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.