Sing Your Song

Allowed freedom, we are enchanted beings. The enchantment begins with our human, personal song, which discovered, cracks open a window into the cosmos, enabling us to experience reality with fewer boundaries.

The song, first personally and then communally, is the primary tool that unlocks our apprehension of deeper reality, and allows us to act from that vision. This process is deeply connected, integrated and anarchistic.

In the world of 10,000 years ago, with religion, city states, and agriculture on the rise, enchantment became dangerous to those who would rule over others. Domination on a new scale became institutionalized.

It is interesting to note how religions and state institutions perpetuate remnants of song for their own purposes. Music is important in church and politics, with oppressive authorities maintaining a tenuous hold over us through ritual sound.

Told what to sing and when, the song is not ours. Ritualized music can bring us closer to each other and group conceptions of the sacred, but stifles non-religious, apolitical connection to the world.

Our freedom will require new songs and dances.

We each have a song to discover which found, is completely free from authority and symbolic language. It is not music, but it resonates in our bones and opens our vision.

Sung with personal intention it connects us to the world we lost and leads us to be healed. Both the personal and communal songs evolve over time and are impermanent, as are all things.

This body, these vocal cords, these dancing feet, connected to this speck of dust, this tiny packet of information racing through the cosmos will be gone in a second, but while here, in this form, can lead us back to enchantment.

Dave Hanson taught science and art for 20 years and has been teaching shamanism for the last 35. He lives in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula. dhanson (at) olypen (dot) com