I'd like to share a special recording with you. 

It's a short clip of Melanie DeMore briefly teaching and explaining the three parts of her powerful song, "Standing Stone," during an interview I did with her in her Oakland, CA home back in the fall of 2017. And then it's a recording of about forty of us singing that song in the Texas Capitol Rotunda a little over a year later at the "Best of 2018" community sing that I lead. 

At the end of the rotunda recording, I say, "It's not easy standing by somebody when they go through really difficult stuff." The group had just experienced the song's natural brilliance in the way that the parts are actually quite challenging to sing alongside one another. There's unexpected and, at times, uncomfortable dissonance written into the three parts. When Melanie teaches this song, she talks about this notion that being a standing stone isn't easy - it can be profoundly uncomfortable and challenging. 

Singing has been a powerful technology and medicine for me in my own experience of enduring the difficulty of being a standing stone for others in pain. Songs that I can sing to and for myself in these moments, songs that I can sing to and for the one or ones who are suffering, and songs that we can sing together in collective moments of strife. May this song - both the recording and the song itself as a tool to carry in your backpocket - bring you some resource if and when you are called upon to be someone's standing stone. 

One of the groups that's suffered disproportionately during this pandemic are survivors of domestic violence. Especially if you are like me and identify as a cisman, I encourage you to check out the campaign, #ListeningFromHome by NO MORE as one way of stepping up as a standing stone for those more vulnerable than yourself during these times. And for other white folks, I invite you to look up your local SURJ chapter to see what work they're doing to address the pandemic of racial injustice in your community.

May you be - and have - standing stones.

Josh(ua) 

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