I sit for a long time in the absolute silence.  All at once, there is barely a perceptible noise, a soft rumble as of thunder.  The sound dies without discovery of its nature or source.  It returns, seeming to come from all directions at once.  At last it emerges from its mystery, grows into a tremulous hum, and solidifies into chanting.  The music has no tempo.  There is no breathing audible in it.  No one voice stands out; it is the fusion of all that produces the effect.  Long held notes which at last modulate again and again in the calm rhythm of the heart.  I am suspended in the sound.  And charged. ... The chanting dies away as gently as it began.  Once again there is the unanimous voice of silence.

Warm sun. My worship is a blue sky and 10,000 crickets in the deep wet hay of the field. My vow is the silence under their song. I admire the woodpecker and the dove in simple mathematics of flight. Together we study practical norms. The plowed and planted field is red as brick in the sun and says: "Now is my turn!" Several of us began to sing.

Music is sound AND silence. It is the spaces BETWEEN the notes that create rhythm, melody, and meaning, and the greater the composer -- and the perfornance -- the better the quality of the silence. Legendary pianist Artur Schnabel said that it wasn't the notes but the silences between them he played better than other people. A few seconds more or less at crucial moments in the performance of a piece may mean the difference between a mundane and a transcendent experience.

Music has a divine message and messenger of life. It was quintessentially the "Quickening art" -- quickening my soul with this my body, so that suddenly, spontaneously, I was quickened into motion, my own perceptual and kinetic melody, quickened into life by the inner life of music. I was carried ahead by the ongoing musical stream.

The interior place where we experience God is the same kind of place and as real as the place here we experience music and poetry.

"Wake up! SEE!"

Suddenly from where I lay, I did see. I saw that as he shoveled, the coal had a song. Grandfather had a song, even the pickup truck had a song. I saw that Grandfather heard the song and that he shoveled in harmony with it. He was like a symphony conductor. I realized that what I saw was the maximum-efficiency, minimum-effort law he had been teaching me earlier. While I had struggled against myself during the long hospital ceremony, Grandfather had been conducting an orchestra, a ceremonial symphony.

"I see you got it. You see, everything has its song. Find the energy, the song, and merge wíth it. You must seek the harmonic and merge with it."

When I asked the old man if he believed in the healing power of music, he laughed at first, and then suddenly grew serious. "I forget everything when I play. All my heart goes into the music. If I don't concentrate, the music changes, so it's best to forget all distractions and just play."

When the violin
Can forgive the past
It starts singing.

When the violin can forgive
Every wound caused by others
The heart starts singing.

The world is full of implicit religion, and the inspired saints and poets, who say that the birds "praise God" when they sing, are in no way mistaken. Because it is their tiny life itself which sings the "great life" and makes heard, through its countless variations, the same news which is as old as the world and as new as the day: "Life lives and vibrates in me." What homage to the source of life is expressed by these small streams of life: the birds which sing!"