While I am waist-deep in the ocean of my dreams, the birds are practicing their musical scales, warming up their vocals. By the time I’m wading into a new day, they’re in full chorus — and they have stamina; they continue throughout the day. Some hours are more polyphonic than others but their singing is constant.

When the sun begins its steady dip beneath our eye line, the birds clock out as the coqui frogs punch their time cards, dutifully posting up for the night shift. They sing in a different key but are just as constant, just as symphonic.

As the day fades out, they fade in, full volume. They keep a resonant vigil going throughout the night. Who knows what harm they ward off while I take the shape of the horizon against which my consciousness sets and rises.

There’s no such thing as peace and quiet in nature; silence is unnatural. It is all vibrating constantly: Every literal and figurative grain of sand in our universe vibrates at a specific frequency.

And by making a sound, you cause matter to compress and expand alternately. Think of that motion and then think of the beating heart, the tree-branch lungs. Think of a bird taking off in flight and a jellyfish pulsing through the belly of the deep blue.

Pumping, oscillating, inspiring. Being moved by sound, being vibrated alive.

Resonating with an object’s frequency can amplify its sonic waves. But too much resonance — too much of the same — will create a tsunami of sound that destroys the object. Solid bridges have been known to collapse with the lock-step of a brigade marching across or from a gentle wind blowing at the same harmonic resonance as some part of it, like a singer hitting that glass-shattering operatic high note.

The universe is alive, vibrating to mostly unheard but ceaseless sound, a sound that creates and forms and molds shapes. It’s sound that may be responsible for everything we see and feel, and touch.

And you’re an instrument that has been created to make the thumbprint of your unique sound. You are responsible for your one note. So why is that somehow the hardest thing to do? Why are we constantly looking over our shoulders, mouthing to the guy in the horns section, “Am I doing this right?”

How should he know? He doesn’t know what you’re supposed to sound like — he’s been made to play his note, and his note only. And if he tried to teach you, he’d teach you to sound like him because that’s all he knows how to do, to sound like him. He’s learning, practicing every day, to play the one note he was brought here to play, to play his part, to sound like himself so that he can vibrate the right things into being.

What if species are dying and the earth is being polluted because we’re playing the wrong notes? Because we’re in disharmony with ourselves? Because our vibrations are off? What if sound is what our environments are responding to, resonating with, and tuning themselves to?

All these wrong notes…

What if the only thing you had to do to undo all the ugliness, all cancer, all the hatred in the world is to play your one note? Not to learn the whole song, but just one uncomplicated note?

The answer? For me, it’s to write. This is me taking my place in the ensemble and playing my note. A note the orchestra sounds fine without. A note that when it’s missing, the difference is imperceivable. But when it’s there, it adds a little more harmony. When it’s there, you notice.

You’ve already signed up for this orchestra — you’re here. You’ve committed to playing. But what are you playing? Are you trying to sound like a horn when you’re a triangle? Are you timidly playing the triangle when your note requires a powerful bash of the big symbol?

What parts the clouds to allow the sun back in? Who’s responsible for that sound? Could it be you?

We’ve all been invited here to play our one note perfectly, and that’s it — nothing more, nothing less. I can’t control how your violin will sound tonight, but I can play my note at exactly the right time and in the right way.

I exist in a constant serenade — we all do — one that’s not meant to be heard, but felt.

P.S…sst!

I’ve submitted the second draft of my memoir to the editor I’m working with — one more edit to go!

And I *think* Kev and I accidentally created the cover image while playing around with some of his new photography equipment this weekend…😬 The book cover mock-up made it feel very real all of a sudden!

Want to get your hands on a copy when it finally incarnates? Let me know, and I’ll let you know where you can get a copy.

Credits

Sounds of nature a la my yard, and Crystal Bowl Healing 7 Chakra Meditation.

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