Our cosmic genesis
By Elsemarie Norby (Mar 24, 2006)

Music matters in every life. All people from every culture throughout human history have had music as a meaningful and necessary element in their life's journey. Why? Here is a short, fairly simple explanation.

Once upon a time, before time was even invented, there was a sound. It had such power that stars and planets collided, broke into pieces, moved great distances and came together again to become cosmic worlds that we are still discovering. The sound made rhythmic waves that had the power to put these worlds into some order, which we have been studying for the last few seconds since we invented time. We've found out that these cosmic pieces are always moving in relation to each other, that there are seasons to their formations, and that there is order and balance to their being. Now we give names to planets, stars, suns and moons because they move and appear in patterns that we can measure and log. We call these patterns "the rhythms of the universe." We make charts of the space around the piece we named earth, so that children can study the pictures of our universe, learn the names of our neighboring planets and how we all move in predictable patterns around each other. We gave a name to the sound too: "The Big Bang."

Now here we are, human bodies with capacities that we hold in great esteem. We have minds that think, discover and record many things. We have five senses that constantly give us information about our surroundings, because what is around us is always changing and we are always adapting. We have systems inside our bodies that make us work in predictable ways-rhythms and patterns that determine whether we have order and balance in our beings. We think a lot of the organ we call the "heart." It is a pump that keeps the blood flowing through the body. We call the pulse of the heart the heartbeat. Its speed can vary, depending on what the body is doing, but the rhythm must be even if the body is healthy. We also think of the heart as the center of our personal universe, and we make it the container and giver of feelings.

Feelings come from the nervous system, a very complicated but orderly array of wiring throughout the whole body that connects to all of our senses, so that we can be expressive and sensitive to our environment. 

We can certainly conclude that each one of us is a chip off the cosmic block, a perfect sound and rhythm system, an instrument. Is it any wonder that all of us are, by our very nature, musical? Considering our genesis and our place in the cosmic scheme of things, that's why music matters in every life.