HOLY SOUND

Do you think the universe sings?  I do, and I don't mean metaphorically.  It is a strange quality of extended silence, that it engenders tunes in me.  When I have been sitting still for a long while, meditating, or walking a path through the woods,  I want to sing something.  Lacking the skills to create new songs out of the sounds that call me, I usually sing a camp song, a favorite from my iTunes, or a hymn.

The quality I want to stress, however, is that the songs from me are a response to the sound I hear from the world around me-not noise from the will, or an attempt to confront the quiet.  I have to actively suppress the urge sometimes, and sometimes, I only discover that I am singing because of the funny looks I get from the people passing me on the sidewalk.  It is as if there is a soundtrack running underneath the action of my life which sometimes erupts into a song.  

I only realized recently that some people don't hear music all of the time.  Music for them, is something that comes from others, or something created solely in the processes of the brain.  They do not hear the sky ringing sound before a storm; they do not hear an expectant string section humming within a crowd of people;  they do not experience a great bronze cymbal clash when the sun pierces through a shadowed stand of trees.  

I do.  I contend others do as well.  I contend that some of us are oriented to hearing, and that the universe really does have a beat.  It is a noisy, boisterous place, whose cacophony is pounding out the meter of dying and living from the deep core of our planet to the vast, dark matter of space.  That song vibrates through our blood and bones, even if our ears are not equipped to pick it up.  It sounds in us.   After all, sound is only that-vibrations communicated from one instrument to another.  

I believe that sound calls forth response from those that hear it, the way wolves will pass their calls from one throat to the next.  I believe that the soul and singing are bound into that sound.  When I stand amongst people too afraid to clap their hands to the rhythm of a song, or with people so walled in behind their societal roles, they cannot bear to sing unless another starts the tune, I am convinced that there is some illness of the soul at work in the world.