Monday November 1, 2004 Bum-Bump, Bum-Bump…

Monday November 1, 2004 Bum-Bump, Bum-Bump…

My grandson CB now about to enter his fifth month in the world has an electronic battery powered—two double AA alkaline—white noise generator that my daughter found to her delight, that he loves. It measures about five by seven inches and just under two inches thick. If you didn’t know any better you would assume it was a radio. It has several push buttons along the top and a volume dial on the side. The buttons select a series of continuously playing sounds: raining falling, waves pounding the shoreline, and CB’s favorite, the sound of a gently flowing stream, among others.

Swath CB in his receiving blanket after he’s been fed, and with a pacifier in his mouth, all you need to do is flip on the white noise generator and he’s good for an hour or two in la la land. My sense is that naturally occurring rhythms found in the regular beat of pounding surf, the swifter tempo of gently flowing stream, are the origins of music within us. When CB and the rest of us entered the world the one consistent sound we all heard was the regular rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat. Thus, our first and most memorable impression of the world is of its regular, constant cadence of bum-bump, bum-bump, bum-bump…

That ceaseless, unrelenting pulse informs us from the start that we are within a living entity. And when we are wrenched from that relatively quiet, warm, dark cocoon of comfort into a space where our every sense is suddenly overwhelmed with sensation, we realize that we’ve entered a far more expansive living entity that is probing us, hurting us, touching us, talking to us, moving us about within a much larger, brighter, and noisier cocoon. That soothing rhythmic heartbeat is no longer assuring us, comforting us.

From the moment of birth, we are part of this larger living, breathing organism. Thousands of years ago, you would have been part of a tribe. Thousands of years later you had become part of a race. Years later you were part of a cultural and political identity: Greek, Roman, Persian, etc. Today, you’re part of a national identity: American, British, French, German, Japanese, etc. And at the micro level, we are part of a community—the San Francisco Bay Area, Orange County California, El Paso, Texas, etc. If you imagine each of these identities as a distinct living body, then you are a cell within that body. And just as the cells within CB and CB’s mom are driven by the bum-bump, bum-bump, of a beating heart, so too are all of us being driven by the rhythmic beating of this larger body.

You ever wonder why it is that when you first travel aboard for the first time or after a long interval to visit London, Paris, Tokyo or some other place that you feel out of step with everyone around you? You can easily blame it on jet lag but even after you’ve been in country you still encounter instances where you feel awkward and out of place. There is a natural rhythm that everyone within a community begins to move to. During the Monday morning commute, the same group of cars all drive down the same roads to go from home to work and later back again. On Saturday, other groups converge on shopping malls, grocery stores, and countless other venues. Each of those converging on a given place sharing something in common with the others around him/her, moving to the same beat. The phenomenon is illustrated by the ability of the hearing impaired being able to dance within a group and keep to the rhythm of those around them. Eventually the traveler arriving from abroad falls into the local rhythm and no longer strikes the dissonant chord within a crowd.

I submit that on a much larger scale the world is the living organism and all of humankind is collectively hearing the heartbeat of mother earth. Believe me, she is alive—living in earthquake prone California and feeling her move you appreciate how alive she really is. And just as the unborn infant within its mother’s womb is completely oblivious to the world outside her, we likewise are equally oblivious to the force beyond and within the maternal earth: a direct hit from an errant asteroid or comet from space, the eruption of a volcano with the force several times greater than Krakatoa and humanity will follow in the footsteps of dinosaurs.

Most of us live our lives oblivious to the natural rhythms that vibrate around us, but the older you get the more sensitive to it you become. Perhaps you begin to realize the vast distance you’ve traversed in such a short period of time looking back from the autumn of life and begin to count the heartbeats left before you cease to sense the bum-bump, bum-bump… at all.