Morning Page: Soul Music
Ever wake up with a song in your heart? How's this for a song? Today I woke up with the third movement, the Presto agitato, from Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14 in C-sharp minor (the Moonlight Sonata) in my heart. It's an excited, hurry up movement, full of urgency. It sounds like leaves being carried over a waterfall.
Beethoven is fabulous, passionate music, and pretty much all of it gets my pulse beating just a little faster, but this movement in particular... why this? It's the first movement, the Adagio, that everyone knows. The one you would recognize as the Moonlight Sonata, with its somber, oozing progression of heartbreak, every note hanging by a thread. I adore that movement. Adore it. It feels like a little piece of my soul being made audible.
So why today the frenetic Presto agitato? Am I in a hurry? Not particularly. Am I, as the name of the movement suggests, agitated? Perhaps a little, but no more than usual. I can feel my electrons buzzing, feel myself made of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, a collective of atoms. But if I listen deep down I can always feel that. Or imagine I feel it. Is there a difference?
I was thinking about God, and belief, and how I hold two minds. I believe because deep down in my bones I know there is something Divine about creation, And I believe because I choose to believe. There's a part of me that stands back, skeptical, and eyes the atheist's path. It whispers that I am shoehorning in superstition where science would do. I hear it, I acknowledge it, and then I remind it about dark matter, and how little we really understand the physics of the universe, or the beauty of evolution, or the majesty of geology, or any of it.
I can hold both thoughts at once, as if I were two people with two brains, two antithetical ways of thinking, and that itself is part of the Mystery.
Our ancestors felt earthquakes and blamed angry gods, giant carp, slumbering dragons. Now we blame plate tectonics, thrust faults, the convection of Earth's liquid mantle driven by the heat of creation still residing in its iron core. Is that any less fantastic? Having a scientific understanding hardly takes the Divine out of the picture, it merely changes the face of God.
Ultimately, I am more than the sum of my atoms, even if I can imagine myself as matter and nothing more. I am energy as well, energy science doesn't wholly explain. More than physics and chemistry and biology, I encompass the science of my being and expand around it. A cake is more than flour and sugar and eggs. Water is more than hydrogen and oxygen. Today I claim my chakras, my ethereal and spiritual bodies, the soul that manifests in my physical body. Today I listen to the Sonata Number 14 in C-sharp minor, all three movements, and hear myself mirrored in each of them.
Beethoven is fabulous, passionate music, and pretty much all of it gets my pulse beating just a little faster, but this movement in particular... why this? It's the first movement, the Adagio, that everyone knows. The one you would recognize as the Moonlight Sonata, with its somber, oozing progression of heartbreak, every note hanging by a thread. I adore that movement. Adore it. It feels like a little piece of my soul being made audible.
So why today the frenetic Presto agitato? Am I in a hurry? Not particularly. Am I, as the name of the movement suggests, agitated? Perhaps a little, but no more than usual. I can feel my electrons buzzing, feel myself made of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, a collective of atoms. But if I listen deep down I can always feel that. Or imagine I feel it. Is there a difference?
I was thinking about God, and belief, and how I hold two minds. I believe because deep down in my bones I know there is something Divine about creation, And I believe because I choose to believe. There's a part of me that stands back, skeptical, and eyes the atheist's path. It whispers that I am shoehorning in superstition where science would do. I hear it, I acknowledge it, and then I remind it about dark matter, and how little we really understand the physics of the universe, or the beauty of evolution, or the majesty of geology, or any of it.
I can hold both thoughts at once, as if I were two people with two brains, two antithetical ways of thinking, and that itself is part of the Mystery.
Our ancestors felt earthquakes and blamed angry gods, giant carp, slumbering dragons. Now we blame plate tectonics, thrust faults, the convection of Earth's liquid mantle driven by the heat of creation still residing in its iron core. Is that any less fantastic? Having a scientific understanding hardly takes the Divine out of the picture, it merely changes the face of God.
Ultimately, I am more than the sum of my atoms, even if I can imagine myself as matter and nothing more. I am energy as well, energy science doesn't wholly explain. More than physics and chemistry and biology, I encompass the science of my being and expand around it. A cake is more than flour and sugar and eggs. Water is more than hydrogen and oxygen. Today I claim my chakras, my ethereal and spiritual bodies, the soul that manifests in my physical body. Today I listen to the Sonata Number 14 in C-sharp minor, all three movements, and hear myself mirrored in each of them.