In Celebration of the Human Voice - The Essential Musical Instrument

Marv Zauderer

Living in: San Rafael, CA.
My experience of singing with people is an experience of a profound kind of connection, a collective effervescence. In the most magical of moments, veils of history fall away - persona, trauma, self-protection - and my soul meets other souls in a beautiful, mutual giving and receiving, carrying the words and feelings of the songs we are singing through that pure channel of meeting. No matter what the content of the songs is - hope, grief, fear, awe, shame, love, joy - I feel us singing our way into aliveness and I know I have come home.

To me, singing is a crucial part of the social infrastructure of our communities - as important as roads and bridges, for so many of us, for our feelings of connectedness, belonging, and well-being. With all the separations and separateness in our experience - between people, between groups, between us and so much of the more-than-human world - singing together can give us the experience of crossing any divide into an experience of resonant union, poignant interdependence, and what the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh called "interbeing.