August 18, 2026

In an audio recording - recorded on a cassette no less on a walkman with a record button [remember those], my mother asks my grandmother. "What were your favorite subjects in school? "

"Poetry and singing," my grandmother replied.

They spoke in English but I heard the Gujurati roots in the voice of my grandmother, or Kutchi more like it, for that is where was from originally, the Rann of Kutch a vast expanse I have never seen.

Today is her birthday and on occasion of her birthday, I share this memory.

It is also on account of my grandmother's birthday that I am sharing this performance online today at 11:11 am.

When I thought of when I wanted to share Sinew, this date was clear.

I knew my grandmother Parveen as a funny woman who would tell me stories while making sounds.

She was playful with such a sense of humor and made me laugh, but I never heard a poem she wrote or loved, nor a song. I knew her growing up in India and then intermittently after we moved and then she passed when I was in my late twenties.

During my the pandemic, one of my aunts told me my grandmother’s favorite film was called Baiju Bawra.

A young man goes in search of a teacher so he can learn to sing better than a famed court singer who was responsible, he felt, for the death of his father.

Between the melodrama and the love story, there is the story of a human seeking the source of their own song.

In the movie he is searching for a guru and finds one, but the source of song that he finds is in a forest.

In a clearing in the forest, all the ragas resound.

It's a wild moment. A meta moment. A true moment. A moment that spoke with such resonance to me.

What calls us move, to create, to work, to sing, to live our lives in this way or that? Whose unfinished songs are we living? Because that's how the current of the corrientes sometimes plays out, it seems, the thread unspools, or is it winding us up? There is so much talk, especially here in the US, of our supreme independence, our indubitable capacity to do what we want when we want, to make the most or least of ourselves as if the choice is only ours, as if it’s only up to us.

More and more, I see the web we are part of - like a cobweb, something spun, not by one spider, but by forces that we are subject to, even as we have the capacity to spin our own and be the spider too.

Except for a massive spider as big is my hand that I once saw in Kerala, (you heard click click as it moved on the wall) I am generally okay with seeing spiders scurry around. So I can look at a spider and see its wisdom in a way I cannot with other insect like crawly things. Go figure.

Parker Palmer the Quaker educator speaks tenderly about the grace of our journeys, of the limits and possibilities that stem from our true nature, on independence and community and vocation.

All this comes to me this early morning.

For now, here’s to poetry and singing, the truths that grandmothers speak, and here’s to the mystery of what and how we live.

If you’re free and feel like it, come along today.​

Or come create together in September, in sovereign community

Or go sing to a tree, or a stone and follow your own web !

Or do it all!

happy tuesday

Shebana

Sinew, 30 minutes, at 11:11 am US MT

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contact me at info@shebanacoelho.com

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Shebana Coelho

-aaja bulerias, venga bulerias...

-wrote this about tyrants and animals and starry starry future rivers

-also there is a white goat here ​

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