Gratitude For The Gift Of Voice
Thoughts the day after Thanksgiving
I listened to the recent On Being podcast where Krista Tippet interviews Joan Baez. There is an exchange that happens about 10 minutes in that goes like this:
Tippett: …I’m so curious about your relationship with your extraordinary voice. I mean, there’s some mystery to having a voice like the one you were born with.
Baez: It’s mostly mystery. I don’t know where it came from. And I do know that now I can play the early music — listening, it’s not me. It’s really listening to somebody else because it’s this gorgeous soprano, which I don’t have at all now, so I can listen and wonder to what was. And it was the gift that I was born with.
Tippett: Even when you were young, did you perceive it in that way, as a gift?
Baez: As a gift, yeah. I didn’t know the magnitude of it, but I’ve always known it was a gift.
I’m thinking on this Thanksgiving week about the many things I am grateful for — my health, my beloved husband, our beautiful children, and our dazzling granddaughter Lucy, who is just over a year old. I’ve also been thinking with gratitude of the many gifts I have been given.
Among those gifts is the gift of being able to see the potential in other people’s stories and ambitions — to see the books and the businesses they could build.
But the Baez story struck me because her quote about having the gift of her voice didn’t end there. She also added one more thing to her comment:
Baez: As a gift, yeah. I didn’t know the magnitude of it, but I’ve always known it was a gift. And the second gift that went with it was the desire to use it in the ways that I’ve used it.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2017, she said the same thig even more succinctly: “My voice is my greatest gift…the second greatest gift was a desire to use it.”
That second gift is one I have been given, too: the desire to use my gift to help other people learn how to see the potential in other people’s stories and ambitions.
If I have done anything to help you at all with these things, I am here to thank you today. Because just having a gift is one thing; but being able to put it to good use is something far more resonant. And without you, I couldn’t do it.
So thank you.