iv_ever_dumbening_the_inaudible frAnk i re-read over your call to listen, and i remembered the days when i was taught that true prayer is listening and not speaking. everything speaks. once, i was driving by myself and the early morning light was revealing first shapes and then as the day woke, i could see clearly. i was near ojai, on the backcountry of santa barbara, near lake casitas. and i had to pull over because i was overwhelmed with a thought so gripping i thought i would expode from the shear immensity of it. it's actually very simple. yet, i wish for the purity of these thoughts again, that child-like ability to hear the voices of the world around us. i looked at the pines, the sage, the clouds, all of it, and listened. the sound, other than a distant stream, or the swish of the santa anas through the needles, was inaudible. words said to me from the origin of life itself. messages, an endless, eternal train of thought. that the blueprint contained within all my eyes could see, the images that my brain was processing form the retina, were ageless, just as i was. i wept. exhausted, i fell asleep on the hillside. we are so fooled by the temporary. visit a boneyard, sometime. look over the beautiful statuary, the names and dates, etched into granite. these were lives, people who lived for many years, and now they are monoliths, epitaphs, memories. but, actually, they have have never died, they have been transformed. translated. returned to their original state and then who knows what? have you heard the inaudible? 020113 ... ever dumbening Maybe I never have, because I feel guilty and arrogant when I think that I have heard it many times. If I have, it is because I've been well prepared. I picture the surface of a cell, with proteins and lipids forming a dynamic wall. To get in, outside messages need to embrace and be embraced by the cell membrane. There are a few books that have lined up my proteins in anticipation of hearing the inaudible. I went to church every Sunday for the first 20 years of my life, but I knew that my impression was somewhat different from those in the pews around me. I always thought god was more of a biological thing. I was rewarded for my patience when I came to Foundation and Earth (the fifth book of Asimov's Foundation series). It was the first place I heard of the Gaia concept--Lovelock's idea that the earth itself is a living being. Another book, Guy Murchie's Seven Mysteries of Life, along with a bachelor of science in anthropology, snapped my receptors to attention. Murchie's book is a massive encyclopedia of the interconnectedness of everything. I've always agreed with the idea that learning is simply rediscovering things you already know. I choose three examples of hearing time speak silently to me. Silently, the first: Burning man provides a torrential flood of input, but there are times when walking across the playa that the other 24,999 people evaporate into the dryness, then solitude. At sunset one day this year, I was struck by the silence. The mountains just west of the Black Rock Desert were angling, rotating, passively quenching the sun. I was looking at the reentrants formed by the soft persistent rains. I was instantly connected to the past and by extension the future. I thought that _this_ is our piece of history, this silly little experiment in the desert. I stood there with the stream flowing from all to all. Silently, the second: I like to occasionally pick up rocks. I can't say that I've ever found anything "valuable," but they spoke once I picked them up. There are two in particular. I won't be able to do them justice with my description, but a few details are necessary, for where I found them and what they look like served as the triggers. One is a fragment from a larger rock, so you see the raw, white inside (quartz?) contrasted with the smoothed, rounded, reddish curve of what was once the outside. This one I found on the shore of Lake Tahoe. And I looked at it and was crushed by the weight of this rock's journey. The other I found in Tibet (where, incidentally, I think the inaudible is warehoused). It is some kind of sedimentary rock--little speckles of what looks like charcoal, swimming in a sandy broth. I found it along the road from Lhasa to Shigatse (an incredible bus ride in its own right, with tons of silent speculation). Describing my thoughts upon picking it up would be futile, but again I traced its path to my hand and my path to its surface. Standing at more than ten thousand feet, I watch as the Yarlong Tsangpo flows a few hundred yards below where the rock and I meet. Silently, the third: We only have to backtrack a few miles to Lhasa for the third. And as I said, Tibet stockpiles the inaudible, so if you have a few hours.... The Potala is the giant palace of Tibetan postcard fame. It served as the house of the Dalai Lama in life and death. Not long after entering the grounds, a small boy grabbed my hand, his sister grabbed Colleen's. An hour later, we exchanged a few words with their parents. Aside from that, silence. Their was no hesitation when they grabbed our hands, they knew us, we them. They walked with us, telling us generations of history without uttering a single word. The purest beauty imaginable. 020113 ... ever dumbening Two more thoughts: 1. I should've just answered: see spiritus_mundi. Thanks miniver. 2. Just a footnote on the Murchie book. Every atom in our body is replaced, some cells releasing them faster than others. After a few years there is not a single piece of you that was there before. We--everyone, everything--exchange these vibrating bundles. That's part of what allows us to hear the inaudible. My cat has a hydrogen that your great grandfather once quartered. Meow. 020114 ... j_blue i think it could be argued that the world's sould can be noticed anywhere, if you know where to look i perceive it everyday, on the streets of san francisco; and take walks to talk with it the ocean, the hill tops, the teeny parks where the dogs take their owners to run and express happiness to each other the underground, its grafitid advertisements, the bars, the cocktails hm... the cocktails 020116 what's it to you? who go blather from