Musical Interlude

I had plans for yesterday; the get-some-things-done-around-here sort of plans. But when a friend of mine called mid-morning to ask if I wanted tickets to the afternoon's symphony concert, it suddenly became far less important to me to get some things done, and I happily accepted her offer. (I'd been toying with the idea of buying tickets for the last month and a bit, but just never quite managed to climb far enough out of my rut to actually do something about the notion.) 

I cleaned myself up, dusted off my good clothes (Literally, dusted them off - it's clearly been a while since I went out anywhere formalish. *sigh*), and put them on. I drove down to the Kauffman Center, climbed up to my seat, and sat down with a satisfied sigh.

There's something about live music. I have several ways to listen to high-quality sound at home, but. To my ears, the sounds from the speakers can come close to the sounds in a music hall, but to my soul, the recordings are missing a core something. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the sound waves the instruments create together as part of their magic.

As the concert began, it took a bit for the magic to take hold; my thoughts are used to running amok these days - there aren't many competing voices in my world. But then, but then. 

The stream of sound from the voices and instruments swirled around me and settled in my core, silencing the voices in my head. I sat up straight, put my feet on the floor, closed my eyes, and let the music carry me away. I can't tell you what I thought of the rest of the concert, because I had no thoughts. There was just the music and the moment. 

I wasn't familiar with the pieces on the program, so I had no notions of where the notes should be headed. Rather, I was free to let go, to just drift in the current of sound, to let it carry me where it would. 

I came back to earth a few times, and leaned over the rail to watch the movement of the orchestra as they worked together to create the musical current, but those moments didn't last long. The pull of the waves was too strong.

As my brother told me in a text the other day, after I sent him a bad joke*: What is matter, but a collection of atoms, which consist of concentrated energy, which can be construed as a particle or a wave. We are both matter and a wave. Because we are a wave, we are music incarnate.

I can buy that. (Please forgive me for switching metaphors here.) I can believe the music of the concert picked up the threads of my lonely song and wove them back into the fabric of the song of the Universe for those timeless moments, leaving me refreshed, and with a tenuous sense of my connection to the Is.

Music Is.

*The joke was: You occupy space and have mass. What does that mean?  Answer: You matter.