notes from a beautiful spirit

you can see that I 'misheard" the question: had I heard "who" -- I'd have been totally struck...

What is my God? What are My Gods?

That was, to irreligious me, a disbeliever, a non-starter of a question. How could I hold such a question? But even as I was thinking that, I heard a tone in my inner ear. A D-flat from a Chopin piece. Not so much the note, as the memory of hearing it and the knowing what hearing it does to me.

It evokes awe, and wonder; it transports me, it stops the world.

I have sung in enough 'sacred' music in enough churches, temples, cathedrals to have made the connection between the feeling of Chopin's D flat and what I believe the psalms, hymns, requiem masses, prayers, cantatas, and oratorios are meant to evoke.

So what else can evoke such a feeling?

a newborn's fingernail
sunrise on the water
sometimes the scent of lilacs
Sibelius' violin sustenuto
the voice of Vessalina Kasarova
Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Wind Southerly
Alvin Ailey's Cry
the leap at the end of Billy Elliott
smell of that body oil I can't find the name of
any Giacometti
Siri by Gino Hollander
the first line of the calm part of Brahm's Alto Rhapsody
a child's hand wrapped around a grownup's finger

So very interesting -- all these from senses -- god?

And from a more thinking place, and 'inner sense' if you will, comes the knowledge of the 'much' that is unknowable - although there seems to be a non-personal universal well of knowledge, of experience, of energy, of spirit that is both part of us and not part of us but available to be dipped into -- and which hints, or teases, at explaining what cannot be accounted for otherwise.

Some things that cannot be known, we sense anyway -- and that suggests the possibility of our being connected in ways we rarely imagine. I am fully open to that imagining.

Here I come as close as I ever have to the idea of a supernatural being, but it is not very close. And so ends my response to the non-starter of a question.

leie