Happy New Year!

During Covid, my spouse Jean has taken on some arts and crafts projects. An old square outdoor wooden picnic table surface, she said, needed some inspiring brief words to paint at each place. So I directed her to Sufi poets, and she eventually found this by contemporary Iranian – born poet / novelist Kamand Kajouri:

forget your voice — sing!
forget your feet — dance!
forget your life — live!
forget yourself — be!

And in that spirit, I share this wonderful 1st 4 minutes at a Middle Church, NYC, (thanks, Gordon!) pre-Covid Christmas Eve service: Gospel, Beethoven, and modern dance (3 of my favorites)!

And I am also a fan of Yara Allen, music director for Methodist Rev. William Barber’s justice campaigns, called “Moral Mondays” – no relation to our Music Mondays! Here she is teaching — as we can do more of on zoom — “Woke Up This Morning with my mind stayed on freedom.” Note that the original lyric of this spiritual / Gospel song is “stayed on Jesus,” but Ms. Allen appropriately adapts. Fannie Lou Hamer did the same with “Go Tell It On the Mountain” during the 1960’s, altering the ending ” . . .that Jesus Christ is born” to “that we will be free!” Curious – I found it elsewhere on youtube, but it’s Middle Church (again)! I LOVE her compliment to choir altos and — “God bless you all” — other choir folks (at 1:30) Enjoy!

Namaste
Keith