The Hum

Putting conversations together to the rhythmic beat of Love

This month, instead of the typical 6-part layout, I’ve written a long-form essay. Don’t worry - all the cosmically connected goodness you’ve come to know and love is here! Enjoy, comment, & share!

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She told us first. In 2016, seven years before scientists would confirm the lowest grade buzz of the cosmos with a variety of data, Shonda Rhimes named the universe's hum.

I recalled Rhimes's words while reading Adam Frank's Atlantic Magazine piece that was tagged in an Instagram story. Frank starts his article “Scientist Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries”¹ with this line:

The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

Have you heard Mongolian throat singing? It has an embodied, earthy depth with ancient roots that is still mastered by Tuvan singers today. This is what Frank wants us to imagine when he talks about the hum of the universe: a reverberation through your body and every body—animate and otherwise.

I imagine if you could hear primordial gravitational waves, Frank is probably spot on about what they'd sound like. I'm interested in what they feel like, which is exactly where Frank and Rhimes start to get into conversation.

In her TED Talk², Rhimes talks about her kids asking her, “Wanna play?” and what happens when she commits to saying “yes”:

It's all peace and simplicity. The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe. I can barely believe I'm breathing. Play is the opposite of work. And I am happy. Something in me loosens. A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. I feel it. A hum creeps back. Not at full volume, barely there, it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there. Not the hum, but a hum.

Here, "the" hum she refers to in the final sentence is the hum of working. The hum of existing as a titan with a special brain who does all kinds of highly-regarded things with the stuff that comes out of that brain. She recounts in her talk that at some point she loses this hum, and is introduced to another: "a" hum. She goes on:

And now I feel like I know a very magical secret. Well, let's not get carried away. It's just love. That's all it is. No magic. No secret. It's just love. It's just something we forgot.

Understandably, Rhimes quickly goes from "a magical secret" to "just love." Magical secrets require special knowledge and access. But in making it "just love," suddenly the abundance of it is made known and it—the love—becomes available to all. Not just the Shonda Rhimeses of the world with all sorts of earned special access, but to the yous and the mes as well. It's so beautiful, why do we have to be reminded? What makes us forget?

The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan, that's just a replacement. If I have to ask you who I am, if I have to tell you who I am, if I describe myself in terms of shows and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is, I have forgotten what the real hum is. The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific.

That work-hum is LOUD. It acts like a titan by dictating what to do next, elevating status-serving efforts over soul-serving ones. This hum says Love does not define our status, work does. This hum relegates play to children and never to us adults. This is how we miss the magical secret children readily have access to: we invest in a special kind of misery we've traded in for the tried and true asset of playfulness. What if this abundant hum is the reminder that a key offering Love gives us is play?

The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific. The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. The real hum is confidence and peace. The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure.

The real hum sounds like play to me. Can you hear it? Play is the joyous, exciting, life-giving, confidence- and peace-boosting vehicle of Love. A vehicle that zooms past the historical "you're not allowed to be that way," detours around ball-juggling, and cuts itself loose from pressure. When I teach about play (yes, I teach adults about play), I offer markers to help identify play by naming how it feels: low or no pressure, fun, and joy in the body. What is play to you? How can you say “yes” more often to a hum of play?

The real hum is singular and original. The real hum is God's whisper in my ear, but maybe God was whispering the wrong words, because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan?

Singular and original. The implications of this phrase in Rhimes's talk seven years prior to the confirmed evidence of gravitational waves takes my breath away. The source of the gravitational waves is cosmically primordial, "singular and original." The Mongolian throat song of the universe is buzzing through the fabric of space and time. It's not beckoning us to a tyrannical murmur, but to a Loving purr in the tonality of play.

After explaining the scientific process of gravitational wave observation, Frank connects with his kids, much like Rhimes does.

 

I’m pretty skeptical about [UFOs] having anything to do with alien life, but I believe the questions represent something ancient and innate in us all. As children, each of us had a deep and easily triggered sense that the world is full of wonder, that everything is strange and amazing. Stepping out into the backyard, we’d get entranced staring at an anthill or watching leaves pirouette as they fell. As a toddler, my daughter would purposely tip her cup over just to be delighted by how the water spilled across the table.

Children bring us back to something primal in us and in the universe. Children, newer to the world and its reality than we are, hold both future hopes and reminders of embodied ways of being. Ways of being motivated by the hum of a favorite song, infectious giggles, and gasps of awe at the world around them. 

Rhimes, after describing all the fun things that happen from her "yes" to her kids, proclaims: My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up.

The universe’s hum is almost undetectable, but our kids show us the way to live in tune with it.

She immediately follows with: I play and I play until I begin to wonder why we ever stop playing in the first place.

It's kind of delicious, isn't it? That childlikeness and play and universal vibrations and wonder are all wrapped up in Frank’s and Rhimes’s stories. When I first came across Rhimes’ words, they struck me and my soul tucked them away for a later time. I didn't muse over them, but when I read the Atlantic article by Adam Frank, what Shonda said came flooding back to my body.

Because seven years apart they are basically saying the same thing.

And why *did* we stop playing? Why did wonder become something rare instead of being the stuff our moments are made out of, the very fabric of reality?

When did you stop dancing to the rhythm of awe? And why?

Frank's article caused many emotions to surge through me, often conjuring my tears.

Every gravitational wave in that background the NANOGrav team found is humming through the very constitution of the space you inhabit right now. Every proton and neutron in every atom from the tip of your toes to the top of your head is shifting, shuttling, and vibrating in a collective purr within which the entire history of the universe is implicated.

The primordial movement of the universe is moving us. This movement isn't perceptible without highly sensitive instruments, but knowing that you buzz in rhythm with the entirety of the universe… does something to you. Now it could do something to your ego, but it could also do something to your enoughness.

With the utmost gentleness, the universe is wooing you into its rhythm. It’s a rhythm marked by the slow creation of a 13-billion-year-old cosmos that brings forth phenomena like stellar nurseries and question mark galaxies.

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Photo Credit

Look! It’s the universe asking the question, “Wanna play?”

Rhimes names the hum as love. Frank speaks of it as interconnection. I think they are both right, still saying the same thing. 

When our hum isn’t love or play or wonder—when it’s work and perfection and status and title—something happens. In an effort to earn a morsel of what moves the fabric of the universe, Love is harder to receive and interconnection is harder to nurture, even though it’s pervasively present. This isn't just an inference from putting Frank and Rhimes in conversation with each other. This is me entering the dialogue too.

Honey, I love a stage. Since I was in my first talent show at four years old, I knew. Throughout childhood, a stage was a place for play, curiosity, and connection. But 35 years after that first encounter, when I'd attempt to take the stage again, I'd have a trauma response to not feeling a sense of belonging, the familiar sense that I wasn’t enough.

In a dream, I'd be sitting with a beloved drama teacher from high school (who has since passed) who was giggling at me and a friend. A fellow high school thespian would interpret the dream as my late teacher telling me to chill out and have fun. My current theatre teacher, the very much alive Rhyn Clark, would invite me into play and connection.  And it would all circle back to the repairing of my broken sense of dignity, my wounded enoughness, my questioned worthiness.

Really, for decades the universe was trying to woo me with play back to that place of singular and original Love. Hell, the Eternal powers that be would send me a husband who was getting his PhD in play. As a budding cosplayer, an avid comic book reader, and a moonlighting salsa dancer, my husband thought I had two heads when I said to him, "I don't do arbitrary fun." Add on top that my play needed to always have a *serious* purpose or outcome, and the hum of the universe thought I had two heads as well. I was only thinking with the cognitive one, but the rhythmic one beckoned me to dance. That almost imperceptible vibration of all things whispered to me in a million ways, "Don't forget the joy. Remember it's right here." Isn't that what a Loving playfulness is? A deep abiding sense of joy, that joy-specific hum?

Like Shonda, my kids ask me to play and I have 739 reasons to say no. Unlike Shonda, I sometimes still do say no.

I'm naturally very serious-minded, and I’ve found too much of that without the wonder Frank speaks of or the play Rhimes says “yes” to makes me dull, performative, and afraid. I don't need to be less serious-minded. That's part of who I am, how I'm designed. Yet that serious, pensive part of me has to get out in the yard to play hide and seek with wonder.

The hum of the universe is Loving playfulness, is joy—and that joy is true even when you have to do the work, and clean the things, and go get groceries.

More than true, this joy is accessible. It doesn't start with our “yes” to it; it's always there. Instead, our “yes” awakens us to the joy at the very fabric of the entire cosmos, and suddenly we are enveloped in the Mongolian throat singing of the universe. It’s in the rhythm of childlike joy where we live in tune with the tiny, imperceptible ways we rock and sway in the beat of space-time.

May a deeply persistent “yes” be your answer to the question the universe has already asked you: “Wanna play?”

What Has My Attention

Billy Porter’s single Broke A Sweat is a whole bop!

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s Social Justice for The Sensitive Soul and talk about feeling seen and known…

Fellow Substack writer Camille Hernandez has her book officially coming into the world next month! Preorder The Hero And The Whore .

If you’re in Atlanta, I’m teaching an upcoming class to help actors access emotional depth and nuance. Would love to see you there!

Speaking of Shonda and rhythm, this reel on Instagram had me rolling!

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/universe-gravitational-waves-nanograv-discovery/674570/

2. https://www.ted.com/talks/shonda_rhimes_my_year_of_saying_yes_to_everything