Life is singing, are you listening?
A prizegiving, a farewell and several conversations about hearing the song that life is playing to you. Are you listening?
Enabling The How #189. Reading time: 5 minutes 40 seconds
We have a large viburnum tree outside our kitchen. During the course of the year it sheds leaves, twigs, berries and flowers. Quite a mess to sweep away every day. The debris clogs the gutters, which overflow at the first rains, a not so gentle reminder to clear them.
This tree also gives us the most welcome shade all year long. Spring is heralded by a massive bouquet of tiny white flowers that appear almost overnight. These in turn offer our bees sweet nourishment after the dry spell of winter. To stand under the canopy at this time offers a humming choir of joy and gratitude.
We could focus on the mess but we prefer to listen to the singing.
The hall rang
This Saturday was the annual prize giving at Ikusasa Lethu. Learners were acknowledged and rewarded for improvements, achievement and academic excellence over the course of the year. These learners, ranging from Grade 8 to Grade 12, mostly come from high schools in Alexandra Township. They are not the top performers but those that are in the middle range who have potential and want to do better. Each year they apply for a position on the programme which is limited to 75 places per grade.
Every Saturday they are bussed to St Mary’s School for Girls in Waverly to do extra lessons, provided by a cohort of passionate teachers willing to give up their Saturdays to support these learners. Not every learner makes it through the year. Some drop off as they cannot maintain the discipline of giving up their Saturdays to do more school work.
The reality is that living in an under-resourced, over populated, noisy environment where unemployment is rife does not endear hope. With few job opportunities, the cool beckoning of gangs in fancy shoes and loud cars is hard to resist. Yet the majority of learners arrive every week and do the work.
They are an anxious bunch who stress about their tests and despair if they don’t do well. That’s where we come in to teach skills to build emotional fitness and mental wellbeing to meet the extra challenges that they have to face as a result of the demographic and social strata they were born into.
On Saturday they whooped and cheered each award winner giving the loudest yells and claps for those that had excelled. And they sang in celebration. These young people had heeded the call that life sang to them. They had backed themselves, put in the effort in spite of their hardships and the hall rang.
Also a farewell
The prize giving was also a farewell to Robyn Fraser-Knowles. She has resigned as the head of Ikusasa Lethu to explore new adventures in Cape Town with her wife who has recently accepted a new position in the Mother City.
Robyn has been a shining light for this programme introducing innovative elements and always keeping the welfare of the learners close to her heart. Like a Duracell bunny she rarely runs out of energy and we seldom catch her without a smile on her face.
We know that it was a difficult decision for her to leave before she felt that she had accomplished everything she wanted to. Yet her ear turned to the tune of new challenges, new environments and a different group to support.
The lingering melody called to someone else to step into her shoes. This new breath will pick up the tune, add their own accompaniments, tweak the tone and fix the lyrics to suit their inspiration.
Listen to the notes
Over the course of the week we connected with some other beautiful people who talked of a call, a whisper that had been in their ear forever but was now growing louder and stronger. The notes would not let go or go away so they reached out to us to explore ways that they could dance or sing to the tune without looking like a whirling dervish or someone high on drugs.
Those that cannot hear the song, because they are not ready or have lost the ability to listen at that level, are quick to condemn the dancer-singer to crazyland. In order to hear the refrain we have to be still and listen through the noise of this world we live in. It requires moving through the forever hum of technology and the media snap, crackle and pop with cereal box messages at empty calorie mouthfuls.
This is difficult for many who are so caught up in their whirlwind lives and convinced by the marketing machine that they no longer have space to listen above and beyond what demands their attention. These people cannot be dismissed or ignored or left behind because they could be our mothers and fathers, siblings and children, friends and colleagues. It is important for those that wish to heed the song to live in this world while waltzing into a new system of being. It is a careful balancing act.
Life is singing
The song can sound discordant and jarring. Like a new music genre, at first unfamiliar to our ears and even unpleasant, it just takes some time to acclimatise. If we give ourselves the chance to stop and listen we may find our hips start to sway and our heads begin to bob.
This song of life wants us to succeed but so often we don’t listen. We let old habits wear us down and outdated beliefs cover our ears. If we turn our heads towards the tune and let the notes run through us we may find ourselves softly humming with a smile on our faces.
Somewhere near you there is a flower in bud, about to bloom and a bird in a treetop chattering its song, or maybe it’s another call, a unique Nature sound, specific to where you live in the world. Whatever it is, it happens whether you notice it, hear it or are even there to experience it. This is the life outside of our life, the great current that flows through everything, it sustains us, nourishes us and sings to us. It calls to us to be that which we were born to be. It reaches deep and strums and drums and hums. It won’t go away. It is always there calling, calling, singing. Are you listening?
Until next time.
Yours in feeling,
Matthew & Chantal