all about the threshold choir and singing at the hinge moments.
Whew. Not to get all heavy and stuff, here on a beautiful fall Monday morning, but my sweet friend Alannah posted a comment on facebook about having sung (with 17 people) at a friend’s bedside. I don’t know any details, and may be all wrong about this, but usually when you sing at someone’s bedside, it’s a threshold moment. A hinge moment, I like to call them. The moments of greatest importance, the moments between spaces. Death. Birth. Frightening illness. Deep quiet. A singular moment, or set of moments, at the hinge of time.
When I read Alannah’s post, I remembered The Threshold Choir, an organization of women led by Kate Munger; The Threshold Choir gathers to sing at bedsides, at these threshold/hinge times. I don’t know what it is about voices singing together that moves me the way it does, but this group in particular really gets to me. The video below shows the group rehearsing in a church space, but of course it needn’t be embedded in a religious context (by which I mean any particular organized religion; singing for a dying person is a spiritual endeavor, but who cares the framework). Watch this 4-minute video if you have time.
There are Threshold Choirs all over the country now – here’s the page that lists them. And of course you can start your own, either formally or informally.
There must really be something kind of magical about the human voice singing. When you sing your own body vibrates, and sends out vibrations. When it’s done with an intention, like an intention of comfort, something else happens. When a few voices gather together it’s even more magical. I used to sing my kids to sleep; I’d take my guitar into their bedrooms and sing to them one at a time, and it’s one of my favorite memories. My sister used to call me and ask me to play and sing for her so she could go to sleep. Sing for someone, whatever the song.
o how i love annie lennox. i really do.
I had a long conversation with Katie, my older daughter, this morning, which was essentially a conversation about what gives a life meaning and value. Like me, her desire is for close-to-home things – meaningful work, a family, being a mom. Like her, I am often intimidated by people whose lives are more dramatic, or whose work is more “exciting,” or whose lives are more something than ours.
And then, while I was uploading my new sock photo to ravelry, my iTunes randomly played a song from Annie Lennox‘s album Songs of Mass Destruction. (If you click the album cover to the left, it’ll take you to the Amazon page where you can buy the music; I very highly recommend it!) I became fixated on the first song released from the album, Dark Road. Sony took down the video, so I can’t show it here. Bastards. It’s a beautiful video, and the song is heartbreakingly beautiful, as many of her songs are.
55? isn't she gorgeous?!
I’ve been in fan love with Annie since I first heard Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) back in 1983, I think. As a matter of fact, that song always makes me think of Katie; she was a tiny toddler at the time and she was crazy for the song. It could be playing at the other end of the house and she’d squeal, come running, and then stand there, bopping and grinning to the beat. Adorable. Annie’s music has been the soundtrack for much of my adult life; the Diva and Medusa albums truly are the soundtrack to the end of my first marriage, and my devastating divorce. The Peace album is the soundtrack of a year of my life in graduate school, when everything — everything — came together and I was absolutely happy in myself. The Bare album is the soundtrack to one of the biggest changes of my adult life.
So anyway, I’m sitting at my desk, doing my little small life thing, documenting a little sock I knit, for heaven’s sake, and the next song from the album came on – Sing. Sing my sister sing, let your voice be heard, what won’t kill you will make you strong, sing my sister sing. It could be trite, but it isn’t. Annie sings it with urgency – sing, my sisters. Sing. The song is the focus of her Sing campaign to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.
So there she is (just a couple of years older than me, by the way) making beautiful music and trying desperately to help save lives in Africa, and to help women, and here I am taking too many pictures of a sock.
Of course in light of this morning’s conversation with Katie it struck me. I could say the cliched thing, something trite about “all lives have meaning” blah blah blah (note, it’s not trite because it’s not true! it is true that all lives have meaning. But it’s trite because it’s a too-simple answer to a deeper concern). I don’t know how to resolve it. I feel it, I understand it.
Maybe it’s something like understanding that age 51 I’m probably not going to be an astronaut and should cross that one off my list. 
Anyway – here’s Sing, if you haven’t heard it:
dude, i don’t want to hear you sing.
dude.
Manhattan is an exciting place to live. It is. Everything is here – every country, every industry, the most exciting industries, famous people just doing their thing and we let them be, energy, disaster, everything. I don’t ever want to live anywhere else (though I would definitely consider living in Paris, Hanoi, Cusco, or Amsterdam). New York is amazing.
And there are days where it just wins. Somehow New York beats you, now and then. For me, the win usually comes at Duane Reade. If you’re from here, I don’t need to say more. If you’re not – Duane Reade is the everywhere drugstore, and the employees will just defeat you.
You know how the very thing that’s so great can also be the worst? It’s that whole “everything contains its shadow” deal. Well, one of the often-amazing aspects of living here is that all these people – all these different, wildly different people – we’re all living on top of each other. You have to adjust, you have to not take things personally because we’re all just trying to make it happen. That’s cool. I almost never get tired of seeing all of us. I feel so tender toward humanity…all you have to do is look, and there it is, pulsing and moving and trying so hard.
But sometimes, sometimes it’s just eNOUGH, man. Sometimes I am just not. in. the. mood for the guy who gets into the subway right next to me and decides to start singing – loudly – for the pleasure of doing it, as far as I can tell. In another language. Or the woman who wheels an amp and a big speaker into the subway, turns it on, picks up her mike, and starts singing Donna Summer On The Radio (and I love that song, by the way…). Or the woman who steps into the car and starts shouting her preaching, and it’s never good, it’s never all about how loved we are by God, it’s always about how bad we are, how far away, how sinful, how death and destruction are coming. You kind of have to have a bit of energy to spare to hold yourself in the face of that loud. It’s a public shared space – the unwritten rule is that you don’t take smelly food into the subway and eat it while you’re riding. You don’t do that! It’s rare that someone does, actually. But if I wanted to hear a concert, I’d seek it out. I don’t necessarily feel like it when I’m exhausted after a hard week, when the walk to the subway has taken me through crowds of tourists teeming in and out of Macy’s, when the trains are fucked up and late and so crowded you can’t imagine squeezing in but you have to try, when it’s just been a sucking week at work. And you do all that, and you just want to get home, and you’re standing there so tired it’s hard to stand, and the guy next to you opens his mouth and starts singing some very loud, shouting song in spanish, maybe, you can’t tell, and you can’t even get away.
Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, well, he eats you.
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