The Rose Window

Dear Friend

🌹 🎶 The Gift of Singing this Midwinter🎶🌹
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
- Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose
Our voices are magical gifts - an everyday superpower with which we can summons dragons, charm snakes and enchant fairies.  So it's no wonder that singing plays a central role in many midwinter cultural celebrations.

🌹 🎶Warmly inviting you to come sparkle at the Winter Sparkle Concert
this Sunday and to share the gift of your magical voice with yourself, your loved ones and the world in brave, bold and beautiful ways.

🌹 🎶 Our gift to ourselves, vocal expression bestows many magical benefits. A good bellow billows our lungs, warms our hearts, clears the mind and invigorates our bodies.  Healthy expression can liberate us from the grip of fears and inhibition, boosting our confidence and personal presence so we shine and sparkle.  As vocal expression relies upon highly tuned listening to be effective, we must learn first to listen. So quiet moments of reflection, retreat, rest and re-tuning to our inner voice can also be a gift to ourselves amidst the seasonal hurly-burly.

🌹 🎶 Our gift to others, our voice allows us to share ourselves with others. The bridge between our inner and outer world, it's the instrument by which we communicate our needs, wants and desires, enabling us to connect, collaborate and cooperate.  In the dance of communication, we also fine-tune our empathic power of listening, taking care to examine whether what we express is true, necessary, helpful or kind.

🌹 🎶 Our gift to the world, our voice is often mightier than the sword, enabling us to speak truth to power and to face down falsehoods of oppression.  From protesters in Iran to carol singers rattling a bucket for a local charity, raising our voices mobilises and unifies us around important messages and causes.  As we sing together we tap into a deeper sense of purpose, belonging and power - it really is magic!