If the story is true, and it’s as true as we can know at the level where particles can still be called particles, everything is vibrating.
Everything.
I walk to school on a February dawn, where the grays around me look beautiful against the impossibly white snow under my boots. My steps trace the steps I made yesterday–not many people trod through the Green in the mid-February snow.
I have been walking for almost six decades now, past the age my mother walked, and close to the age of my Dad’s last stable steps. Remembering this makes each step matter.
So my vibrating feet are walking on vibrating water molecules held in a beautiful crystal lattice reflecting light from the sun and no one truly knows why any of this is happening.
But we’re pretty sure it is happening, and we’re pretty sure it will keep happening for a long, long time after any of us reading these words are long gone, whether we’re conscious or not. I’m most conscious when I am least aware of anything but now, step after step after step after step, the snow and ice yielding slightly with a slight crunch, more felt than heard, and I leave another footprint and then another.
We live by our stories, our stories make us who we are, and too few of our modern stories extend beyond the tiny bubble of culture we find ourselves immersed in, drowning in words with little meaning.
Meanwhile the particles keep moving–vibrating, swirling, more nothingness than matter–for reasons no one can fathom.
So ask me if I believe in God or miracles or Heaven or Hell, and I cannot help myself, I laugh, not derisively but in joy, thinking of my particles, inside and out, vibrating like music, forever vibrating, for no reason at all.
And if particles vibrate for no reason at all, well, then this collection of particles hardly needs a reason to do the same.
So I do.
I often feel that the people who am drawn to feel ‘right’ because somehow our essential vibrations are in tune. That the harmonic of the vibrations of my cells fits in with the harmonic of their cells’ vibration.
So too do spaces feel right, as though the vibration from the space allows an amplification of my own essential frequency.
There is a holiness to this symphony.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of a bird – a windhover – “my heart in hiding stirred for the bird.” I think that he felt its essential vibration.
On a February morning when all seems frozen, still, it is important to hear the tuning and the vibration.
Thank you for listening.
And three years later I see these words again, and I am still, vibrating.