Is music innate?  Are humans the only species equipped to make it? 

Look no further than Youtube for some pretty convincing anecdotal evidence.  So eight million people discovered this tiny celebrity before I did.  My grin is just as wide. 

Watch her gears lock into beats she hears in her head; the toddler's grasp of Hey Jude gives credence to the humans-wired-for-music scenario.

Then there's the research.  Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, says certain brain regions are wired specifically to process music.

One would have to look for aspects of music which have no equivalent in speech. This certainly seems to be true of the regular beat or pulse. Speech has its own rhythm, but it doesn't have the fixed metrical quality of music. There's spontaneous synchronization with rhythm in all human beings, even in childhood. You tap with it, nod with it, and even if you don't, the motor parts of your brain move with it. There's an auditory/motor correlation in human beings not found in any other animal.
Oliver Sacks, Wired

Here is an author who understands flow.

'I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Indeed, The Elegance of the Hedgehog bears witness to the efficacy of Ms. Barbery's altered state.  As I read, I scratched myriad rich quotes in a notebook.  But a novel tells its own story; out of context, words can lose their sheen.  Talking about a story, unless you are a very good ventriloquist, is hard to do.

Risking this, let me quote the protagonist, Renée, as she contemplates a Japanese masterpiece.

The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup - this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion; is this not something we all aspire to?  And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?

I wonder if it's true, that a culture keen on acquisition and scalability handicaps its artists' sense of the ephemeral.  Can pure beauty walk this earth of concrete and billboards without becoming some means-to-end, cheap trick, fast talking ad copy?

A Laker’s fan to a radio man on how he feels about his team:

“I get so excited, I got butterflies down my neck!”

Poetry in picturesque places gives me a longing for life, well within and far beyond reach.

Mary, a mother, wife, friend to all, passed away this week.  She was to me a distant acquaintance whose life, I thought, would purr along into peaceful old age.  She was a true mensch.

We know there are all kinds of people, right?  On the one extreme you have the teams-of-one variety, who suck the living daylight out of you to focus it on them.  Longevity teaches you to move to warmer climes.  Which doesn’t take too long if you’ve met a class act, like Mary.  Such a person lays out a blanket big enough for you and all your weary bones; you stand there dripping on her generosity; she beams at you from someplace peaceful, ego free.  And the light she brings is everywhere.

You carry this to the next place, and the next, and in the course of time, you learn how to be a more hospitable soul.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a lovely film in many ways, the old-young boy asks why people have to die.  “So we know how much they mean to us,” the answer comes.  This is cold comfort.  Given a choice, I’d rather bumble along with my loved ones, imprecisely prescient of their preciousness than, suddenly enlightened, find them gone.

So much for Hollywood treacle.  I don’t want death, or Hallmark, to line my cloud with silver.  But death is, I think, in some careful ways, a gift.

As metal doors clattered open before me, with visions of penetrating Darth Vader's lair, I slipped my car full of puppets, ladybug accoutrement and guitar into the dungeony garage.  I'd already circled several black granite behemoths in search of their epicenter, this Early Childhood Enrichment building.  It made sense, really, for the bankers to keep their progeny locked in the safest vault of the best fortified gated realm I'd ever close encountered.

After two security check points, several phone calls, a signed affidavit, one visitor's pass and three doors that sprung mysteriously open as I approached, I made my way to the well appointed story room, set out my effects on the beige leather couch and waited for the children to arrive.  Considering my tax contributions had helped fund a $45 billion bailout of this very bank, I felt right at home (sort of).

This very morning, driving through tree lined, mansion-appropriate boulevards, I wondered at my sense of well being.  With giant insects adorning my tee shirt, ladybug necklace and freshly washed hair, here I was, jazzed up on chocolate and some quality time with my amp.  I was happy.  My question: does a person living in one of these gigantic houses feel gigantically more at peace with her world than I do?  Is there a direct correlation between the two, and if there is, how does it feel to be any happier than this?  I wondered if waking up in the morning felt monumentally better to these castle dwellers than to me.  Just curious.