Lively Dog Blog

I had a pretty good day, but I think the best part was reading Mark Morford’s April 23rd column on SFGate, on the deep musical hum made by the earth. You need to read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes:

“The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird, a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that’s not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.

Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can’t really fathom it, so low it can’t be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, “like dozens of lazy hurricanes,” as one writer put it.”

That’s some amazing description. The best part is when he uses his imagination to try to explain it:

“Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.”

It goes on from there to more possibilities, swinging out into the solar system and the galaxies, and back in to explore how all humans and animals seem to have an inborn love of music. You need to go read it. Go on, now, you can come back later.

….

Thanks for coming back. My only disagreement with Mark is that I can’t wait for science to figure it out. It’s a wonderful mystery to contemplate as it is, but seeking complex explanations sparks my imagination just as much mystical ones.

To belatedly tie it back into massage and Reiki, sometimes I idly think about the music we play during sessions, and how much more smoothly the energy flows when the music is playing. I always thought it was simply relaxing for the client and rhythmic for me, which made everything better. Perhaps, though, the music facilitates the connection between us, by tapping into that primordial rhythm that surrounds us all.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!