Hello, Sweet Human.
I’m so glad you’re here.

Shall we take a breath together?

Like, seriously.

Feel free to stop where you are, notice whatever part of you is touching couch/earth/grass, and let’s do this.

Ready?

Inhale…feel everything move and expand and life rush into your lungs and say “hey! I love you! I’m here for you!”

Exhale…feel things settle back into the center of your body, feel how easy it is to let go.

Feel free to do a few more rounds before you keep reading. All those words below can wait. Nothing more important than breath 🤍.

It has taken me a while to get to the point where I could write up the description for this round of choir because, like most of us, the waves of grief are coming strong these days. There is so much to grieve right now, individually and collectively. A lot of us feel stunned, stuck, powerless, despairing, enraged, terrified, overwhelmed, disoriented, confused, isolated…there are many very good reasons for that. If you feel any of those things, well done (seriously)—it means you’re paying attention.

Grief is all of the things listed above and more. It is a complex constellation of emotions and experiences that comes with any life shift, “good” or “bad.” We all experience it differently, and yet it is a universal and uniting human experience. It is the transition space that moves us from one life shape to another. It is a force of love, even as it often causes great pain.

A lot of us have learned to fear or avoid grief. And with good reason. It’s not something we’re meant to do alone. Our ancestors knew that gathering, caring for each other, singing and feeling together were simple, embodied, tried-and-true ways of allowing grief to move through us and reshape us. Much like wind moving over sand dunes or water moving over stone to reshape those landscapes, we too, as individuals and communities, are landscapes meant to be reshaped. We are being called into that reshaping right now.

Another emotion that often comes when we are forged in the fires of grief and change, when we get what we need to weather that reshaping, and we come out the other side…there is so much awe, there is so much gratitude. Gratitude is a partner to grief. She is the doula, the midwife of grief. She makes sure we don’t drown in our sorrows or inflict pain in our rage. She holds us and tells us “this is your birthright. You are built for this. Many have gone before you, facing and surmounting new challenges that no one before them knew how to meet. We are in this together.” As Valerie Shakur reminds us when we are in the labor of life, “breathe…push,” and in our case, sing.

Fire Choir: Grief & Gratitude is a community space where we explore singing, sound, breath, and movement, while strengthening our relationship to our voices and ourselves. It’s about exploring different aspects of our expression and letting them sing. It’s about listening deeply and being truly heard. It’s about feeling the harder things that might show up when we pay close enough attention, so that we may learn, then grow, then sing from a new space. It is about cultivating community from this space, all so that we may meet the calls of life with integrity, capacity, and loads of love.

I simply invite you to pause for a moment and imagine a space where you can show up however you are on any given day,—exhausted and in need of rest, energized and in need of expression, or isolated and in need of connection—and land in community focused on cultivating sense of self, expression, regulation, and connection through music and movement.

If this resonates with you, you’re invited to 8 weeks of Fire Choir: Grief & Gratitude.

Important note—in the Fire Choir space, we value decolonization and transformative justice as frameworks that we aim to practice at individual and collective levels. If you are unfamiliar with these frameworks, you are encouraged to learn about them before entering the space.

The Details

When: Wednesdays, March 19, 26; April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30; & May 7 from 7-8:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm and participants are strongly encouraged to come early to decompress, be in community, etc.

Where: Mercury Project, 538 Roosevelt Ave., in Southtown San Antonio, Texas.