Singing Alive

~~   Greetings and Welcome All   ~~

We are gathered here to illuminate the mythic roots and shoots, flowers and fruits, that inspire and evolve Singing Alive (SA) events.

Why is this important?

• Because the entire event is an exercise in the creation of a particular reality, a specific container.  This container needs to be at least basically understood, and then agreed to and honored for the well-being of our time together. 
• So that potential attendees know what they are agreeing to, it is important to review the guiding paradigm, the intended ‘culture’ of the gatherings, so that we are all more or less on the same page.   Those then drawn to SA can, from a more informed place, choose to come and simply be, if that is the preference, or more actively ally themselves, offering constructive input when appropriate.

What is this container?  

• On one level, its purpose is to allow densities to thin, and imaginations to grow.  This to surface songs from more inclusive layers of consciousness, and to reveal our more profound, more archetypically-charged, potentials as a singing species.  In this way the event is a birthing space, an incubator, for acts of emergence, and needs to be held as such, protected, much like a retreat.
• On another level it is a place for these songs to grow, to ‘learn to walk’ among the humans that sing them, to be lived, embodied, carried, and shared.  It is important that the event ‘walks the talks’ of these songs, in mutually supportive feedback relation with them.  In this way it is ceremonial space, and is best approached with the same conscious awareness, the same reverence, that you would approach anything of the sacred.
• And on yet another level, it needs to be a held space so that we humans can go thru our own transformations, to feel free to express new self-definitions, new identity patterns, in ways that feel both safe to ourselves, and to others.  ‘Holding space’ means being present for people, in support of them as they feel their feelings, as they lean into their vulnerabilities.   It means being kind, curious, and judgment-free.

We @ Singing Alive LLC, have done our best over the many years to keep attunement to the pulse that runs thru the Gaian folk-song genre, and often re-work the container to accommodate it.   We strive to cultivate this frequency, and protect it from compromise, for without its vital presence, there is no SA. 

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As the era of the ‘Great Pause’ fitfully passes, it is leaving a destabilized status quo in its wake.  In this swirl of uncertainty we may detect a rhythmic void of yet unrealized possibilities, an opening in the collective story-line, a great hunger in the human imagination, inviting us to remake our world, to dream a new Dream.  The creative currents of mythic renewal that underlie and feed SA may be of use in this re-Creation.

In service to new beginnings, positive futures, and a clearer understanding of what SA is about, we have included a few perspectives that may help you better enjoy the event, and help us as organizers attune more attendees into the Cause.  All these can be explored further in the six articles below, if one feels moved to do so.

• Though there is plenty of festivity at SA, it is not a festival, at least in the conventional sense.   The behaviors associated with the usual festival is a default setting to many people who have never experienced anything otherwise, and when they project festival expectations onto SA, it can muddy the waters of what we are intending to create.  The ongoing treatise, ‘The Gaian Dreamtime Song Village’, is a resource for understanding the ‘Being’ that is ‘Singing Alive’, at least in its visionary form. This ‘Creation-story’ is concerned with songs as living beings, and the cosmology they inhabit.  From this viewpoint, we explore the songs that tend to populate SA, the circumstances that help birth them into this world, and the potentials for personal and planetary evolution offered to us when we engage with them in co-creative ways.

• The imagination, as in ‘use your imagination’, has the ability to ‘see’ the unity, the clusters of affinities, beneath the physical world of ‘10,000 things’. We can draw this underlying connective reality to the surface thru the power of metaphors and analogies, of visualizations and heart-longings.   This is a healthy use of the imagination, and serves to fertilize our lives with inspiration.  To care for and protect this creative matrix is to practice a kind of ‘imaginal hygiene’, as it can easily be colonized and corrupted.   At SA we aim to nourish the imagination with rich archetypes, many long lost to the rationalist, and combative mind-set of modernity.   The disenchanted state of the world asks us to dig deep, for the more buried treasures of the imagination we can discover, the more wholeness (healing) we can bring and sing into our world.

• One of the signatures of an evolved consciousness is the recognition of interconnectedness.  As much of humanity has opted out of this recognition, a dis-ease of homesickness has set in, a yearning for healing and reconciliation.  Slave-era spirituals, gospel songs, songs of frustration and angst, and bhakti devotionals all speak to this longing.   When we sing these feelings from the deep vulnerabilities of the heart, we connect to an innate bodily intelligence, itself inseparable from Gaian intelligence.   As above so below.  The more we allow this planetary awareness to move thru us, the more we re-member the original instructions.  All the ‘cells’, all the life forms that populate this earth body know the Ways of the Gaian metabolism at some level of their being.   In human terms we can call this ‘indigenous consciousness’.   It originates songs that honor our home, re-teach us the Ways to live in right relationship, and to care for ourselves and the planet.

• The depiction of the heart as an internal sun, from which we can shine the radiance of love, is ubiquitous to the world’s cultures, and provides a theme found in many songs at SA.  This sun may en-lighten our physical form as a ‘creation-body’, which holds the history and promise of the planet in the microcosm of our individual existence.   When we surrender ourselves to this radiance, the impulse of self-transformation carried thru the element lineages, thru the crystals, flowers, butterflies, birds, and beyond, can activate thru us humans as well.  Mapping our transformations on to those of the natural world, its seasons and cycles, rhythms and rhymes, grounds us in the body, and connects us to guidance.  Such radical changes are initiatory.   Medicine songs, useful in helping our sense of self move thru contractions and releases, are common at SA.  As the journey of initiation is universal, there are songs from many traditions that attend to, a) letting go of attachments, b) engagement with the shadowlands, and c) tempering of the soul through crisis.

• One way to define Gaian folk-songs, is that they assist with our conscious engagement in the great Game of evolution.  This because they are native to a future healed earth, yet for them the future is NOW.  .   This is the common field of vibration from which these songs ‘sprout’, and which they seek to re-create on the physical plane.  For this reason, all songs ‘recognize’ each other, as do, at some level, those who sing them.  Each song is a thread of a yet greater story, a vast tapestry of teaching.  To communally sing these songs is to activate the story, the template of next octave planet earth.  This story can then ripen in our bodies and grow thru our lives.  As we choose to become the story, we become an offering to the temple universe.  Clues to this narrative of mythic renewal can be found in an overview of songs sung at SA events.   If one were to group them by affinity (e.g., birthing songs, blessing songs, grieving songs, gratitude songs, etc.), and intuit connecting story lines, then these are no longer just random songs sung at an event.  They become parts of a greater story, to which, we may find, we belong.

• Singing Alive is, in sum, a pro-active peace event.   By this we mean peace as way of life, a culture, a Path.  It upwells as a generative force of happy living, a current by which nature re-balances itself, self-organizes.   This in contrast to peace defined by negation, as a mere absence of war.  This is similar to health as a Path of ever-increasing well-being, not just an absence of illness.   And just as the holistic ’health seer’ sees past symptoms of dis-ease to one’s inherently whole, or healthy state, and then helps to coax it into expression, so the pro-active peace perspective sees the natural altruism, or kindness, of an individual, of society, and works to create conditions whereby it may maximally manifest in the world.  To focus on what is right, instead of what is wrong with something, is an approach to life.  It also acknowledges a spiritual law, that negative forces feed on being resisted, and instead wither where there is good will, honesty, forbearance, and most of all, Love.  With his approach we can give up the war metaphors, the fighting for peace and justice, and instead focus on outgrowing, outshining, the mentalities that create conflict.   The resulting culture of peace represents one of the most fruitful avenues for song development in the Gaian folk-song genre.

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