After I pray,

I want to take the shoulders of everyone I see
and ask their faces: Can you see it on me?
Can you see it on my face, all over me?
Can you tell me what's different or new about me?
Can you smell it on my breath? Can you hear it in my talk?
Can you see it in my eyes, and the way I walk?
What do I look like? Can you answer me?
Because man, I can feel it, I can feel it on me!

I can feel it on me, that liquid fire,
that white-hot, ice-cold, healing light;
yes, light like fireflies, light like rain,
light like galaxies whirling in space,
and I want to know, can you see it on my face,
rippling through me like immortal power,
resurrection power, revelation power?

Power, power! We all want power.
Power is beauty, power is strength,
power is being above and beyond,
power is freedom to sing and to shout,
power is freedom to laugh and to cry,
power is having nothing to prove.
Power is being fully alive.

We want it, we want it - God, yes, we do!
We spend our lives in search of it, don't we?
We seek it in stories, in songs, on stage.
We spray a touch of it behind each ear.
We carry it in our pockets, string it around our necks;
these talismans, these trappings of power.
We addict ourselves to it, we drown in it, don't we,
we'll shoot it up our arms and through our skulls, won't we?

But today. Today. I have it. I have it!
And it's not what you think, it's not what I thought.
It's everything, everything I've ever wanted,
but more, more; ever so much more.
It's love, love come alive in every fiber of my being,
love on fire in my every cell,
love, giving itself to me over and over,
a wellspring of everything springing and well;

and oh, when I pray, I sing,
and oh, when I pray, I shout,
and oh, when I pray, I laugh,
and oh, when I pray, I cry,
and after I pray, I have nothing to prove.
I am fully alive! I am living in love!

4'33"

4'33" by John Cage

When I first heard about John Cage's 4'33", I must admit, I was not impressed. Cage (1912 – 1992) was a famous American composer of the twentieth century who was interested in exploring things like musical indeterminacy, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments. This piece, one of his most renowned and (perhaps) most notorious, was originally composed for solo piano, and has three movements, which are a total of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in duration. The catch: during each of the three movements, the piano is not played. The movements are marked only by an opening and closing of the piano lid. In other words, the pianist sits at the keys and does practically nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. And then the audience applauds. In theory. I think some audiences might throw tomatoes instead.

I myself might have considered throwing tomatoes at first, except I believe in nonviolent resistance. Rather than arm myself with rotten fruit and sit in some elite concert hall to watch a pretentious intellectual snob sit there and not play the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, I decided I would give John Cage a chance and listen through a complete recording of the piece just once without judgment. It couldn't hurt. Afterward, I would have a good laugh at the whole enterprise and go on my way.

I was wrong.

When I actually made myself sit through a recording of this piece for the first time... something unexpected happened. I got it. A light went on inside my head, and suddenly, I knew why Cage might have composed this piece. There could be other reasons, of course, but this is the one that came to me.

Cage wants us to experience silence. And within that silence, we encounter a different level of sound.

Listening to 4'33" all the way through is hard. Most people get bored and give up within thirty seconds. But if you require yourself to stick it out, you may experience what I experienced: a heightened awareness of ambient sound. After all, nothing is truly silence. All silence is sound. But there are so many sounds that we completely filter out, because we have made certain sounds important and others of no account.

I love music, meaning in this case traditional music that actually has a discernible structure and tune and so on. But after experiencing John Cage's 4'33", I think about it differently. I can't help but feel a little sad when I see people running out of a meeting, their hands already scrambling to wrap headphones around their skulls. We all need a music boost sometimes, and I'm one hundred percent for it, but is there a chance we have become so addicted to the music in our headphones that we can no longer hear the music of the world around us?

Everything is music. Everything is art. And that is what John Cage's 4'33" forces us to acknowledge. When a concert hall full of people is made to sit in silence, we are faced with the reality of our addiction to specialized noise, our inability to appreciate the mere act of being.

True North

I have this innate awareness of the points of the compass. Often I can determine the placement of north, south, east and west even when I am in an unfamiliar location and the sun is in the middle of the sky, just because to me, each direction has a different "feel" to it. Each of the four strikes a different chord in my psyche, inviting me to respond in a certain way.

The west always looks to me like a dead end. I know it's not; I've traveled west several thousand miles and seen the wild and beautiful country beyond that horizon. But just looking at the western sky, I always think, "backdrop." A permeable backdrop, but a backdrop. The west is the ends of the earth.

The east, by contrast, looks like an invitation. It speaks to me of getting up and going, heading toward the sun, heading toward the edge of the continent to look out over the sea. And beyond the sea, there is still more to be seen. The east, in my subconscious, represents beginnings, possibilities.

The south, I confess, tends to look flat to me. I don't know why. To my eyes, it always shines with a sort of dull light, resembling an illuminated floor, something you would find at the bottom of the rabbit hole. The south means a place to put your shoes, a springboard from which to fly upward.

Which brings us to the north.

The north gives me the strongest feeling of all. I can always recognize a northern sky because it makes me want to run toward it. This has nothing to do with the scenery, by the way. There might be a forest on the southern horizon and a steel mill on the northern horizon, but I will still feel an inexplicable pull to the north, whereas the south seems more like a wall to lean my back against.

The north truly calls me, and I have no idea why. All I know is, I understand the term "true north." If I were the needle of a compass, it wouldn't matter how many times you spun me around: in the end, I would always swing toward the north pole.

Couples

There are two students sitting across from me in the library, a guy and a girl. I've seen them together a lot, and judging by the way they interact, with words flowing freely on all subjects and the occasional display of affection, I have gradually decided that they are a couple. This particular couple is one that I particularly enjoy observing. They seem evenly matched in terms of intelligence, sense of humor, dedication to their individual pursuits, and interest in one another's lives.

I pay attention to the couples around me. I always notice when two people are together, and without meaning to, I take mental notes on the quality of their connection. It interests me to see how they relate to another, and what they seem to see in each other - what it is that holds them together. I like to watch the arc of a relationship, from its euphoric beginnings and on through the steadfast, stable sharing of life's many stories. Sometimes I notice that a couple has turned back into two singles; maybe eventually I'll see one of the singles with a new person, and again, my curiosity is stimulated. How does this new one answer to the empty space left behind by the old one? What does the new person represent? A distraction? A hope against hope? True love, this time? Do either of them know?

I wonder about these things. I also wonder about myself, and the empty space around me, and the galaxies inside my skull.

Seventy Years in the Same Place

I once met a girl named Carrie who was going to be a nun.

She was about my age, built like a house sparrow, and full of smiles that seemed to spring up out of the depths of her little heart.

Carrie wasn't going to be just any nun. She wanted to be a cloistered nun, she said. I visited the old Franciscan friary where she hoped to dwell for the rest of her days. The buildings in the compound, a church and a house, stood silently in the ghetto part of town, faded red brick and somehow beautiful. In the back, there was a yard, with a meditation garden and a plot for vegetables. The area was surrounded by a high wooden fence; outside loomed the city, the old houses with peeling paint, people in shoddy clothes swinging down the sidewalk with mock defiance written all over their faces.

Inside the compound walls, Carrie said, she and about ten other women would stay forever and always, leading quiet lives until the day they died. They would pray, and sing, and sweep the floors, and sew clothes for charities, and eat, and garden, and laugh, and sleep. This would be her entire world, Carrie told me, this little place in the middle of the ghetto. This would be the stage upon which every scene of her entire future would play out.

When I was about to leave, she gave me a hug. Once the enclosure doors were officially closed, I would not be able to hug her again, except in one special room, where visitors could slip their arms through bars and pat the backs of the nuns in their rugged woolen habits.

I went home and looked at my brochures from study-abroad organizations, staring at pictures of midday in Madrid, sunset in Sydney. I thought about Carrie. Then I thought about criminals who have to live out their days in prison. I thought about villagers in the Tibetan mountains, born and raised and mourned in the same little plot of land. I thought about my great-great-great-great-grandparents, who probably seldom, if ever, set foot outside their hometown in Switzerland.

And for a moment, I could imagine it. Seventy years in the same place. Seventy years looking out the same window every morning. Seventy years eating around the same table, with the same people. Seventy years hoeing the same garden. Seventy years stretching out in the same bed, listening to the same night sounds whispering through the same house.

Do You Even Talk? And Other Hilarious Jokes

“Boy, Elyse is talking so loud, I can’t even hear anybody else.”

       It was my friend’s mom who said this, in a rare moment of jocularity for a middle-aged mother of two. I looked up just in time to see her gentle eyes smiling at me in the rearview mirror. And, in response to her unexpected cleverness, the minivan went quiet for a moment… but only for a moment. In no time, the racket resumed, as a group of manic teenagers fought for the cleverest counter-joke:

       “Yeah, Elyse, geez!”

       “Be quiet, Elyse!”

       “Yeah, shut up, Elyse, you’re hurting our ears.”

       I laughed – an achievement: it was the first sound I had made during that entire car trip. And it would probably also be the last. I’ve always been the quiet kid. Growing up, I routinely had to deal with well-meaning adults who put their hands on my shoulders and announced loudly to groups of my peers, “She’s shy,” which instantly made me feel ten times shyer than I actually was; and, of course, there were those hilarious individuals of all ages who liked to get up in my face and ask me point blank, in booming voices, “Do you even talk?” My mind would empty out. I don’t know… do I? Suddenly I was questioning everything. My usual reaction was to plead the fifth and say nothing to my cross-examiner, and that, my friends, is a great example of how myths are perpetuated.

My parents knew I could talk. From an early age, I talked plenty inside the safety of my home compound. Of course, at first, I would only talk with my mouth closed. Minor detail there. My mother was a little concerned about that. She would ask two-year-old Elyse what I wanted to drink, and I’d say, “Myymmh.” 

       “Juice?” she’d say. (She was just guessing.)

       “Mmt-mm” (shaking my head).

       “Milk?” she’d try again.

       “Mm-hm” (this time nodding).

       It was kind of a scary situation, if you think about it. My ability to communicate my needs and desires was limited to a set of virtually indistinguishable syllables. What if one day I decided I wanted something more extravagant than milk or juice – say, a chocolate-covered ice-cream sundae with a cherry on top? How long would it have taken my caregivers to figure that one out?

       Luckily, I did eventually open my mouth and start talking like a normal person. When I finally did this, I actually spoke quite articulately for my age. I never did go through a "baby talk" stage. It was almost as if that whole season of talking with my mouth shut had just been one long practice run, occurring within the nonjudgmental confines of my oral cavity.

Once I started talking, I talked a lot, particularly when I thought no one else was listening. At three or four years old, I liked to pace around in my backyard, babbling incessantly. Occasionally my mom would stick her head out the door and try to hear what I was saying. Whatever it was, there was a lot of exciting inflection and dynamics, she noted. Then it hit her: I was quoting movie scenes, more or less verbatim, from memory. Scene after scene of Winnie-the-Pooh, Barney… you know, the classics of preschool filmography. At night I would lie in bed and quote more movie scenes, tell myself stories, sing myself songs, while the light through the window glowed cerulean, cadet blue, periwinkle – colors from the blue section of my crayon box. My mom would come in and kindly shush me. I was keeping everyone awake.

       Yes, at home, I managed to keep up a constant stream of sound; but under the public eye, that stream would dry up, evaporate. It’s not that I was afraid of people. I never felt shy in the conventional sense – you know, batting my eyelashes, hiding my eyes, a quivering creature cowed by the presence of humans. I didn’t feel shy. I just felt quiet. I felt like my mind was a castle, flanked by a moat, and when I went out among strangers, without my volition, the drawbridge would fold up. I would be safe inside, observing the world from the remote turrets of my inmost consciousness.

These days, as an “adult,” I still get the old familiar descriptive labels thrown at me: quiet, shy, reserved, soft-spoken. I’m definitely what they call an introvert. In public, at least, I listen more than I talk, and the more talkative the crowd around me, the less I have to say. Noisy groups don’t make me nervous; on the contrary, they make me feel like I’m lying in a bed with two dozen heavy thermal blankets piled on top of me. I’m safe and warm, protected by my introversion, but I’m also buried, submerged in muted calm. Fighting to the surface of the blanket sea requires a great deal of kicking, pushing, and general struggle. It’s easier just to stay under. 
       Speaking requires concentrated effort; speaking loudly is almost a physical impossibility. I hate drive-thrus for this reason. You can’t order your food quietly. Vocal projection is a must. If I want to be heard, I have to take a deep breath – one of those whopping inhalations that sucks all the energy out of your brain cells and leaves you dizzy for thirty seconds afterward. “ONE FILET-O-FISH,” I yell, hating every syllable. “WITH A SMALL FRY. AND A SMALL WATER.” Honestly, they need to provide a handheld microphone option for customers at drive-thrus. Imagine if I could order my filet-o-fish in my favorite seductive Johnny Depp stoner voice. “Yeah... yeah, one filet-o-fish... and fries, fries would be beautiful. And water… water is everything, man… water is life.”

No, I like being a quiet person, really. It’s cool because you automatically have secrets, and having secrets makes you seem mysterious, even if your only secrets are that you own a Labrador and you don’t like blue cheese. This information isn’t exactly confidential, but it may as well be, because you’ll never tell anyone. Being an introvert is empowering because you can walk around feeling like classified documents, like government passcodes, and no one will ever know just how amazing it is, or isn’t, inside the locked briefcase of your mind.

       And oh, as a final note. I’m not actually one of those introverts who hates extraverts. I love them. Their energy and enthusiasm about everything, from grapes to world peace, is truly inspiring to me. Plus, they make the best jokes about whether I can even talk, or how I’m talking so loud, they can’t even hear anyone else.

50 Music Genres, Including Some You've Never Heard Of (Hopefully)

1. Bluegrass
2. Gangsta rap
3. Pop
4. Indie
5. Death metal
6. Ska
7.  Psychobilly
8. Mariachi
9. Rock 'n roll
10. Hip hop

11. Proto-electronica

12. Reggae

13. R&B

14. Opera

15. Afro jazz

16. Bubble trance

17. Plainchant

18. Traditional Celtic

19. Soul

20. Freak folk

21. Martial industrial

22. Gamelan

23. Dubstep

24. Ranchera

25. Country

26. Ragtime

27. Broadway

28. Grunge

29. Waulking songs

30. Samba

31. New jack swing

32. Techno

33. Disco

34. Doowop

35. Blues

36. Funk

37. Djent

38. Baroque

39. Post hardcore

40. Free jazz

41. Skwee

42. Pirate metal

43. Barbershop

44. Romantic

45. Skater punk

46. Bossa nova

47. Klezmer

48. Hymns

49. Screamo

50. Powwow

 (I could go on, but I won't.)