Month: June 2022

​​To begin with, we’re in the middle of Spiritual Renewal Week here at Ananda Village, our first big in-person event since 2019! Each day there are morning classes, plus special events most evenings.

Which brings me to yesterday. We started out by singing before the morning class with the Joy Singers, leaving immediately after class to drive to town and grab burrito bowl lunches-to-go on the way to my weekly appointment at the Infusion Center.

For this week’s treatment I received four pre-meds, followed by all three of my chemo drugs: Velcade, Darzalex, and Zometa. I was a little nervous since the concert was that night and this was my first time getting all three medications at once.

The treatment lasted two and a half hours. By then we had learned there was a fire not too far from Ananda Village, so we drove home to prepare for the concert while listening to fire reports and hearing about what areas were under mandatory evacuations (as opposed to just warnings).

We only had about an hour to eat dinner, change clothes, and get over the amphitheater to set up the stage, but we started hearing speculation that the concert should be delayed or cancelled because of the fire. So, we called and talked to the Village community manager, a very calm and wise soul who explained why he felt the concert was a “go”, and we totally agreed. And then the power went out! 

But let me back up and give you some context about our concert…

We usually have a well thought out “theme” for our SRW concerts, but this year was simply about finally singing together once again — in person — as a global community! The choir wasn’t large, but we hadn’t had singers from so many different locations singing together in one place since our 50th anniversary event in 2019!

We had been really looking forward to this concert, but we encountered all kinds of obstacles along the way — my health issues; the ongoing COVID realities (increasing cases, singers testing positive, and others avoiding singing as a precaution); having to relocate the concert from the Temple of Light to the outdoor amphitheater, which was the only way we could have a large choir; musicians having accidents that put them out of commission; you name it!

But all along we felt very strongly that we had to keep moving forward with restoring our music to it’s primary place in the life of our global community. Why? Because Ananda Music is such a tremendous tool for uplifting consciousness, which is so needed in the world right now.

The added confusion and challenge of a fire and power outage just a couple of hours before the start of the concert had us wondering whether there weren’t downward pulling energies trying to block the powerfully positive and joyful expression of our music.

If so, we weren’t going to allow it to happen! I was inwardly resolved that the concert would happen — even if we didn’t have power. I figured that we would simply sing unamplified with however many singers showed up and whoever made it to listen would just have to come right up close to hear us!

But the good news is the amphitheater was on a generator, so we did have power. Plus all the singers made it and the concert went miraculously well.

Oh, and I felt absolutely fine the whole night, with no side effects whatsoever from my big chemo treatment. Miracle on top of miracle!

And that was my super big day.