We Sing for the Sheer Joy of Singing

Anyone can sing. You just open your mouth, and give shape to a sound. Anyone can sing. What is harder, is to proclaim the soul, to initiate a wild and necessary deepening: to give the voice broad, sonorous wings of solitude, grief, and celebration, to fill the body with the echoes of voices lost long ago to bravery, and silence, to prise the reluctant heart wide open, to witness defeat, to suffer contempt, to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy, to retreat to the last dark hiding-place where the tattered remnants of your pride still gather themselves around your nakedness, to know these rags as your only protection and yet still open – to face the possibility that your innermost core may hold nothing at all, and to sing from that – to fill the void with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy that staves off death yet honors its coming, to sing both full and utterly empty, alone and conjoined, exiled and at home, to sing what people feel most keenly yet never acknowledge until you sing it. Anyone can sing. Yes. Anyone can sing.
~ William Ayot

“Song is not a luxury, but a necessary way of being in the world. Somehow we have been fooled into thinking that song is entertainment, something we can do without, like dessert…The minute we arrive we are born singing, though this is often mistaken for crying, Yet without this deep reflex, the lungs won’t work and the lifelong exchange between inner and outer can’t begin.”
~ Mark Nepo