Shining dead center in this stunning poem are these words:”…the voice is an advent of spirit.” 
We would be wise to regard every voice, human and non-human alike, as such.
May kindness and confidence prevail in the coming year. 

I rise before the sun does

I rise before the sun does. Each morning I sit on the edge of the bed
with my feet planted on the unlovely linoleum floor and I say slowly but quite
distinctly to the darkness, “Sweet joy befall thee.” I feel like an actor speaking
the first words of a play except my life is no play nor does my soul need an
audience. What I do need is confidence. I’ve built my life up from very shaky
ground and William Blake, the man who wrote that line, has been a godsend
to me. The human voice that speaks a poem rises from a powerful well; we
take it for granted but a voice is an advent of spirit. I know from attending
numerous churches during my haphazard childhood that the joy that preachers
trumpet comes in a box with grievous dimensions. Their salvation is a
machine of wrath; they break your back on hell so you can get to heaven. The
joy I invoke can go where it chooses because it resides in our being alive.
The joy I invoke is Blake’s Jerusalem, the city we can build each day through
kindness: “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” No one has ever
called the place where I work “sublime,” so I need that word, too.

Baron Wormser, from The Poetry Life: Ten Stories

 

Take it from the birds.  Sing a song loud and clear, for your voice, too, is an advent of spirit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42YGprrAOj0[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]