I saw on the news earlier this summer a piece about how the natural world enjoyed a brief COVIC-prompted respite, as if the planet has asked us humans to sit quietly for a time. The air and water were cleaner, and it seemed that bird song changed: at least among some species in some locations, birds were singing more loudly and with an expanded vocal range. Without the usual noise and speed and crush of people to inhibit them, birds were finding and lifting their voices. They were exulting in the space that our forced hiatus is offering. They were singing, piping, warbling, cawing, chirping, whistling, or trilling with greater gusto and, if you will, with deeper authenticity.
And what of your own “voice” in these times? To be sure, for many people the change, grief, and anxiety wrought by the pandemic has meant a loss of voice and agency, a laryngitis of soul, a time of lament, a cry for help. All of that is real, and deserves to be heeded. This may be a time to listen for your true voice – whether it expresses raw suffering, deep questions, or simple joys. This may be a time to listen for your most authentic self, to listen for your deepest sense of meaning and purpose to (re-)emerge with greater clarity and “high fidelity.”
In his baccalaureate address at Spelman College in May 1980 the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman said, “There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born and no one like you will ever be born again – you are the only one….You are the only you that has ever lived…and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…. The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams [and] your ambitions that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you…. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.”
In these strange and changing times, where even the birds can sing more freely: What does “the genuine” sound like, to you? How do you know it when you hear it in yourself, and in others? What seems to prevent you from voicing or hearing the sound of the genuine in yourself, and in others? What is the song that needs to come into the world in and through you?