At yesterday’s ‘Singing for Health’ group we sung the 1969 Peggy Lee song:
Red and yellow and pink and green
Purple and orange and blue,
I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow too.
Listen with your ears,
Listen with your eyes,
And sing everything you see!
I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow,
Sing along with me…
This joyful, optimistic song is about appreciating and celebrating the diversity of individual colours that together make one beautiful rainbow. This appreciation comes through a mixture of senses and shared experience… ‘Singing’ a rainbow, ‘Listening’ with our eyes…
At home I read Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798). Up late one night with his young son Hartley he writes:
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher!
Coleridge loved to walk through the countryside. He’s encouraging his son; by listening with his eyes he can hear the language that God speaks.
King David wrote Psalm 8 around 1000 BC:
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
David too is saying that by listening with his eyes he can hear his God speaking…
David, Coleridge, Peggy Lee, singing friends, me… listen with your eyes… rainbows, mountains, lakes, moon, stars, people…
