CURRENTS
God is a big word
My Music has been with me since my earliest memories.
I remember the first time I saw and touched a piano, and I remember the big ball of orange color that floated up out of that magic, gargantuan machine and remained in the air for the longest time.
I had played a D or an E, I suppose. It was a dark, reddish orange, so it probably was an E.
I was three or four years old.
Sooner than I would have believed, that event happened nearly sixty years ago! Time just flies by now. I can't find enough minutes in the day to do everything that I NEED to do.
Somehow, though, I manage to make hours and hours of Music every day.
It is my surest, most reliable connection with the Universe, my direct line to the Secrets of the Ages, and my way of communing with my God. I was never a very religious person, but I was always on my way to some "spiritual awakening" and I'm finally arriving.
I've been enormously blessed by having this gift of Music, and this gift has led me along the spiritual path to the place at which I find myself now.
God is such a big word, and for some it's a silly word.
How could someone who believes in evolution, in particle physics and chaos theory and the "Big Bang" and string theory... how can that someone justify a belief in a vast Universal Force?
Is this Force like gravity or electromagnetism? Is it like photons, like light? Is it like positrons or monopoles or event horizons or black stars?
In a word, yes, and in a few more words, yes, I think so.
I don't know much, and the older I get, the less I know.
I grew up loving Music. And I grew up believing in science and Art and free will and the sanctity of the human spirit.
And I still believe in those things.
But lately, those things and God are not mutually exclusive.
Here's what I think I mean:
When I look up at the stars, I see a Universe filled with galaxies like grains of sand. I see billions of civilizations rising and falling. I see a trillion sentient life forms, I see a near-infinitude of Class-M planets that could support carbon-based life (like us). I see this in my very very small cerebral cortex, as an imaginative projection, because I believe that's what's out there, and it's enormous and elegant and mind-boggling, and it may make me cry if I don't look away.
Then again, I see so little because I'm really just like an ant looking at the foot of an elephant.
I'm looking at reality with such limited senses.
It's like looking at a landscape through a three-foot-long length of pipe that's an inch in diameter.
I can't see into the infrared or into the ultraviolet.
I can't see an atom or even a molecule - huge contraptions, molecules - so I don't have microvision.
Nor do I have macrovision.
I can't envision a light year... 26 trillion miles... it's hard for me to imagine how big AFRICA is, so how am I supposed to get my brain around 3 billion LIGHT-YEARS?!
I can't conceive of these things because I am not evolved enough.
My planet is awash in a sea of poverty, war, power struggles, pettiness, minor and major squabbles, crimes of terror, jealousy, zealotry, extremism, prejudice, and death.
Obviously, many others are even less evolved than I!
We're just not ready to meet neighbors from Tau Ceti or Proxima Centauri.
We're certainly not ready to meet anyone worth meeting if we can't even get along with the folks in other countries of our own PLANET!