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Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm Carmen Acevedo Butcher, and we're thankful you're here at learning how to see.

We're so glad because today Brian and I are speaking

with the musician and poet Carrie Newcomer, and she brings up and into the room all of the wonders

of music, which started me thinking. A good 3,000 years ago now, young David, future king, as we read in

1 Samuel, did what amounts to what we call today music therapy within King Saul, who, as we hear

in the message translation, experienced the spirit of God leaving him, and in its place came awful tormenting depression.

Saul's advisors went looking for a musician. David was found and came to play the harp to

tormented Saul. And we read that David's music calmed Saul down, and he felt better as his depressed mood lifted.

We also appreciate the Hebrew scriptures wise, enduring Psalms that are an integral part of any old or new monastics diet.

Thomas Merton, in fact, called the Psalms,

bred in the wilderness in a book by that title, because he says they provide

nourishment for the interior life. The power of music then is nothing new,

and you're going to experience it today in learning how to see. For me, my name

Carmen means song or poem, even incantation. The plural of Carmen, the word, is carmina. Ordinary

singing or chanting is one of my daily practices for many decades now in all kinds of interior weather,

sunny, cloudy, serene, stormy. Singing somehow grew for me out of severe childhood trauma

from my father and from deep kindness from my mother who loves to sing. I gravitated to hymns at church,

songs at school on the radio, and ones I would make up as poems, and then sing. I never quit

doing this somehow. Singing has helped me express gratitude and celebrate the wonder of everyday blue

skies or rainy clouds or soaring crows, egrits, turkey vultures, also the Appalachian Mountains of my

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