Inside Sound

we are sound chambers.

I can always hear it behind my thoughts, just waiting there for me patiently.  

It is a pulse. 

​Music moves me and intends to even when I am too darn heavy to budge. 

There are songs that are particularly inspiring to me, music that opens me like a piece of fruit.  The rind just peels away and I spread each juicy section of my emotions splashing out.  Finally, I explode, turning inside out by an intricately crafted arrangement of vibrations.  When I allow music to move through me like this then I become the instrument.  My body resonates like the hollow wooden body of an acoustic guitar. 

We are all sound chambers for one voice or another.  When we let sounds bounce around inside us we keep that vibration going, like we collectively step on the sustain pedal of a piano. 

the giant guitar

On several occasions, my 12 year old son and I like to entertain each other by talking about a giant guitar.  One so large that, as it lays there in some wide open west coast valley, or better yet, at a proper establishment for such a creation like The Clark, you have to look at its entirety from a distance.  We imagine you can set a ladder against it and climb up to the top surface, plant your feet there and stare across the girth of the gleaming metal strings, down into the sound hole like it’s some sci-fi, space station on an alien planet.  

Here’s where the idea has steeped enough to step into.  Lowering yourself down into the hole you hang from the largest string, the bass, and once your body relaxes a bit, you let go.  The string, which, to scale, would be a large metal cable, like the kind used to build bridges, vibrates with such a fantastically Earth shaking shutter that the sound chamber that you are dropping into becomes so thick with vibrations you could almost feel it slow down your fall.  Gravity itself is denied by the levity of reverberating sound.  You float down as the sound waves disperse into the open air and gently land.  Inside the great hall of the instrument, the music swallows you.  The light patterns in the room are shifting with the skylight sound-hole. 

A part of you may never want to leave.  The part of you that will pay respect to the new discovery inside the echo chamber.  The other part of you that perhaps wants coffee or to hold close to one you love will get you headed home but most likely with a new way to listen.   

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