When We Come Into Our Calling

Song Notes

Angeles Arrien, a cross-cultural anthropologist and remarkable teacher of the perennial wisdom of indigenous peoples from around the world, speaks of the bell as the instrument of the East, the place of vision and remembering the “promise we made before we were born.” She says that in many cultures it is the bell that was used to “call us to our calling,” to re-mind us of that original intention to deliver our unique gift into this world, to which we committed with that sacred promise we made to the ancestors before they sent us here. When I was taking the Community Choir Leadership Training with Shivon Robinsong and Denis Donnelly, co-directors of the Getting’ Higher Choir in Victoria, BC, I began to sense, as my fellow trainees and I kept discovering more and more our individual sense of purpose and the capacity to deliver our “original medicine,” as Angeles refers to it, that we were becoming like bells for each other, encouraging and awakening each other to our “calling.” This round came in as I was pondering these things while sitting in my host’s hot-tub in the early morning before heading off for the final day’s classes. I taught it to my class mates later that morning as we opened the day, and I immediately heard the sound of bells in the harmonies of the round.