Several years ago I wrote a blog about how sound moves not only through the air and aether, but also through our bodies, our eardrums, and our hearts, and deep into your memory. Since even before recorded history on stone tablets, humanity has had an intimate relationship with sound, notes, melodies and harmonies, and rhythm. It should come as no surprise that vibrations resonate through every one of us.

We live on a planet of rhythm and time.  A planet that completes its cycle around the sun every 365 days, with a moon that cycles around us every 28 days, and we rotate around our own axis every 24 hours.  These cosmic cycles and our bodily ones, all connected to the circadian dance of day and night.  The mystery of rhythm and time found for a moment in the soul’s drum.  When it is right, you feel it with all your senses, every thread of your being.  It is the ‘sweet spot’ of connection.

If the rhythm is right, if the translation between inner mood and the drum membrane are perfect, then you know it instantly. “Ah, this goes with my body tempo, this connects how I feel today, how fast my heart is beating, what my thoughts are, what my hands feel like.”

When the rhythm is right you feel it with all your senses, every corner of your soul and being. You don’t fight it, but instead allow yourself to be propelled and consumed by its insistent yet familiar feeling.  All sense of the present moment disappears, the normal categories of time become meaningless. —— Mickey Hart, Drumming At the Edge Of Magic – A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion

I’d imagine that most species on this magnificent planet experience the same thing as we do with sound, vibrations, and music. In some ways it is how we navigate through life. Imagine the endless beauty of all the world’s songbirds, whales and dolphins in the oceans, herds of mammals guiding their young, and all of humanity’s greatest concertos, bands of every genre, instruments from many cultures, and the powerful significance it all brings to life on Earth.

Now, imagine a world, a life, with no sound.

This is very hard for me to do. I can’t frankly. Sound, rhythm, and music are so deeply woven and engrained in my family heritage and my DNA it will never be silenced! At least for several generations or more; both my kids are crazy about their music, much of it they fell in love with from their parents. But imagine a life where none of these sounds, vibrations, or rhythms exist. How would our human bodies react? How would others react to us?

There is also a paradox here. Or maybe not a paradox, but a potential paradox, or a limit. Overkill. Excessive sound or noise. Is silence better than noise, interference?

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence…
—— Simon & Garfunkel

When a human being expresses their feelings, right or wrong it doesn’t matter at the time, is it better than silence, than omission? Are feelings typically honest and raw? From Paulo Coelho:

Telling the truth and making someone cry
is better than telling a lie and making someone smile.

What sort of perceived reality is achieved when one is fed half-truths, half-lies, or full-blown lies, or a more common form of silence:  omission. Is it human nature to express these forms of non-reality or blurry reality? Is it human nature to trust, or trust too much too easily? How often do we practice these techniques?

I’m in the dark, I’d like to read his mind
but I’m frightened of the things I might find
Oh, there must be something he’s thinking of
to tear him away
when I tell him that I’m falling in love
why does he say…

If we deny other humans — our dear friends, family, lovers, partners, spouses — OUR sounds, vibrations, words, feelings, rhythms, and “music” is it fair to expect or demand THEIR free expressions of sounds, vibrations, words, feelings, rhythms, and “music”? Where does silence, hush-hush leave us?

————

Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always — Listen to Songs Unsung

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