Steps to the Temple and the Throne

In 2 Chronicles 9 we find a very interesting pair of verses tucked away in near obscurity that have enormous implications for minstrels, as those that minister through music ("Minstrels are few and far between; musicians are a dime a dozen" - Aaron Lindsey):

"The men of Hiram and the men of Solomon brought gold from Ophir; they also brought algumwood and precious stones. The king used the algumwood to make steps for the temple of the Lord and for the royal palace, and to make harps and lyres for the musicians. Nothing like them had ever been seen in Judah." - 9:10-11

What we see here are two things that Solomon chose to use this wood for: steps and instruments. The steps were the physical path to the house of God and the house of the king - tangibly, plainly, and straight-forward. But the remarkable implications of the connection between the steps and the instruments are that they were created for the same purpose: a pathway. While the stairs were the physical pathway into the presence of God and of the king; the instruments provided a similar pathway for the spirit. As we can see, music can usher us into a very powerful place of communion with God (2 kings 3:15). What the stairs did physically, the instruments do - even today - spiritually. God is spirit, and is also known as the King.

What can prepare us for God's presence? Music can lead us to His throneroom. In can elevate our spirits to an incredible place. It can draw God down with it.

(The only way we can get there, of course, Jesus. I'm not disputing that at all. It's absolute)


When he was building his kingdom, he saw the importance of laying the foundations not only in the physical but in the spiritual.


More later...

Style as Religion: Job and Music

I want you to walk with me through a metaphore...
This one shouldn't be too hard,
but think of Music as life. Think about the congruence of this metaphore - where and how they match up, the similarities between the two, and how fitting and pleasing the camparison is.

Now, I want you to think about what makes life wonderful. Where you would go all the time, what you would do, and most importantly, who you would do it with.
Isn't relation the most pleasing thing that we have in life? Isn't it true that you can go through the most dreadful experience, but if you have someone that you love and enjoy walk through it with you it can become one of your fondest memories? Or you could be doing something that you love, only to have it ruined by the presence of someone you dislike.

(Ok now, in this metaphore, relation is relation - in both music and in life - with others.)

Think of the flow of life, and the flow of music that touches you deeply, and how similar they are.

Fantastic. Now we're ready to move ahead!

In music, we have categorized everything. We must have a box in which to put something because if we leave it in the unkown it scares us. That's just a human response in life; if we can't grasp it, we fight it.

Many artists compose music according to a particular style. Rock, Hip-hop, Gospel, Jazz, R&B, Classical, and the thousand permutations of sub-categories that each engender. In order to sell, an artist will "cut the fat" to fit into a category so that the audience feels safe enough to approach it and buy it.

But if we consider the metaphore, music, like life, is essentially dynamic.
"Styles" of music, like Religion (which will stand for boxing life into a comfortable, explicable, sterile, and understandable form; science, islam, methodism...) eventually, and consistently, kill that which is caged. Consider the freshness of Jazz when it first emerged, but how it has been amputated from its original, life-giving source.

I think of so many artists that are truly great and genuine - much like people who truly exist within a form of religion as sincere, devoute, and true seekers of God - who are trapped by this thing called "Style".

Soon, if the route is taken, people begin to sacrifice great ideas on the fact that it doesn't conform to the standard of a musical genre.

What I'm trying to say is not that religion is necessarily a bad thing (life IS, however, about a RELATIONSHIP with GOD, not a form of ritual), but that Music, like life, cannot be distilled to a style/religion. It's more expansive than what just one person has to say.


Let's use Job as the idea of the ultimate musician/artist.
Job was not concerned with the pious "propriety" that entangles us in religion. Job was concerned with speaking with God. All three of his friends tried to categorize him - to box him in to an explicable situation: "you're cursed of God; you need to repent; what did you do to make Him hate you?" But he refused to accept those pronouncements. Instead, he said, "I want to talk to God. Let God Himself answer me! I will settle for no less..." And because he didn't settle for less, he got exactly what he wanted.
Consider him as a musician, refusing definition by the barriers of category, and how that quest for the fresh, the soul, the new, the essence, was rewarded with an answer. He was not bogged by others' perception of him. He defied the gravity of their names and rose beyond. Which of his friends talked to God? None of them! In fact, the others were told to come to God only through Job's sacrifice!
Tenacity to tap into the essence is key. The press for the best must never rest. Job did not wait on the validation of his peers - or of his audience - to move. He gained momentum in spite of them.

Kierkegaard said of Job that nothing could satisfy him but the one-on-One answer from God - the answer from that which we seek. God, of course, is the essence of life. And if life and music are interchangable in this metaphore... You catch my drift. I've already said that God is like a song.

Vibration, the Open Grave, the Open Heart

2 Kings 3:15 (Young's Literal Translation):
"and now, bring to me a minstrel; and it hath been, at the playing of the minstrel, that the hand of Jehovah is on him,"

At the playing of the minstrel, the hand of Jehovah is on him. Elisha understood something about music, about the nature of God, the nature of music, and the key to opening his own spirit to what God would say to him.
Babatunde told us that, "Rhythm is the soul of the universe."

I have been talking with a couple people about Moses' encounter with the Great God in Exodus 3. In verse 14, the Proclaimation, God says in most english versions, "I AM THAT WHICH I AM." He is existence in most true form; life in fullness; the essence of all existence. But one friend in bible college says that a better translation is, "I WILL BE WHOM I WILL BE." And in Exodus 33 and 34, where Moses asks to see God, The Lord says that Moses can only see His back, but not His face, because then he would die. My friend said, "Doesn't it sound weird that God would put His hands over Moses' eyes while His face passed by, and then Moses would see God's bock?" He went on, "What that means is that God, being the essence of existence, is always moving. And if Moses were to see where God really was at any time, he would die. What God tells him is that He will allow him to see where He just passed by, where He just was - His trail, essentially."

God told Moses that He would pass by him; God is always moving, and we can catch the trail of Him, the hem of His garment, for "No one may see My face and live" (33:20).

Think about what we hear in music: we hear what was just played. Music cannot be stopped and examined circumspectly, it cannot be caught and held; it must be moving in order to be music, in order to be sound. We cannot hear what it as much as we hear the back side of it - what was.

Music is the key to unlocking the god-ness in us. Jesus Himself said, "Ye are gods," and He was quoting David. Psalm 8 brings this into a clearer focus. God Himself made us in His image, and is restoring us back to a state that is greater than our original form, because Christ is our progenor, not Adam any longer!

Elisha understood what it was about music in order to have God touch him. "At the playing of the minstrel...the hand of Jehovah is on him." Music is an expression of God's nature.

They say in string theory that the smallest article of substance is vibration; and what is vibration but movement? And what is movement but rhythm?

We are all interred with and expression of the nature of God, physically. God is all and is in all; the universe, His creation, rings true with who He is - it is alive and vibrant!

What was it that shook death out of our lives forever by rolling away the gravestone at Christ's tomb? A great reverberation in the earth, we call it an earthquake. Rhythm is the genesis and continuation of life. It opens the grave of our hearts to receive His spirit and His life.

But remember this...the earthquake, the vibration, is not God Himself; for the earthquake passed in front of Elijah - but God was not the earthquake, nor was He in it. Those three things that passed in front of Elisha were signs and signifiers that God regularly used to represent Himself - but they were not Himself...they did not encapsulate Him.

God is not a song, per se...He's so much more than that. But a song is like God.

There is old magic in song that has not been rediscovered yet. Purported by one school of archaeology, Stonehenge was constructed by vibration, by song, as were many of the great wonders of the world. Where has this knowledge gone? It has been hidden for ages, and I believe it is time for it to reemerge - not in a gnostic sort of way...but in a real sense of understanding.

God chose the Psalms to be cannonized, but He did not leave us music. Why? Because the expression of Him through music could not be contained by one culture - not even by His chosen people - and every tribe, nation, tongue - song - will bow at His feet. Amen.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

These days are the canvas;
My environment, the palatte;
My brush is my choices and
The strokes are my spirit.

What kind of picture of me
Would I love to see on
The wall in thirty years?

Between You and Jerome Ellis


Jerome Ellis
Today at 12:21am
Iit's all about roots. Music has drifted too far away from its roots. I have these lectures, in both book and video format, by the great composer/conductor/performer Leonard Bernstein where he tries to grasp where music is going in his time, made in 1973. He touches on this whole concept of returning, returning to roots. They're titled The Unanswered Question, you need to get a hold of them. I envy drummers because their primary medium is rhythm, and you were right when you said that that was the foundation. The African conception of rhythm itself being melodic is truth. What I strive for in music is just what we were talking about, towards roots. Example: Coltrane in Love Supreme, throughout pervades the 1 b3 4 motif, like Acknowledgment's groove motif is 1 b3 1 4 (like C Eb C F), and Pursuance uses C Eb F (1 b3 4) and F Ab Bb (1 b3 4) as its first six notes. That motif, that series of notes, is the root of the blues, and honestly I think Coltrane recognized at that hugely mature part of his life the importance of roots--nothing could be simpler nor more foundational for jazz than the blues. The same with all music, and I believe that it all traces back to the motherland. I mean, we as humans trace back there, why shouldn't our music? I saw this Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra show last year with Wynton directing, and he had this African troupe with him, the set was called Congo Square, this huge suite of like 15 different "movements," and it felt/sounded just right. You and James, man, you get that. Like I was saying, last Friday before you get there, he laid down this rhythm, and I went over it like I was from Egypt or thereabouts. Roots. I read that Darwin, in the Descent of Man I believe, asserts that music in its primal form was connected with mating rituals and other such highly emotional activity, and of course, it was just rhythm in its first incarnations, with the addition of primitive bone flutes and such. That really points to my fundamental conception, you could call it, of what music needs to do, at least when I make it, create an intense, spiritual experience, and it doesn't have to be loud to be intense, nor fast, nor complex. Coltrane understood that. I stand by the comment I made, about how that performance of My Favorite Things ceased to be jazz, labels don't suffice. It's simply music. I'm so scatterbrained, man, but another thought I've been pursuing is how both classical and jazz music have come to, mostly, a dead end in very recent times. Not that there isn't wonderful music being produced within each "genre," despite my dislike for the categorization, but that the development/progression has halted considerably. Classical stuff especially, and I have so many thoughts on the peculiar time of the mid 20th century, I need to gather those into a coherent whole. But man. Return to the roots, and you can't go wrong. More later.


David Napier
Today at 3:22pm
Amen.
I'm so delighted to have someone who shares my mind. You're familiar with T.S. Eliot, I'm sure, but have you read or heard explained his tretise, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"? The turn of the twentieth century is such a fascinating period to me, mainly in its aesthetic geist and intention: to reach enlightenment - a transcendent state - through art. The cry of the era was, "Make It New," and I absolutely love that...perhaps with a slight modification: "Make It FRESH". And here's where Eliot's idea blooms...
He suggested that there is a connection of all humanity through art called "The Objective Correlative," which basically means that those who could touch the correlative had the ability to transcend environment, culture, and history to speak to the deepest parts of a man. This is the principle that explains why Shakespeare can be translated and performed in Japan and still garner a significant aesthetic response.
Eliot's prescription for the artist was this: learn the Classics, inside and out. But why? Well, they are classic for a reason; they have stood the test of time, and we can still draw the deep humanity out of them as though the author had a studio apartment in NY and putting out a novel every few years.
How were they able to create something that transcends time and culture? By connecting to the Objective Correlative of humanity - by knowing HOW to reach the human heart, not the Greek or Roman heart, or the Imperialistic Brittish heart, or the 19thC Russian heart. Eliot says that we should intensely and intently study the classic writers in order to discern HOW they reached the core of humanity. Then, once we've begun to understand it, we can then employ it in our own works; we can create something completely fresh accompanied by the understanding of how to touch the correlative.

That's why we, you and me, are getting back to the roots. We're looking for that essence, that thread that strings throughout the entire human experience...
HOW...
That's our crisis...

There's this killer quote that I've adopted from a guy named Aaron Lindsey:
"Playing is talking; you can only express musically what your vocabulary will allow. I submit that going to a greater level of playing has much to do with one's ability to speak the language of that level. Minstrels are few and far between; musicians are a dime a dozen."

Mm!

Dude, a lot of time just freed up for me. I'm going to be practicing like a mothasucka. I would love to gather with you and expound and express.

And here's a thought about the other night with James:
We were talking about whether or not Coltrane's life was worth his art...
Here's the beautiful thing about us, Jerome, we have the strength of Christ-in-us. We don't have to end up like Trane, or Bird, or any of those cats that had major problems but ended up making our world possible. We won't be overcome by the world rather we HAVE overcome it!

It's time for Renaissance/Revolution. We're on the cusp, and it's going to be ushered in by us.

You're right. "My Favorite Things" wasn't Jazz anymore. For a man, the most enlightening revelation that can come to him is that of existence: I am. That's one thing that kills me about what God said in Exodus. He made the most powerful, fundamental, essential statement ever: I AM.

I exist. I am the essence of existence. I am true existence. I am the source and flow of existence. There is nothing beyond. I am all has been, is and will be.

That's what "MFT" turned into: the most essential expression: I exist, and I am stating that with music. The essence of Music is simply expression of existence.

And here's the thing with generae past (Rock, Jazz, all of which are DEAD): they want to express what WAS, and not what IS NOW.
That's why our musical culture of rehashing is so stale and past rigor mortis.
Don't rehash the past. DO NOW.


Whoooo!
We've got so much to talk about!!!

The Ultimate Victory

Last night a bunch of us guys got together to play ultimate frisbee on the beach. The boardwalk lights flooded the near shore, and it was still hard to see the red disc. And when you dove, the sand stuck to the sweat.

Before heading to the beach we had cell group. I had what we call "Pulpit of Power," which is a three-minute segment of fire. There should have been an organ backing me up. Basically it's an opportunity for us to speak and let the other guys in the group know what God's speaking to us. I was going mainly from Matthew 11:12, "The kingdom of heaven is forcefully advancing, and those who are forceful take hold of it."
I began with a question: Where is the kingdom of God? Rightfully answering, the group said, "Everywhere, and in our hearts."
I continued by bringing in this principle from Matthew, and I supplimented it with two other verses where God shows us that He believes in us. The first verse was from Joshua in the first chapter. It was just after Moses had died, and God appointed Joshua to lead about 3 million people. God tells him to be strong and courageous, to not depart from the words of the revelation, and to be strong and courageous...again. The next reference was from 2 Timothy 1:7, "God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, love, and a sound mind."

God believes that we can do it. We are the ones who put the limitations on our lives.

Two things about the ultimate frisbee games:
There were a couple of guys in particular that seemed to pull a few catches out of nowhere. Here's why I think they cought it: they believed they could catch it. Both of these players exude confidence, both in their ability and, I think, innately in the fact that the frisbee was designed to be caught.

At one point, we were down 4-1. I turned to the guys and said, the only way we're going to win this game is if we believe we can do it.

We came back and took the game 7-5. It was incredible.

Stranded. _____ Let Them Sound Like They Sound.

If I were stranded on a desert island and had only one song with me, it would be "His eye is on the sparrow" by Marvin Gaye.



___________________



I had an epiphony today about the drums, specifically drum sounds.

Nowadays with our recording and production skills we can capture the "perfect" sound of any instrument. For drums, this means that we can isolate each individual piece of the drum kit and eq it to "perfection" as a part, then put them together to create the whole range of the kit.

But here's the thing: nothing sounds quite like the drums on motown recordings. There's something about the snare that kicks into "Stubborn Kind of Fella" that expresses emotion - SOUL - like few drums can. Naturally, it has to do with Benny Benjemin playing on the track, but that's not all. The sound of the drum, though not in "ideal" conditions nor "perfectly eq'd," captures a rare quality that escapes most modern drum sounds. Or consider "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," the ticka-ticka-tic on the rim of the snare in the intro. If it were done today (and it has been), it would sound too polished to make the sense that it does on the original recording.
Two of my favorite artists, D'Angelo and Badu, do a rendition of "Your Precious Love," originally performed by Marvin and Tammy Terrell. The cover comes nowhere near the Gaye/Terrell version, and here's why I think it doesn't: the production "perfection" of the instruments and vocals. If they had recorded it in motown's infamous "Snake Pit" studio, no doubt in my mind it would be exponentially better.

Here's the thing about motown drums: the engineers allowed the drums to sound like drums naturally sound. They didn't put limiters, excessive eq on each part of the kit, or gates or filters or any of that jazz. They just let them be themselves, and by doing so created some of the most emotive drum sounds ever recorded. Who doesn't like the motown sound? Professionals today are still baffled by what those engineers achieved.

Or even consider Rudy Van Gedler and the blue note jazz recordings. He may have put two mics around the kit, total. Listen to how Tony and Elvin sound of those recordings! Or Blakey!

I think we need to reenter a sonic world like motown captured - one where each instrument was allowed to be itself.

Or we could go like the Beatles and get experimental with physical dampening effects instead of by tweaking knobs.

I said tweaking knobs.

Sorry.

Trimming the Langugage Fat

Keyno and I were talking today about language.

Language is one of the primary forces of culture, providing its establishment and vitality.

Sometimes we can create a sort of separatist culture with our language, a colony that is only accessable to those who can speak it. We do this with God. We create terms and structures that we think are extra pleasing to God, some call it "Christianese," and yet by boxing Him in we can in essence try to emasculate God's works.
...
The way that we christians speak sometimes can sound like a completely foreign language to non-believers. What are we going to do about that?
...
Even christian music falls into this trap. I am trying to change that.

...

Tradition and the Individual Talent Revisited

At the turn of the 20th century, in what is called the "Modern Era" by those who dictate what periods of time are named, the geist of the artistic world was much the same as what I want to achieve. "Make It New!" They cried. (How unoriginal of me!)

Many aritists, writers, thinkers of the emerging era were dissatified with the results of the 19th Century in society. They reacted against the deterministic perspective that everyone in life is controlled and constrained to the environment in which they live. To find examples of this, check out Emile Zolla's work, or if you want a direct suggestion, read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Their characters are trapped within the confines of their habitat, and act only according to what their surroundings plot out for them.
What many of the modernists strived for was a transcendence through aesthetic endeavor; an escape from environmental confines toward enlightnment through art. Ezra Pound, Roger Fry, and T.S. Eliot were at the forefront of this movement, among many others who pushed the envelope, and boldly challenged us to rethink the boundaries that we have adopted, urged us to foresake the reconstruction of the past and begin a whole new work.

All of these men were profoundly educated. They both knew the classic and were familiar with the current. Pound urged students to leave their universities and, "Come to me for your education," because he had assimilated all that was important from the masters and employed it in his works. Roger Fry, in his book Vision and Design, lifted the veil of objectivity in art criticism and helped bring to light the value of individual interpretation. And Eliot, in his tretise "Tradition and the Individual Talent," hooked on something that I find is essential for any type of real and current Renaissance to take place.

Eliot's idea was that there is a reason why "Classics" are Classics. And that reason is that they communicate something so deeply entrenched in the human experience that they transcend cultural barriers and speak to us now, and will to future generations. As though all of humanity has a core, and the classic authors knew how to reach through situational, temporal and historical obstuructions and touch that human core in each one of us. That human core, Eliot labels as the "Objective Correlative." It's that string that connects us all to each other through the expereince of being human. It's what allows Shakespeare to be studied and understood in Japan.

His prescription for the artist, then, is to read all the classics - *all of them - and learn *how the classic authors reached the Objective Correlative and communicated to readers across historical lines. But Eliot didn't say, "Copy them." In fact, far from it. What he was saying was, "If you understand how the Correlative can be reached, you can access it in your work assuredly." By beefing up on the classics, you can understand and then *employ communicating to that human core with something *new and *fresh and *alive.

This is absolutely brilliant. Gather from the past - analyze it, test it, understand it - and then create newness, something totally different. Brilliant.

In order for a real current Renaissance to happen, I believe this needs to be understood.

Why NOT Me?

The message that keeps coming to me over and over through different avenues is that CONFIDENCE IS EVERYTHING.

Tonight at the gym I was thinking about how a friend of mine this morning said, "You're going to marry a super-model, dude!"

You know what my first thought was? "No, I don't deserve that. I don't have what it takes to get a woman that beautiful."

Now, understand this: That's not the first time anyone has said that to me.
But why is it that I'm quick to disbelieve other people, write statements like that off as flattery, and adopt a self-deprecating mindset?

And this is where things got a bit deeper...

I believe that the enemy tries to implant in us a sense of doubt in ourselves when we're young. And if we listen to the subtle voices that tell us what we can't do, what we're no good at, what we'll never have, then we have already accepted a great defeat; we've accepted less than what we can have, what God wants us to have!

Why shouldn't my wife be gorgeous? In fact, she should be.

And this permeates almost every other area of life: Why settle for anything but the best?

There's no good reason. So don't do it. Don't settle for anything small, second-rate, ugly, puny, meager. It's not worth you to be anything less than everything you can be.

Building

In his fabulous book BLINK, Malcolm Gladwell explores the power of intuition. He talks about a practice that we all do called "Thin-slicing," where a snap judgment is made with limited information, and how it is usually more successful than long, deliberate decision-making.

Anyway, there's a song out right now that is absolutely fantastic. It's Umbrella, by Rihanna. The first time I heard it, it was about a five second clip, and I was blown away. I looked at Keyno and said, "Yo, who is that!" He said, "You haven't heard that yet?"

After picking the song up, I noticed a technique that the producer uses for the beat: he uses a one-bar phrase, then builds on it, retaining some of the original qualities plus more in the second bar. He basically loops it through the whole song, and it provides a fantastic base from which the song can construct or deconstruct however he sees fit.


...

The Ghosts of Generae Past

We've all seen the t-shirts with the slogan, "Rock 'N Roll Will Never Die" on the front, maybe sporting a grinning skull with a rose clenched between the teeth and a snake crawling out of an eye socket. You can probably find one for cheap in a discount department store right down the street. This sentiment is not a new one, nor has it been restricted to Rock 'N Roll alone. It has been the cry of devotees to a genera throughout the ages; people who feel a certain emotional connection to their beloved style stake a claim of eternity on it; it's the ever-human attempt to perpetuate something for generations to come. But what distinguishes the living from the dead in music? Is it how much money that style does or doesn't bring in, or how many people play it? I believe that there is more to it than that, and that many of the generae we claim for eternity have already died in bed next to us.
The great clarinet player and innovator in Jazz Sidney Bichet once said, "Jazz will never die." And if you look at the industry, he's quite right. There is most certainly a niche for the continuation of what we call "Jazz". But consider Sidney's Jazz to what we call Jazz today. He started out as a midwife of dixieland, and continued until his death in the sixties. But can we honestly say that any of the Jazz that's put out now could attain the depth of Coltrane or Holiday? Hardly.


We call Latin a dead language, yet somehow people still make money off of it; they can speak it, and can tell you everything about the culture in which it thrived. These are the archivers of Latin, the "language experts," who look at it as though it were a prized butterfly collection on their wall. There are even five distinct permutations of Latin still in active use today: French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese. Then how come Latin is considered "dead"? What constitutes its demise? Here is where we get down to the essence of the livelyhood of something: The reason Latin is dead is because no one lives it anymore. Like a father, it has had childeren and passed on. Similarly, we need to accept the passing of some of our beloved generae from the present.

Hip-hop is the first type of music whose childeren have foreseen and accepted its demise. Several times lately there have been moguls who have said, "Hip-hop is dead." And it's death is due to the very things that we think keep other generae alive: boosted sales, more artists, bigger niche. What those things have produced is something so far from the heart that pumped life into it, that it has either become a whole new entity, or is a walking shell of with no vital organs attached. This style has gone through the life-cycle more quickly than any other in history.


Our society is one of containment and rehashing. Every new record has its comparisons to other records; every category has multitudes of sub-categoreys; most artists are enamored with the past, and their music reflects that. We are a culture of conflation. Distinctions are constantly blurred at the edges. A wide grey expanse buffers strict white and straight black. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no...

We cling to these types - "Rock 'N Roll", "Jazz", "Hip-hop" - because they're familiar, they're comfortable - they're safe. Who is doing anything dangerous anymore? Something that requires real faith to execute day in and day out...something fresh...something alive.

But there is a New Birth on the horizon...one that gets us back to those "dearest freshness deep-down things" that Hopkins so elloquently observed were interred in the soil - in the soil and soul of humanity.

The Rite of Rhythm

The great drummer Babatunde Olatunji once said, "Rhythm is the soul of life." I believe that is true. But what exactly does that mean? I have been on a quest for the past few years to understand the pulp of that statement, its implications and wisdom. In fact, I hadn't discovered that quote until about two months ago; but I've felt it for much longer.
When someone else articulates the deep things inside of you, when they tune into your frequency (or your rhythm, if you will) and express that which you could never find words for, it's a sweet, sweet thing in life.

If you consider the world around you - for example, the world of humanity - and distinguish a single element of it, you'll find a whole world of rhythm.
Language, for instance. Any native speaker will be able to decipher whether or not someone else is a native speaker primarily by cadence, the rhythmic patterns of the groupings of their words. Basically, the way you say something can have just as much meaning as the ideas behind the words. Think about it musically for a minute: Two people can play the same note or range of notes with vastly different effects, whether due to their placement of each note in relation to the others, or their skill, or their personality, etc. The phrasing of those notes, the way they are played, has the most essential role in their effect on the listener. And "Phrasing" falls directly under the category of rhythm. You could even go as far as to say that melody is a sub-category of rhythm, because without phrasing we simply have notes that endure for unspecified lengths, or ones that carelessly lay on top of one another with no rhyme or reason.

I realize that my approach so far is quite scientific. What I mean is that, at this point, I'm simply making observations with no philosophical conclusions. Those will come later.