Soft Launch

Not to be confused with soft-serve ice cream

An acquaintance recently told me that if life wasn’t difficult, I wouldn’t learn my lessons and would have to come back in another lifetime to repeat them. Say what?

First of all, I do not agree to experience ongoing lifetimes in which I must endure drama, confusion, suffering, and whatever else a hypothetical deity dreams up for me. Second, I refuse to believe that difficulty is necessary for achievement. But what this person’s statement did make me realize is that half the fun of creating, collaborating on, and iterating a big dream is working through the various challenges that arise.

Human beings are trial-and-error learners. We learn best by coming up with ideas and exploring various ways to make them happen. When we fail, we have merely narrowed the list of possible ways to bring our ideas to life. When we are done with the process, we tell stories about the journey, create maps for others to follow, and pass our knowledge on to those who come behind us. This is not only how we learn, but how we weave our collective narratives into a tapestry that will stand as a testament to what this grand experiment called humanity is capable of.

This approach to learning is how I believe all children should learn and what I am trying to accomplish through my new initiative, Song Flight. Song Flight was first imagined as a way to help Ukrainian kids displaced by war by connecting them with other children around the world through stories, songs, and creative collaboration. It now includes a larger goal of helping ALL children develop the emotional intelligence and core literacy skills they’ll need to become, kind, creative, and collaborative adults who don’t start wars.

If you haven’t paid a visit to Song Flight yet, treat yourself: https://Song-Flight.com.

This trial-and-error approach is also why I shouldn’t have been surprised when the live concert I organized to celebrate the launch of Song Flight went spectacularly awry. The concert was meant to be live-streamed on three platforms:

• A webpage where visitors could listen to the music without visuals;

• Via YouTube where the musicians would be visible playing live; and

• In the virtual world of Second Life where the musicians would be playing as avatars. There, visitors could not only listen but plant flowers in the Sea of Sunflowers to honor the children they love as well. See: https://www.song-flight.com/

My first challenge was the discovery that the company providing my stream had gone out of business. This meant finding another provider - FAST. Fortunately I knew someone who knew someone who could connect me to a new provider. Whew.

Second, we were having trouble getting all the musicians onto YouTube so we could stream their physical selves onto the big screen in Second Life. In the end, we were only able to get two of the five up on YouTube, but their performances were so captivating that it didn’t matter in the least.

Finally, I learned that the Song Flight theme song I’d written for kids had undergone a musical metamophosis. In its new iteration, the melody couldn’t be sung by children so it had to be removed from the promotional video. Disappointing, but as you will see in my follow-up post it all worked out for the best.

Which brings me to the end of Part I of this saga and paves the way for Part II in which another music collaborator writes a new melody and does more than 8 different versions of the song (rap, ballad, finger-picking guitar, strummed guitar, beatbox, ukelele, piano, and full-blown, orchestrated version) “JUST for FUN!”

This new version of A Worl Full of Magic will be available on the “Singing for the Kids of Ukraine” compilation album. Musicians from around the world have contributed their original music to make this album possible, and I am proud of what we have accomplished together.

In the meantime, please enjoy the highlights of the January 15th launch in this video below by Jackson Redstar:

P.S. NEVER forget that detours, roadblocks, and conundrums are just opportunities to make course corrections and adjust your sails. I can’t wait to see what is coming next!

Hugs,
Jena