What is it about music that simultaneously keeps time yet sets us apart from time as well? Does it voice the unspoken resonance of deeper patterns contained within local and distant organs of the universe? Losing oneself to the music is one of the easiest things to do and happens through a host of different experiences. My earliest exposure to rhythmless ambient music may have been where this first struck me so profoundly. Slow textural builds that lilt its listener over audial mountains and through sonic valleys like the flight of a lone bird. This early exposure to such rich environmental pieces would flood my mind with expansive visual components and I could practically feel the breeze sweeping through my hair. These were not drug induced affairs – they were pure sonic relationships instilling a mystical sense of the truly endless nature of time and space.

Music like this guided me closer to physics as well as a spiritual realm, two not so different fields, yet worlds a part in how they impart their wisdoms. A freedom that I had not felt was contained in the long phrases of these gentle opuses. It cultivated a wonder that recalled childhood and that feeling of genuinely not knowing and not being aware that I didn’t know. Everything was curious again. And the thought of “me” would drift away into a sea of tranquil unknowing way beyond the imagination into something beyond experience, what I only know to call the divine. Yet in my naive youth, there was no compulsion to identify it or have concern that it should be understood. I only knew what I felt, something beyond joy, a stillness and resolve that could not be discerned through any other circumstances.

While other music also shows us different correlations to time with its stops and starts, odd time signatures, unexpected transitions and endless variations, ambient music seems to hold a key for departing from time completely and follows the heart of the unrevealed. When my time comes, I do not think that my body, mind and soul will become fodder for the flowers, yet take flight to the unending distance of time and space. Words, ideas, needs, wants, separateness… these will shed from me and a whisper in the wind will permeate a path untold.

Something for you to soar with:

“Finally Touched” by Kit Watkins