The first sound is not the beginning of music but the end of silence -- a thin filament unspooling across an empty field. We attend to its shape, its direction, the way it carves a path through what was before it had no name.
What the ear receives is not a single tone but a chord of overtones layered upon overtones, each frequency casting a shadow on the next. To listen deeply is to feel the room around the sound, the air it has displaced, the surfaces from which it returns.
And in this bloom -- everything at once, everything sustained -- the listener disappears.
stillness.