Roads to Joy

So the SongWave Choir have finished their weekend series of concerts, Singing up a Storm, and we exhausted but energised singers are recuperating. After presenting a huge accumulation of metaphors, relating to sea and sand, water and nurture, hearth and home and shelter from the storm, we’ve sung ourselves hoarse. I believe the concerts, which were well attended with enthusiastic audiences at each of the three venues, will have generated in excess of £500 towards the renovation of the RNLI Boathouse at Kirkcudbright, which has seen little improvement since its construction in 1853.

But there’s another opportunity to reprise some of our beloved numbers, as we venture tomorrow evening to the dedication of the Dispersed Memorial Forest at Threave Nature Reserve, remembering Covid victims from Dumfries and Galloway. So we shall sing again, and many may weep, adding our own salted tears to the storm.

In our life, it seems, we are each of us single sailors at sea, but we share experience together as a community, so in fact we are individuals, but we are not alone. This sense is never more true than when individuals sing in a group. Our last concert was the more exalted of the three, because the acoustic was bright, and the audience was hugely responsive. So we all shared in the collective experience of song, of sadness, of laughter and joy.

We will Cross the Bar, alone, but yet somehow not alone when we are mourned, accompanied by the feelings of those we shall leave behind, or indeed, those who have gone before. The metaphor of the lone sailor in a storm-tossed sea, and the company of sainted lifeboat handlers standing by, has never felt so salient as when we reach this ‘senior’ phase of life.

I’ve been ambivalent about joining a choir of ageing folks, (What, me? I’m not old yet, surely!) but the effort and camaraderie are infectious, and in song one forgets the passing of time, and then we envelop ourselves within time itself, so that we are ‘of each moment.’ I’m always moved when certain chords swell up as different vocal parts join in the harmony, but less so when we don’t get the right pitch, of course.

Mistakes happen, but on the whole, singing in a group is life-enhancing, moving toward the transcendent. We shall try to sing in the Dispersed Forest with that sense of a shared spirit.