Vachon Imagined

Me and a karaoke machine.

That’s all it would take for me to “find” God.

As if God were something I could stumble upon.

But maybe that’s how it has always happened.

All the moments in my life that opened me to the presence of something larger were moments when, for one brief instant, I wasn’t judging what was occurring.

My father used to sing through a karaoke machine.

And instead of listening dutifully, eyes wide, leaning forward at attention, I would close my eyes. Without even thinking about it, my head would begin to turn, as though my ear were asking for a closer view.

The music had a sound.

And underneath my father’s voice and the melody, there was something moving.

I felt as though I were simply holding space for it.

The two working together:

One receiving.

The other becoming still, like a lion protecting its kingdom.

And I didn’t stop there.

As a child, I was fascinated by how sound worked. I would look at the microphone, the cord, the box, the speakers, and wonder:

What is moving through there?

What am I hearing?

Others would have stopped at, “You’re hearing sound, idiot.”

And they did.

But I knew there was something in it.

I would take a penny and drop it on the hardwood floor, amazed by the sound it made.

Then I would move around the room, listening to the echo change with every place I entered.

The sound was different in every corner.

But whatever carried it was not.

I would take my mother’s perfume and spray it into the air and wait for the sound.

A dog would bark, and I would wait for the sound.

I imagined, or perhaps I could see it, that sound moving between things, connecting everything to me so that I could enjoy it.

The sound had a kind of meaning.

But I wasn’t there to decipher it.

I was simply there to receive it.

To enjoy it.

And perhaps that is what we lose.

We become so interested in deciding what something means that we stop experiencing what it is.

We decide before someone has finished speaking whether we agree with them.

We judge the sound before we’ve allowed ourselves to hear it.

But when we aren’t interested in judging what we hear, something changes.

We listen.

And the sound becomes a language.

A whole other language.

One that doesn’t require us to understand it before we receive it.

One that asks only that we become still enough to hear what has been moving underneath the sound all along.