Dear Friend🌹🎶 Bloomin' Our Voices This June 🎶 🌹 "It was June, and the world smelled of roses.
The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."
– Maud Hart Lovelace, US Writer (1892-1980) Betsy-Tacy and TibWowzers - such joyful sense of freedom blooms with long summer days.
I'm as happy as a pig in petals, wandering about on balmy evenings,
poking my nose in roses and gazing at cloud dappled sunsets.
As I explored in my recent
Flower Power Substack article,
the words
flower and
bloom come from the word
bhel - meaning to
thrive. Fertile flowers enable life not only to continue, but to bloom in abundant perfumed beauty. Our voices also have multiple surviving and thriving functions - as infants, our baby cries alert our caregivers to our basic bodily needs and our vocal playfulness helps us acquire language. Many of our companions on earth - dolphins, birds, gibbons and frogs - use a wide range of vocalisations for navigation, identification, territory defence, courtship and play.
From serenading our sweethearts to stating our boundaries,
our voices play both beautifying and basic functions in our lives.
🌹🎶 Three Simple Ways to Bloom Your Voice this June 🎶 🌹1. Good Vocal HabitsIt's important to warm up before singing.
(this is particularly for latecomers who miss the choir warm up ;)
Breathe deeply and then move into voiced and unvoiced sounds such as yawns, sighs, slides and hums, before running some scales and vocal exercises.
2. Take Care of Your VoiceSteaming is a lovely treat for your voice -
head under a towel over a bowl of boiling water and breathe deeply.
If you want something more portable, Dame Judi Dench recommends
Dr Nelson's inhaler in her autobiography,
And Furthermore 3. PlayYoung children play freely through the range of their voice - whooping, yelling, burbling, babbling, making up words and sounds. Improvising and experimenting with our voices is a natural, fun way to expand our vocal range.
BONUS - Share Your Voice Generously.In day-to-day communication, we can share kind and soothing words of comfort in tough times and laugh and lark about enthusiastically in good times.
We can also make a vocal contribution through sharing our songs, stories, speeches and lending or voices to projects, groups or causes.
We live in an interconnected world - so as we allow our voices to bloom,
it can help make life a bit more bloomin' lovely.
