Raise Your Hopeful Voice

down with the frazzle

up with simple clarity

autumn sneaks closer

Irishman Glen Hansard made beautiful music.  “I’ve always felt that if I ever got cynical, I would have to stop making music because I’d just be poisoning the air.”  September’s to-do list:  Breathing fresh air.  Taking breaks.  Speaking truth.  Hearing music.      

Wrapped in Revery—New York Vocal Collective and Henry David Thoreau

In Harlem Renaissance forerunner Fenton Johnson’s “Revery,” he dreams of a time that “I was the summer / I was the autumn.”  This July artistic director Ben Bram conducts the New York Vocal Collective’s painting of Johnson’s 1915 poem.  “I was the All-time—I was love.”  This heavenly choir’s hands and faces.  The soloist’s blue socks matching the Collective’s dress code—Lila Bloom’s sudden, joy-spilling repetition that “I was love.”  Am.       

An abolitionist horrified by systemic slavery and wearied of encroaching industrialization, Henry David Thoreau found refuge in nature near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.  He built a 10x15 foot cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, moving July 4, 1845 into his one-room home amply furnished with three chairs, bed and table and desk, and a fireplace.  He stayed for two years, two months, and two days, publishing his reflections in 1854.  How about a daily dose of this tranquility drug that Thoreau prescribes in Walden—each of us tailoring the treatment to suit our circumstances: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  I say let your affairs be as two or three, and keep accounts by your thumbnail….  Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and the hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around.…”  Doorstep sun—clarity rays.  Park bench seat—goldfinch song.  Treehouse revery.

Fixers of the News—Katie Phang with Josephine Baker and Angus Hervey 

Feisty independent reporter for MeidasTouch, trial lawyer and legal analyst Katie Phang stays on top of a vile regime’s frenzied madness designed to fatigue and disorient us.  She covers it all—the cruelty and the stupidity—with laughter and pep, candor and tears.  Also, the firebrand represents victims, based on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, in her lawsuit against the stalling nonsense of the currently-called Attorney General: “Blanche pays lip-service to the survivors and makes empty promises of justice.  But we’ve clocked him and what he’s all about from the beginning.”  Sample her clocking in this one-minute news clip.  Transparent felon protection—infuriating criminal delay.  “The fact that I’m even having to sue and fight in a court of law for this is mind-boggling.  I should be joined by every member of Congress.”  Further-much-more, oh yes, Phang’s celebration of Josephine Baker in her August essay “The Black Venus.”  How about this: “Sometimes courage can look like a woman dressed in a feathered and sequined gown, blowing kisses to a room full of Nazi officers, with military secrets pinned inside her underwear.” 

Josephine Baker’s 1906-1975 lifestory educates us about poverty and homelessness, bravery and adventure, patriotism and honesty.  “I have walked in the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents.  And much more.  But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad….”  Fleeing this country’s racial discrimination, she became a French Citizen in 1937.  A world-renowned dancer and singer who refused to perform for segregated audiences anywhere, Baker used her acting skills when recruited as a spy for the French Resistance.  Socializing with starstruck Nazis, working the room at embassies and formal dinners, she scooped vital information for the Allies.  Earning her pilot’s license and flying missions during wartime, she spoke at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  Katie Phang’s lesson: “Every single one of us gets a smaller version of Josephine Baker’s choice…to speak up or to stay quiet….  You don’t need permission to be brave.”   

Founder Angus Hervey’s “Fix the News,” reader-supported independent journalism, tracks the scent of global progress.  “What we offer is a broader, better-informed, and more optimistic account of where things stand.”  His team investigates successful responses to problems and highlights smart, unreported preventative efforts.  “We’re disappointed that crisis gets more coverage than healing, and that victories for love and tolerance don’t make headlines.  We think hope isn’t something you have or that you’re given, but something that you practice.”  Quite a read, the August 20th Fix: “The United States is now a safer place to live in than at any point in its history.”  Who knew?  Look way up at one very tall tree, spotting a few human specks, in mountainous Taiwan: Heaven Sword of the Da’an River.  

dropbox or mailing

register…check polling place

early voting nears

Jukebox and Baseball Blasts—Christina Aguilera and Joshua Báez

Window and ceiling fans barely turn.  Christina Aguilera flips the door’s sign to “closed,” pulls down the shade, and slips off her not-made-for-dancing shoes.  Popping a coin in the jukebox, the singer partners with a chair.  “Let me tell you now / Something’s Got a Hold on Me, yeah (Oh, it must be love).”  She didn’t know it could happen to her.  “It sure feels strange, but I sure feel good.”   

Never before has a Major Leaguer—some 25,000 putting on numbered uniforms since 1870—hit 3 home runs in the batter’s first ballgame.  Three going-going-gone balls in a row!  You’ll grin with Joshua Báez as he rounds the bases after each homer.  Called up by the St. Louis Cardinals from his minor league Memphis team, Báez thought about his dad as he hustled to Chicago’s Wrigley Field.  José Manuel taught him to play ball and when his health failed in 2023, Joshua promised him that he would make it to The Show.  That night his mother Yris roots for her boy, yelling and clapping along with thirty-plus family members and friends. His father?  “I had a bee that was with me every single inning in the outfield….  Strange….  I let it go…it wasn’t going to sting me.  I kind of took that as if he was the bee, because it was right there every single inning….  He’s here with me right now in spirit.”

A Song and a Poem—Homecoming Melodies

“Take this sinking boat and point it home / We’ve still got time.”  Written and performed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, their award-winning song from the film “Once” takes the cake.  “Falling Slowly, eyes that know me.”  All cakes.  “Raise your hopeful voice.”  Her piano and steadiness—his guitar and emotion.  “Sing your melody.”   

Calm.  Silent.  We listen with poet Annie Lighthart.  Two melodies always hum.  Harder to hear, lower and softer, “The Second Music” plays.  “I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.”  This quieter music’s song?  The truth of our beautiful lives.  “I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.” 

Josephine Baker

singing just-released “Blue Skies”

November’s forecast