Getting ready to go

Our journey begins tonight!  Ten women from different parts of the country, all singers, will converge at the Singapore Air Counter at SFO at ten, with our suitcases and passports, earplugs and hiking sandals.  Kate Munger, the founder of the Threshold Choir and the bright spark behind this journey, will give us our songbooks.  Our long flight leaves at 1:30 in the morning for Singapore, where we will change planes for Bali.  In Bali we will spend a little over two weeks, doing some service work with Senang Hati (a school for the disabled), some hiking and trail cleaning, meeting with healers.  We will swim, snorkel, sing, cook, and drink in the flowery green beauty.  And who knows what else?

In Thailand we'll spend three days at the elephant sanctuary north of Chiang Mai.  I so look forward to singing to elephants.

In a wonderful book I'm reading, called World Enough and Time, I happened today upon this passage:

"The word 'threshold' is drawn from the Middle English threschen: the act of threshing or beating grain; it is what separates the wheat from the chaff. To make time [for a spiritual journey] is to create just a threshold in one's life, separating the inside from the outside, the past from the future, the sacred from the profane. It is to open a little gate between time and eternity..."

Threshold Choirs all over the country sing for people crossing thresholds: being born, getting married, dying.  I think of the night I sang "Row, row, row your boat" with my sister Kathryn as she was dying, with her gentle heart.  And I think of my friend Fred, who has ALS.  May Fred's journey continue to be filled with love.  May my journey with the choir--to Bali and beyond--open my heart.