BIGGERness

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

-- Mary Oliver

Big (enough?) and bigger.

In the mid-90’s, my husband Joe and I traded the Wild West for the Wild East. We moved from New Mexico (where we met, married and lived for some years) to his old stomping ground, the mountains of Western North Carolina. We wanted to be closer to green trees, water and family. It was homeward bound for Joe and new-ward bound for me.

I married well. The tributary of kinfolk we moved near to were Joe’s sister Sue, her husband Hobey and their three daughters, a family of very precious artists of various flavors. And they all sang. Like it was no big deal … in the house, going to town, with friends, in the garden, and in all kinds of spontaneously combustive ways. It seemed like they poured music into the house and kept it topped up. As a child, my eldest niece Lauren made her debut into my life dressed as Carmen Miranda (faux fruit hat on her head and the whole shtick). She sailed down a staircase while singing Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T and I was enchanted. (And still am.) Though they are all performers, singing was also in the weave of their ordinary, un-performative day and had everything to do with family, home, expression, rootedness, and belonging.

I was also raised with a lot of music. My mother kept the LPs on the turntable and our lives were accompanied by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Sarah Vaughan and the soundtrack of every musical under the American sun. (And also everything Herb Alpert ever recorded since his birth.) But none of us sang. And I was almost pathologically shy where singing out loud was concerned.

How on earth I ended up in middle school and high school choirs I have no idea. But somehow I did. I realize in looking back that tall skinny girls of my generation (at least in my public schools) got pigeonholed as sopranos. As if height and gender determined our pitch. I was not a soprano but I didn’t know that (nor did my choir directors). So I perfected the art of lip-syncing the songs in our performances so that my voice would not stand out in any way (at all). I became very adept at fake loud singing.

With Sue’s family, I felt safe enough to begin to sing along with them in the most tentative, mousy kind of way. One day, in her kitchen, Sue told me that I was an alto. I asked her what that was and when she explained, I had one of those biblical holy rolling moments: I understood I had a destiny beyond the narrow realm of unattainable high notes and that my voice had other choices. I started to revel in how comfortable I felt in a lower range (I thought I had to be shorter for that). I also discovered a love of harmonies and that changed my car diva life which is where most of my concerts are staged.

This revelation came in my late 40’s. The garden of me has often been late blooming.

One summer, as I was driving to town, I was singing my heart out to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” with my newly discovered alto self. I noticed that if I sang louder, I was a better singer. A much better singer: I stayed on key, could hold a note longer, had more fun, and I was definitely more impressed with myself 😎. I also began to wonder where else in my life I was settling for smallness and avoiding what I call biggerness (which should be a word) … not the bigger associated with the Western notions of success, wealth, celebrity, cars or supersized food. And nothing to do with bigness as perceived by others. This is the territory of Sacred More, where we are rooted internally and can assume our correct proportion as a spirit in human form. Here we are invited to set up residence, right in the heart of our own life and our own reason for being.

I have long been inspired by this quote from Patanjali:¹

“When you are inspired by some great purpose … all of your thoughts break their bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” And I would add, when we more fully inhabit our voice, vision and gifts, we meet the person we really are. Because with the whole more-ish territory of us, comes the more abundant light of us. And not the science of light, but the poetry of light … the poetry of us.

Just before I finished writing this post, I went out to the gratitude altar in Joe’s Great Wall which is presided over by the Virgen de Guadalupe. I was thinking of you, dear reader, and sending blessings for whatever biggerness might want to bloom in your life … and for all the many beautiful people starting to gather in this Holy Mischief circle. And in that moment … that exact moment … the wind picked up and hundreds of tiny white blossoms from the Snowball Bush (just above the Virgen) began to fall … like snow. Please take this personally. This is for you, a Snowball Bush blessing for the beauty of you and your holy biggerness whose time has come.

❤️ Debra

A blessing for you and your voice, vision and gifts … and your holy biggerness.

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1. Patanjali was a mystic who is generally believed to have lived during the middle of the second century BCE, possibly in Sri Lanka or South India or, some say, from a celestial or spiritual realm beyond the earthly world.