Concerning the spiritual in voice

Abstract

In October of 2021, I had the honour of being invited into the sacred space of days to hours before death, as I sang for a woman dying of breast cancer. I had never met Regine Verougstreate before, but in the almost two hours of singing for her while she gazed into my eyes and took her last breaths, I had felt a timeless connection and a surrender that is hard to describe. I wrote these words as a stream-of-consciousness response to this experience and many experiences that I have had as a vocalist, from concert halls to marriage ceremonies, sharing sound from a place of the highest intention to align and attune and become a vessel. How can we describe the spirit that becomes our voice? More so, how can we allow for spirit to become us? How do we release the mental grip that hijacks a preconceived idea of what it is to sing? Radical presence. Poetry. Love. These are words that propose an opportunity to choose transcendence.