Song is a vehicle for us to grieve.
Alice - Am I crying for the beauty, or for the sadness?
What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.
If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.
“Song is a vehicle for us to grieve.
It’s a vehicle for us to feel rage.
It’s a vehicle for us to strengthen ourselves.”
–Sarah, a Singing Resistance Organizer anonymously speaking to Anderson Cooper
Alice isn’t a crier.
She says she cried her well-of-tears dry during her divorce and hasn’t cried since. It’s been over a decade.
She didn’t even cry when Renee Good was shot. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t feel it. Not having tears isn’t exactly a good thing. Tears are one of the best and most natural ways for the human body to process grief. The shaking action of sobbing helps the nervous system expel the emotions, and the tears themselves push stress hormones out of the body as well. So, when one doesn’t have tears, processing grief becomes a challenge.
For Alice, she gets all the feelings of wanting to cry, but her body simply doesn’t respond in the natural grief-through-tears way. Instead, the salty tears quietly stream down her insides, stinging through her tear ducts, her sinuses, her throat, and right down into her heart where she feels a pressure squeeze that won’t release. She wishes for the wetness and shudders to express outward, but instead, they just burn through her insides.
This is what happened when Renee Good died.
Alice watched the video of Renee’s death, over and over again, begging for the tears to come. But instead she sat paralyzed by the pressure and the sting. That pressure lasted for days.
And then, January 11th, a few hundred people gathered at Renee’s Memorial in the Phillips neighborhood for a singing vigil. A call-and-response
This little light of mine…
I’m gonna let it shine…
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine…
And Alice felt a single tear squeak out of her left eye and stream its way down her left cheek. It felt cool, and soft, refreshing even. She didn’t wipe it away. She just let it stream and air-dry, savoring the salty feeling of release.
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”
Isak Denisen
A week later, the singing movement had a name, The Singing Resistance, and hundreds of singers were gathering in the streets, walking and singing in call-and-response.
This is for our neighbors who are locked inside…
Together,
We will…
Abolish Ice…
Alice watched the videos on social media on repeat, and let the single slow-tears stream, one-at-a-time. She felt tiny little shudders of sobs. It was the one way she could feel release through the pain. Everything else in her life felt frozen by the ICE. But the warmth of the voices in these videos melted the paralysis she felt, in tiny bits.
Then, on January 23, clergy, labor organizers, and community leaders across the Twin Cities called for a statewide general strike, “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom.” Across the metro, people stepped into the streets together to pray, march, and sing.
One of those events was a planned protest at MSP airport, where 109 clergy members and faith leaders staged a profound act of civil disobedience, knowing they would be arrested. They had a permit for a handful of protesters, and they showed up with thousands, purposely impeding airport function.
It was -30 degrees below windchill, and clergy and faith leaders of all ages kneeled on the hard cold pavement outside the airport, sweetly singing Amazing Grace as police officers kindly and gently, one-by-one, zip-tied them and escorted them to a bus under charges of disturbing the peace.
As Alice watched, her body erupted in full-body-ugly-cry sobs.
After over a decade of dryness, Alice ugly-cried for over 20-minutes. Tears gushed, and sobs gurgled, and she felt like her sternum unzipped and her heart turned inside out as it pushed itself outside her body. She didn’t recognize the sounds that emerged from her throat, wails and moans and guttural groans she’d never felt before, even in the worst of crying fits during her divorce.
Alice’s husband came running upstairs to see if she was okay. He wrapped his arms around her, not to take away or soothe the tears, but to support them, and encourage her to experience them.
While these were tears and sobs of grief, they sat together and relished in them.
It felt so damn good!
It didn’t just feel good because it had been so long. It was deeper than that.
The beautiful sweetness of the sound of human voices singing Amazing Grace, the vibration of sounds was so much more than a way to process grief. It generated a frequency of hope and love in a time when everything else in the world felt like evilness and pain.
The Singing Resistance was healing, on deep spiritual levels.
After 20-minutes an a half-dozen more plays of the video, Alice’s throat cleared enough for her to speak.
“I don’t even know what I’m feeling?” she looked up at her husband whose face was as wet and reddened as her own. “It’s like it all has been hurting so bad, that it’s such a relief to finally cry. But the music is just so beautiful! Am I crying for the beauty, or for the sadness?”
She heaved a big heavy inhale and continued.
“Or am I crying for the anger and rage I feel inside about all of this SHIT!” She pounded her fist into her leg, and her husband caught it before she could pound again.
She took another full inhale and spoke again.
“It’s just so fucking beautiful! That expression of LOVE! It’s so fucking beautiful!”
And then, out of nowhere, her shuddering sobs transformed into deep full belly laughs.
A month later, Amber invited Alice to attend a Singing Resistance event at the Central Park where Alice had experienced her own encounter with ICE.
Only Alice couldn’t sing.
Every time she opened her mouth to sing, a deep guttural frog-sob emerged instead.
This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.
It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.
If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.
If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.
Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.
That’s how this works.
That’s how we work.
I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜
The Singing Resistance is the most beautiful group expression of compassion that I have ever witnessed. A beacon of light in these distressing times. Thank you for joining together and singing. Your voices have touched many, like me.
Years ago, starting in 2000, I sang at a number of Tiananmen Square Candlelight Memorials in Washington, D.C. for the students of Tiananmen Square. I met amazing people, students who survived the massacre and granted asylum in the United States and their supporters. I will always hold them in my heart.
As a songwriter, one man left a deep appreciation in me for the power of song. He approached me after an event, told me he was a survivor, a student in Tiananmen Square back in June 4, 1989. Many in attendance and the speakers were also survivors.
He said he had been flying in from California for these memorials. He loved the speakers, the activists and politicians, always supported them. But then he stopped and said, "But I come here for you, the songs you sing."
Songs are heart to heart, but words spoken from the heart also land in the heart. It certainly did mine that day. It's why even though I struggle with going on stage, because I'd rather be at home reading a book, once I'm there I know that's where I'm meant to be.
I find myself coming back to our meeting, more often these days, this lived experience of how powerful song is. That there is a power within it that goes beyond the body it expresses itself through.
Music weaves itself through human experience, opening doors within us and to each other.
I'm nobody in the music industry, but I don't think there's anything more capable of spreading good than a song sincerely sung on a single voice. And we see it, in Minnesota, in every place where people lift up their voice. It is a mighty resistance. A bringer-down of walls. A builder of ladders. A grower of wings. It lulls babies to sleep and awakens the heart from protective slumber. It's the pure artistry of love.
Thank you, Teri, for conveying so much truth and compassion in your work and activism through the artistry your words and the song that is you. ❤️ 🎶