The Music Within Me

Yes, I know how that sounds.  Some of you have probably seen that occasionally my music selection says something like "Furnace: Running".  And it's true.  I don't always have music playing on my computer because sometimes I'm doing something that music distracts me from.  And also, there is a certain spiritual nature in music for me.  I can hear it in everything around me.  Because of my hearing loss, I fear true silence. For the hearing there is no such thing.  Silence is quiet as it is relative to noise.  Even when it is quiet it is not silent.  In the utter still times, you can hear your heart beating, your blood pulsing through your ears, even if there is nothing else.  There is never true silence.  Even quiet has music.  But silence.  How can it have music?  I fear that silence...that place where I cannot hear the song any more.

So perhaps it is because of my hearing problems.  Years of teaching my brain to put together broken garbled bits of information into something that I can understand as coherent sound amidst chaos, has taught me in the absence of coherent sound, to interpret music in everything.  I can usually work out what someone has said, after a moment, even if I only heard overtones of the speech, the rest drowned in the chaos of other sounds, with no visual clues to tell me the rest. The side effect of that is that the vacuum cleaner sings a song, it has harmonics and subsonic music I can feel in my bones. Each one sings a different song, built on a different chord.  If the shower is the music of falling water every bit as valid as that of a stream, then a real water fall is a thunder of drums that reverberates through the ground it strikes up from the rock into my feet and legs.  That music, so shaking that it is beyond the hearing of most, can hold me in place to listen, and often without realizing, I find I must add my own voice to it as well and sing the song of the water as I hear it.  The furnace sings with a thousand voices, the intake jets the blowers, the ignition, the flames, the humming steel heating and cooling, all the varying voices become for me not noise, but an orchestra.  I can't sing with the furnace.  The song is obscure, and I don't understand it well enough yet... to raise my own voice to join it is to drown it out so I can't hear it at all.  But just the same, it sings to me in the silence.  It makes me know I can still hear, and that there is still music within me.