The Sound of Heaven

The secret in my dream is that the bowl is not the bowl;
the bowl is really only the gong, the tuning fork, if you like
- we are the bowl. We are that which reverberates and that which creates
the multilayered, perfect, breathtaking and physically incapacitating tone.
—Cheryl, Mad Baggage, Analyse That!

How do I tell you that I know about your dream?

When I was 26, I would drive to my parents home most every weekend. My mom was dying. My older, older brother lived in Wyoming. My younger, older brother lived in South Carolina then.

I slept in what had once been my older brothers’ bedroom. Mine long had been changed into something else. My mother chose to sleep on the couch in the living room. She said she felt most comfortable with her back pressed up against it. My father slept alone in their bedroom. He didn’t say anything. Her happiness was his concern.

The way the rooms were juxtaposed, when I would go to bed, I could look down past my feet through the dining room to see my mother sleeping on the couch.

One night while reading Esquire Magazine in bed, the thought suddenly struck me that one day, one night, one sometime I would look out at the couch and I would see nobody there. I wondered how I’d deal with the emptiness I saw there, not quite realizing that it reflected the emptiness I’d feel within. That thought stayed inside my head when I went back to reading, when I read myself to sleep to keep from thinking about an empty place where someone once had been.

I awoke the next morning on the tail of a dream. I was leaving a cave that had a doorway like a vault. As I left the cave, I watched the door close slowly, firmly behind me. It sealed itself completely. I was outside. The day was gray, but there was green and life all around me.

I knew immediately what the dream had said and where it came from. I had closed the door on my childhood. There was no going back, only forward. But I knew that I’d keep going because I heard that glorious sound. The sound I had no words for. The sound that every cell that is my body recognized as if I am made of music. The sound that vibrates in me and protects me even now.

We talk about how heaven looks, what we will see, and who we’ll meet there. We conjure images galore and quite fantastic. Even those who don’t believe have mental pictures they refer to. Every language has a word for the place where their god lives.

No one talks about the sound of heaven—the multilayered, perfect, breathtaking and physically incapacitating tone.

No one talks about it. It’s too beautiful and profound.

—me strauss Letting me be