Tag Archives: joy

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Mundane Monday #168: bee heaven

For today’s Mundane Monday, pick your theme: heavens or bees or both! This plant hums with bees when it is in bloom. The bees love it so much and I think that it must love being swarmed with humming bees. Think of loving and being loved so much.

Message your link and I will list all the entries next week.

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The theme for Mundane Monday #167 was water’s edge.

Contributors include:

CuriousSteph https://curioussteph.com/2018/07/02/mundane-monday-waters-ed

 

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harmony

Another fabulous Voiceworks class, this with Anna and Elizabeth. As the week progressed and we ate lunch and dinner with the instructors at the tables as well as each other, I felt more and more blessed and impressed. These teachers said, “Come talk to us. We have time. We are here and you can talk to us between classes.” What generosity and blessing.

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protection

This is Ruth Merenda, one of the many brilliant faculty, from a Centrum Voiceworks class this week.

Ruthie was at Voiceworks with her husband Mike and two children. I got to trade jokes with their son William at lunch one day. I am listening to their newest album as I write this, Sunshiner. It’s good that only really hear the faculty near the end of the week, because we would be WAY too intimidated if they did the concerts at the start! William has an album too, Piano Nerd, that I have not tracked down yet. He was seven when he made it.

I took the first class of the week with Michael, his Song Doctor class. We each brought a song with problems to the class and sang it to the class. I did that class first because it was hands down no holds barred the scariest, so I thought best to get it over with. I sang Tree Boat a capella. The feedback I got makes me very happy, but the assignment is hard: now I have to learn guitar. Or mandolin. Or something. Accompaniment. Also it’s not my song alone: I wrote the poem but not the melody.

I took two classes with Ruthie. One was on music theory and chords. The other was a performance feedback class.

I had a rather surreal moment in that class. Ruthie has us close our eyes and visualize a protective sphere of energy around us. Now, I’ve been writing about trying to lose my armor suit. So WHAT am I to do with a protective sphere of energy? I thought of my story Good Girl and that gave me my answer. My protective sphere moved outwards, the entire universe. I visualize that protection as holding everyone in the room, gently, lovingly. My protective sphere is my connection to the Beloved and the Beloved’s entire universe and anything beyond that. And then I could do the visualization.

Blessings on Mike and Ruth and their children and on all of the teachers at Voiceworks. The week brought me tears of joy over and over and over: and tears of grief and tears of hope.

 

 

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More Dawn

Here is one of the Voiceworks Classes with Dawn Pemberton. My biggest problem is I want to go to all five or six classes that are running simultaneously and then there are people playing music in the halls, on the porch, singing in the practice rooms!

And we’re on our feet practicing singing soul.

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Voiceworks!

This is the last day of Centrum’s Voiceworks. I am vacationing at home except that it feels like I’ve been transported to a land of song and music, for a whole week.

I don’t want it to end.

This is Dawn Pemberton, a British Columbia singer and choral director and teacher. Her classes have been on soul and an acapella chorus. From the Voiceworks pamphlet: “SheΒ  can be found tearing it up as vocalist, teacher, adjudicator and choir director.” She directs the Roots ‘n’ Wings Women’s Choir and teaches all over Canada.

Her classes have been an absolute joy and inspiration. Soul, acapella and yesterday a body rhythm and stomp class. I could do the body rhythm but when I started listening to it I was so mesmerized that I lost my place. Found it again, but I couldn’t do it and listen.

I ask Dawn if she plays near here, but she says it is very difficult to come in to the US from Canada to perform: borders again. I am very sad about that. I’ll have to go to Vancouver, BC to hear her and her chorus!

And here she is singing Say Something. And her choirs.

Thanks and shout out to Centrum and to all of the teachers and other students, about 170 people coming together for joyous noise!