What Scares Me About Voice

What Scares Me About Voice

What scares me about voice is not being able to let go, let go into the chimes, like the wind, which blows where it will and hears its song sung back to it in the breezeway. I want to ring the chimes in my gut, in my ribcage and sternum. I want my throat to be like my breezeway – open and available for play, for wind, for whistling resonance, for bone-deep vibrations, for lyrical songs. I want to call to the birds with my songs and have them answer me back.
Chick-a-dee-dee-dee.
I’m here-here-here.
What scares me is what people will think, what I will think, what it will sound like. I want to be like Rumi, who said,
“I want to sing like birds,
not wondering who is listening
and what they think.”

black-capped chickadee

I teach Vibrant Voice workshops to remind myself that we can all sing like that. We can all be child-like exploring our voice again. We can all be birds on the wire, on the garage peak, in the garden looking for seeds, soaring or nesting. We can all let our voices fly on the wind.