It's been a funky week and a half. I've been fighting a stomach thingie since last Wednesday and generally feeling down and draggy. This morning was no exception. I couldn't even get bouncy because it was Friday. 

Then KUSC played O Magnum Mysterium, a sublime choral work by Morten Lauridsen—part Hildegard of Bingen, but with harmonies reaching down the whole history of music and straight into the 21st century. It's so exquisite and otherworldly, and it took me up into the clouds.  

A flock of pigeons flew across Pacific Avenue, turning in that synchronized hivemind way that flocks sometimes do, and they became an undulant black ribbon falling through the steel grey sky with the moss green and purple Santa Monica mountains clear and crisp in the background. At that moment, those birds could not have been more lovely to me if they had been larks.  

The tight coil inside unwound. The day was all at once transcendent and beautiful. 

Music refuses to let me stay inside my head. It refuses to let me hold off life while thinking of words to describe life. Music insists that I be. I can do tasks while I listen, but I can't stay inside my head—and by extension I can't write with music playing. I have to travel along with the harmonies, far away from the worlds in my mind. 

And today it took me to a beautiful place.