Where Birds and Kids Can’t Sing

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The greatest motivation compelling the response of most former Sathya Sai Baba followers around the world has been:  out of the depths of natural love for the young and the wish to protect them from abuse, to expose him and his authoritarian cult. 

There is a saying attributed to Jesus which has, from my childhood and all through my life, resonated from the depths of my soul: 

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”.

An Angel Singing and Skipping On The Sports Field

Last Monday, I was deeply moved.  Taking lunch to a child, I walked across a school sports field   A girl in the lower primary school, small for her age, skipped past me, merrily singing. The child’s happy state was delightful in itself, but what astonished me was her extraordinarily fine voice and the joy that suffused it. In the skipping was the song, and in the song was the skipping. I continued walking, heart skipping.

In a minute or so, she again skipped past , still singing. This time, I realized that she was a child I had known a little, along with her family, on and off, over recent years. I had not known of her remarkable talent, but only of the fine voice of her older sister. The children’s parents, too, love singing.

This time, I said:  “What a lovely voice you have.”  She replied that she loves singing along with operas and also musicals such as those of Andrew Lloyd-Webber. With a sense of dedication, in which I thought I detected a deal of true grit, she told me of her operatic and musical comedy ambitions. “Would you like to hear a song?”  she asked. Yes, I would. She then launched into a Lloyd-Webber song, and sang it with purity, power and rhythmic and note perfection.  

After she had finished, she told me how kids at the school make fun of her for going around singing. As though to underline her report, when she sang a couple of kids made fun of her. I told her, “Little do they know. You will have to work hard and sometimes even fight for the beauty that you feel. Keep doing the thing you love, and ignore what is not love”.

I thought:  what an often cultureless desert these children are growing up in. Here is this girl with supportive parents who surround their children with wonderful artistic role models. But here – elsewhere about her – is a great deal of cultural desert. And here were school children responding, and with such harsh negativity, re-processing the cultural aridity of their parent’s lives. Like parents, like children. What a sore heritage. In Australia, cultural pursuits are often downgraded and denigrated, with an obsessive sport predominating. All too little in the way of a healthy body, mind and spirit. After all these years, our education system profoundly lacks, for example, a response to such extremely major work on several forms of intelligence that need to be understood, worked with, and made integral to education. See Professor Howard Gardiner, et al. For a true educator/liberator, see Sir Ken Robinson on TED Talks; e.g.,: “Do schools kill creativity”

The Scottish woman who in her late forties and since chastened the world, and challenged its chauvinistic stereotypes of what a nightingale should look like

Although this was a local sports field, where hopes and dreams can die in anonymity, I thought of the event  – which the world will long remember – of the Scottish singer Susan Boyle’s appearance on the highly-rated British  TV program Britain’s Got Talent on in April 2009, singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables – of which I have written here:  Susan Boyle. Unexpected Divine Chanteuse. Sweet 47. Posted by Barry Pittard on April 17, 2009.

Heaven preserve, for a while, this little one from the fierce competitiveness that attends the likes of American Idol  – but I wouldn’t be surprised if her ability were an audience jaw-dropper if she appeared on such a show. Trustfully, singing teachers or directors who lack wisdom and angelhood will not crab the angelic and glorious connection between this child’s skipping and her careless rapture. 

As I walked out of the school, inspired by the sportsfield meeting, tunes started to come, and by yesterday I completed the lyrics. It is a song for a young child to sing – or for the young child in any of us to sing:

Where birds and kids Can’t Sing. Barry Pittard. (17 April 2013)

I’m not so old and I love to skip

And when I skip I sing

I sing and cannot help it

And it feels

Like such a natural thing

I dreampt that once an angel came

She sat by me and sang

She sang and could not help it

And it felt

Like such a natural thing

   But kids at school say – “Do not skip!

   Your a bit too old to sing and skip!”

   They laugh, they tease, they say “Grow up”!

   And the really mean ones shout “Shut up”!

I dreampt once of an emperor

Who told the birds – “Don’t Sing … Don’t sing!”

I thought – what sort of land is this?!

This cage most maddening!

And now I keep on wondering –

Who says that kids can’t sing?! Who says that kids can’t sing?!! WHO says that kids can’t sing?!!!

And might our land become a cage

Where birds and kids can’t sing?

Where birds and kids can’t sing ….!

But I’m not so old and I love to skip

And when I skip I sing

I sing and cannot help it

And it feels

Like such a natural thing

                    So angel do not go away

                    But always come and sing

                   We’ll sing like we can’t help it

                   And it feels

                Like such a natural thing

                Like such –

                Like such – an angelic thing ….