions, to pull them apart and release.

I did not care what we sang, but began to listen to the sound, to focus on blending and to simply let myself go with the strength and spirit of the women who were all around me. I changed. And now I unabashedly go with it, words and all. For now, there are harmonies of such beauty, I sometimes cry. We play with the music, we almost dance to it. No one to judge us, no one to sigh at us or roll the eyes in embarrassment. We are a group of about twenty women who regularly attend, from age 23 to 82.

How does my first paragraph relate to any of this? Our focus is on acceptance of all people, on gentleness of spirit, but strength of purpose. Our focus is on peace, and on the power of being at peace. And this week I wrote my first song ever. Very simple, for many of the women had never sung in a group before this. I wanted it to be a melody that was relatively easy to pick up. And I wanted the words to be simple--I am my strongest, when I'm at peace. I am at peace when I let love fill all my soul. And I feel so much love, right here all around me. So I am strong for I have love and am at peace. And we go to the you and the we of it all, in two verses. And the very Unitarian coda of wishing we all could use our strength to share love and live in peace. Is it corny? Undoubtedly. I don't much care. All I know is that we sang it and learned it enough to begin to harmonize, and it's funny how uncorny words suddenly seem with twenty women singing them in harmony and 6/8 time.

We focused on our songs of peace last night.

And this morning I heard this news and a friend had spent the night. She came upstairs from her sleep, and we sat there, tearing at such horrific violence. And another dear friend had had a stabbing occur in her neighborhood two nights ago, with the perpetrator apparently running through her yard.  And I've turned off the television because I am sick to death of the partisan nastiness and incivility in general that is on tv and in the grocery stores, and in so many places these days.

And our circle felt more important, not less so. Because it is so very hard to stay centered, to stay hopeful, to keep believing that we humans WILL do better, when there is such ugliness around. The sheer quiet and beauty of my Thursday nights of music fills me back up.

So this aging, flower-child, sixties hippie freak loves her song circle. Loves the friends who never let me fall. Love the bloggers who seem to keep following regardless of how sporadic the entries. I know I am lucky; my life is one of increasing creativity as I age, and that may be a rarity. I don't know, but I suspect so. The friendships are increasing, not decreasing. There are no monsters under my bed. And the images of cruelty, rudeness, meanness on television cannot erase the goodness I get to experience in the people I have been meeting and gradually getting to know in every facet of my life the last two or three years.

And I'm thinking that, in light of Denver and more, perhaps focusing on accepting one another and supporting one another BECAUSE of differences as well as "in spite" of differences has never been more important.

Thank you. Thank you all, no matter whether or not our political, social or religious views differ, I have stumbled into bloggers who do not see this as a place to be flamers, or mean-spirited. I come in here when my heart hurts from something, and within three or four blogs--reading them, my brain is turned around.

... and I breathe.

The Keepers of Jetty's Soul

This will not be long.

When I think about how it was that the little girl in this picture, in ecstasy over a feather, came to keep her belief in goodness and in magic for all her life, I think "Mommy, Grandma M., and Jean Ellen."











You can simply read my last entry and the referenced posting to get what my sister did for me. She's woven in and out of other posts, but those two say the most.

A Celebration of my Mom's Mom talks about Grandma Magee, right around when this picture of her was taken, I believe.  Grandma was in the nursing home near us at last, and had been there for a few years.  She LOVED music, as did my mother.  Grandma was singing when this was taken, and the woman holding her hands was the musician who used to come twice a month to lead people in music.  Mom had had lunch with Grandma that particular day and started us BOTH laughing as she recounted Grandma throwing her hands in the air, saying, "Oh, Goodie! String beans!"

She had done this when my friend had been at dinner at our house once, when Grandma M. was visiting us. Gail said she'd never seen anyone so excited at string beans. Mom had looked at her and said, "You should see how she acts over jello."

 Gail is just under five feet tall.  When she met my grandmother, Grandma said, "My God, you're just sawed off and hammered, down!"

Gail did not bat an eye as she looked DOWN at Grandma and said, "Who do you think you're talking to, Pipsqueak?"

They were delighted with one another.

Another thing Grandma did when delighted was raise her arms and wag her hands, shouting, "Dighdy, Dighdy, Doe!" But, that's covered quite a bit in my other post. I look at this picture and I see her shining so brightly.

She never lost her sense of wonder.

And you can see why my friends said Mom looked like Mrs. Claus. Mrs. Claus in polyester pants, overshirts, and saddle shoes. I look at this picture and I realize, she was just 64 at most here. She is, quite simply, everywhere all the time... in so many of my posts.


I end with this picture of my sister as I choose to remember her. She was my age in this photo, fully engaged in telling someone about a pen and ink sketch she'd made. It was shortly before she began to leave us all, hiding from this world, this life ... preparing to flow into the next. She taught me to draw, to drive in search of the perfectly imperfect tree, to accept people as they are, and to be gentle from the inside out. I don't know which lesson was most valuable.  She is the one who first pointed out that I curled my pinky whenever I was enraptured. She was my number one fan and always believed that I would one day take the world by storm with either my singing voice, my painting, or my writing ... or all three.

I don't need to take anything or anyone by storm. I do not need to make waves to honor all three women. To honor their importance in my life and in keeping me from losing myself entirely through the craziness, the violence, the injuries and illnesses, I have only to sing, to write, to paint, to love my friends--to do all these things for the pure joy of being alive.

... but oh, how I miss them.