You've got to be able to hold a lot of contradictory ideas in your mind without going nuts. I feel like to do my job right, when I walk out onstage I've got to feel like it's the most important thing in the world. Also I've got to feel like, well, it's only rock and roll. Somehow you've got to believe both of those things.

- Bruce Springsteen, quoted in Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Guitar

O Thou,
far off
and here
whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait.
Whose truth is light and dark,
mute,
though spoken,
by Thy wide grace
show me
Thy narrow gate.

Music makes an altar out of our ears. A single struck note, a note blown from a flute, can flush the body with goodness.

If you strike or pluck the string of a piano, guitar, or harp and listen to it deeply all the way past its own disappearance, you'll notice how a musical tone relaxes the defenses. It's as if the sound promises that nothing bad will happen in church. You open up. The periodicity in the tone gives permission to seek beauty and order everywhere. Then as the tone gets softer you become increasingly aware of the sounds around you. ... It is the love of sound itself that makes an altar out of your ears, just as love of the world makes each place -- glistening sand and broken pavement -- an altar.

Leaving your ears open like this is immensely fulfilling, but leaving them open and unattended is not prudent. Loud sounds can hurt you; sometimes the world does bite. Altars need protection. But once you know that the goodness of music can enter into your everyday hearing by listening to your life as if it were music, you become a walking altar and your ears a holy space.