touching the divine

I don't believe in an interventionist God who answers prayers and performs miracles. However, I do believe in a higher power that exists both without and within us, a force that occasionally overlaps with our perceptions. Perhaps this energy can be accessed through meditation or prayer--sometimes we stumble into its presence unwittingly. Most often for me, I find myself in its presence through music.

For the past six months I have been immersing myself in drone music as a way of handling stress. Much of my anger and anxiety comes from being at odds with a deadline-driven, breakneck-speed, need-it-now culture. Drone music represents the opposite of that culture: it unfolds slowly, with no set agendas, no target-dates, no demands of urgency, no selfish goals.

Listening to drone music, I can feel my pulse slow down, my breathing deepen. My neck and shoulders shrug their yoke of tension, and my muscles feel both heavy and light. And then, sometimes, it's there: a warmth in my chest radiating outward, an energy, calm, limitless, timeless. No anger, no anxiety, only peace.

Are musicians able to access the divine more readily than other people? Or is it that music is the most direct means of translating and communicating the divine?

Here is the website that set me off on this morning's tangent. Listen to Stay. Great music, Irene. Thank you.