Under the surface of things, the surface of all the religions, all the politics, all the cockamamie ideas that fly around there’s this “thing”. It’s a wild thing, a strong thing, a very connecting thing, like a heartbeat, or a fast flowing river. It’s like I may express the current “belief du jour”, but underneath, the reality, the “thing” feels more real to me. It may contradict the popular dogma of the day. It may fly in the face of all the “us and them” attitudes, it might even corroborate some far fetched “not so mainstream” avant garde belief or ideology. But it will ring “true, true, true” every time. It’s that gut level communication that reverberates in your soul. It’s that “thing” that ilicits nostalgia, unknown rememberance, and longing. It pulls at the corporate heartstrings of our hungry weary culture. When I hear certain riffs, usually aeolian or pentatonic it wakes up that “thing” in me. I feel it a lot when I hear stuff like Vaughn Williams, or a lonely celtic ballad, or even when I pull out my guitar and sing my heart out. It jumps out of hiding in the music from a lonely bagpiper on a hilltop at sunset. It lives in sunsets and sunrises, silverlinings of rainclouds, fields of golden wheat after a storm, and on the frosty breath you breathe on a cold early morning in a redwood forest. I see that “thing” in the eyes of the very old and the very young, those who are closest to immortality. We in the middle too easily forget just how close eternity really is. I just took a break and stepped outside my door and there it was, right here and now, singing to me on the wind in the trees. That “thing” tells me: Everyone is precious, life is precious, everyone gets to go to heaven, because hell is what we make of our lives when we’re learning that it’s heaven we really want. Life is short and eternity is always just one step away into the arms of God. And the song of God is everywhere to be heard and enjoyed if we just listen. I’m all ears.