Birthday musings

To me, language and music are aspects of the same thing, and they work like each other in my head.  Lately my kids have picked up something from school, a "hoo-ah hoo-ah" thingy that comes into places when they're thinking, especially organizing their thoughts, and I've picked it up from them just like a phrase from a song.  

Some birds and whales pick up things like that.  The hardwiring is primitive if birds can do it.  But the expansion and exploitation of that hardwiring is taken to its extreme in human beings.  We're good at reading each others' emotions, better than we realize and sometimes we ignore that sense in favor of logic or denial or the other kinds of self-talk we employ.  I think many if not most animals are just as good at that as we are, but without language talking them out of or into trouble.  So it's both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on how it's used.  There are truths to be found and shared, but also lies, including ones we tell ourselves.

Language is a great tool, but it's more than that.  When I first started reading about string theory is resonated with me (pun intended) and it made me think about how integral vibration, pattern, and expression are to me.  Whether it's vocalized or read or felt on the skin, energy is communication, communication is language, and language is energy.  That's why I feel strongly that mathematics are also language, and music, and the wind.  I think that makes me crazy, but maybe in a good way.  

That's my birthday musing for today/this year.  Oddly (she said, employing her software version of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) the word musing isn't related to music or to the inspirational muse.  SOED6: [ORIGIN Old French & Modern French muser †meditate, waste time, perh. ult. from Medieval Latin musum muzzle.] 

Which means I'd better get back to work.