Online Singing is a Massive Wave!
I hope this finds you and yours well, and that you are continuing to find new sources of resilience during these challenging times.
Speaking of resilience, I’ve found that singing is helping in a big way! As you may know, FOS (Friend of SingOnline.org) Maggie Wheeler’s Saturday Together in Song gatherings have started up again, I highly recommend those. Our SingOnline.org Song Circle had its fourth monthly gathering in January, to benefit Braver Angels, with the next Song Circle scheduled for Sunday, February 21 — there are limited spaces available for that, join us and hear and see every word from everyone, live! And, don’t miss Lisa G. Littlebird’s and Melanie DeMore’s Winter 2021 Singing Playlist, with 25 new songs, and Zoom singing sessions with the songwriters, from Community Singing songleaders worldwide.
Thanks to continued improvements in the technologies, and evolving understanding on how to make them work best for all, online singing is exploding right now, with a variety of platforms taking hold throughout the world. And there are creative solutions beyond the Internet, like the amazing Driveway Choir, which uses cars’ FM radios. Check out the newly-updated SingOnline.org Links page for curated articles and discussion forums. And please consider sharing blurbs with me, which I’d share anonymously in these blog posts, about your experiences with live online singing tools, so everyone in the SingOnline.org community might learn from you.
The words of the great poet and teacher Mark Nepo, from his Book of Awakening, continue to echo for me during this time:
When everything in life presses from outside of us, we have no choice but to sing like scared children relying on their song to stop the pain, the way that fire stalls the cold. This is the secret of all spirit, why it cannot stay inside, but must be brought from within us into the world. For it is the song from within that keeps the pain of living from snuffing our lives. It is the song from within ignited, again and again, that keeps the world going.
Warmly,
Marv