Hi singing friends,

Consider this musing from Maria Popova on music, singing and the great harmonic of belonging:

To me, this is what makes music so singular — the way it bridges the cosmic and the human, the ephemeral and the eternal. It is at once the most abstract of the arts, made of mathematics, feeling, and time, and the most concrete in its inescapable embodiment — we sing because we have a body, this bittersweet reminder that we are mortal, and we sing to celebrate that we are alive. Alongside love, music may be our best way of saying “yes” to life, and to our life together — I know from the most etymologically passionate person in my life that the Latin root of the word person means “to sound through,” in turn implying a listener: We sound through to something other than ourselves. When we speak, when we sing, when we channel this sound wave of the soul, we reach beyond the self and partake of the great harmonic of belonging.

Popova’s musings on music are a prelude to an animated video in which poet Marie Howe recites her poem, “Hymn”:

HYMN
by Marie Howe

It began as an almost inaudible hum,
low and long for the solar winds
and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
a song without words for the snow falling,
for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges
peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows
the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising
as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing
among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we
found our true place singing in a million
million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be:
the song growing louder and rising.
(Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)

Craig