By Anna Blaedel
This year, every day, as a practice, I sing. I sing, and I take notice of and catalogue an encounter with joy.
These are survival strategies, for living through this onslaught of chaos and catastrophe.
Singing strengthens my lungs. Deepens my breath, and reminds me to breathe. Helps my blood flow, gives my disoriented immune system a boost. It’s not nothing, a free source of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine. It’s not nothing, to sing just for the joy of it.
I am learning that it is impossible to sing, and be closed to breath, which is spirit, which is life.
I am learning that it is impossible to be open and attuned to life, and not encounter joy.
Even in this onslaught of chaos and catastrophe.
Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha, a music teacher in Gaza, is teaching children to sing by harmonizing with the unceasing sounds of Israeli drones. He calls this the “Gaza Birds Singing.” In the midst of genocide and mass displacement, Ahmed and the displaced, hungry, terrified children he gathers are transforming the sounds of war into song. Creating beauty, in rubble. Wielding melodies, while Israeli wields US-made cluster bombs. “Together,” he writes, “we sing for love, for freedom, for life.”
It’s not nothing, to sing just for the joy of it. It’s not nothing, to sing for love, for freedom. It’s not nothing, to sing for our lives.
bell hooks describes love as “the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact.” Love, hooks suggests, is not nothing; love is everything. Rooting in the practice of love is how we survive – and how we die – with our spirits intact. The Gaza Birds Singing teach us that it is impossible to fully separate love, and freedom, and life, and song. Necessary, each and all.
Singing, according to Ahmed, is “a human cry that tells the world: We love life.”
Singing and joy: spiritual practices for remaining in touch with love – love for life, love for each other, love for this world. “True, this isn’t paradise,” I hear Lucille Clifton whisper, “but we come at last to love it.” Clifton catalogues her love: sweet hay and flowers rising, warm rains and mourning doves who open the darkness with song…Clifton’s list reminds me of my catalogue of encounters with joy. Ordinary, extraordinary moments: A bowl of pomegranate seeds placed in my lap by a friend. Soup dropped on someone’s porch. Soup left on mine, too. Resolutions committing to Palestinian liberation and trans protection passed unanimously by a City Council. My dad’s laughter. Cooking with my mama. Reading my students’ reflections on Leslie Feinberg. Planting seedlings in pots of dirt, on my beloved’s new porch. My middle nibling’s delight, when I poured chocolate syrup directly into her mouth. Alaa Abd El-Fattah, released from prison after 12 years. This handful of okra. This perfect, perfect plum.
It’s not nothing, this deep and wide catalogue of joy encountered in chaos and catastrophe.
Joy doesn’t stop genocide, but it can be found participating in protests, and acts of mutual aid and accompaniment, and communities of resistance singing for love, for freedom, for our lives, for life.
Singing doesn’t stop fascism, nor the violent Christian Nationalist authoritarian tech-oligarchs wreaking such devastating destruction, so often with compliance and capitulation by Republicans and Democrats alike. Neither my singing, nor the songs from the Gaza Birds Singing. But when I’m singing, I’m breathing. And when I’m breathing, my heart is beating. And when I attune to the joy of my beating heart, of our beating hearts, I hear a rhythm that sounds like a love song, a song of freedom, “a human cry that tells the world: We love life.” Because loving life is a survival strategy. And we do not, I hope and pray and sing, abandon, detain, disappear, deport, and bomb that which we love.
anna blaedel
co-director
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students through sacred collective: a place of belonging for spiritual misfits, and has a PhD in theological and philosophical studies from Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.