💥🧬 My DNA Screamed 😱

This third post was a tough one.  It’s a deep dive into my personal journey as a songwriter 🎶 wrestling with the question: “How can I be the change?” My answer? Speak from the heart. ❤️ And since my heart's first language is music, I must let it flow—messy, raw, dissonant, complex . . . Whatever it is, it's gotta be real. ✨

 Let Freedom Ring: the Song that Fought Back

🎵 This song landed through me shortly after Election Day 🗳.  It’s called Let Freedom Ring, and it darkly echoes some familiar patriotic musical themes.  Recording it was like riding a bucking horse 🐎 --its meter kept turning abruptly with time signature lines resembling math equations.  I released it last night; to hear it just click on the image.

click above to listen

When My DNA Screamed, This Song Answered

Let Freedom Ring is unlike any song I've written over the past 50+ years.  It began the evening after Election Day, when I scanned my Facebook feed and noticed that a dear friend posted an A I image of a roaring red tsunami. My eyes couldn't look away. My body went visceral. As I write this I remember how my stomach queased, my heart constricted, and my DNA screamed out for Freedom!  

The Heart-breaking Weight of History

Images of traumatized families in the Manzanaar Internment Camp flashed on the life-sized screen of my mind.  That monument is located two hours down the road from us, and it also has a museum—as if such an atrocity could never happen again.  I've walked through the drafty wood-planked quarters where dear ones who’d been seized from their homes were forced to live in windy subzero temperatures. These are my tribe, the Japanese Americans who could fight for America in the war, yet not be afforded a smidgeon of human dignity by the government.  

I wondered if my mom's name would now be on a deportation list 📄 if she had not passed over in 2017; her green card had long expired.  The thought is too painful for me to hold.  Yet I'm feeling how many, so many, stop breathing with every knock at the door🚪, fearing that they're about to be snatched away...far away. 

The red wave image left me crying whole-body tears for the horrific devastation it would bring to multitudes of people. And then it opened into the song Let Freedom Ring that chronicles my heart navigating through the valley of the shadow of death, ☠️ led by an angel's message to be awake in this dark, tragic dream. 

So I ask myself, how does one live day to day now, with barely time to shake our heads between the fast and furious shockwaves 🤯 of repulsive changes?

HOW⁉️ 

Rooted in Grace, Rising in Resilience

Then the answer settled like a warming blanket 😌 around my shoulders. Our wisdom, resilience and caring is rooted in the unchangeable Infinite. We live enfolded in an invisible bubble 💭 of Grace that protects us from the illusion of being truly threatened by the governmental gaslighting of our day.  

Another of my recent songs 🎶 is a chant that puts to music the foundational words from the introduction of A Course In Miracles: 🎵 Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists, therein lies the peace of God.

Anchored deep within, unaffected by any leader’s actual integrity, we are invited to soar through the general media's status quo, and flow 🎶 "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily" 🚣🏽‍♀️ knowing that this currently volatile layer of life is but a dream. 

I hope this We Be The Change blog and upcoming podcast hold replenishing space for you to tend to your rootedness. We grow 🌱 in the garden together, my friend. 👩🏽‍🌾 Go deep. Please go deep--for you, for your dear ones, for the many enduring unimaginable hardships, for me... 🙏🏽 and connect fully with the Wellspring that nourishes us all. ⛲️

With utter gratefulness,

--Colleen "Weaver Bird" Akiko 🪶

P.S. Music is my heart's language of expression. What's yours--painting, writing, speaking, or . . . ? Has it been a "go-to" in these times? Please share in the comments ☺️🎨✍️🎸🎹