I sat still at my computer, simply listening and letting the peacefulness carried by the music enter into me. Maybe they remember feeling, when they were children, that sense of something wild and gentle brushing the fact of the earth. Maybe they have some sense of the holy that they can reach through this sort of music, heard only at this time of year. And maybe they long for peace. And yet another side of ourselves is a little suspicious of peace.
Peace seems like a nice label to put on flatness, dullness, vanilla ice cream.
Maybe there are people out there who honestly loathe, despise, and ignore Internet flame wars and don't even sneak a peek, but I sometimes can't resist. It sparkles up the dullness of life. Our feelings about both are more mixed than we're ready to admit to. We can afford to be like this because we are average middle-class North Americans, and for the vast majority, life itself is pretty peaceful, regular, unthreatened and uneventful. Mostly, we do not live in Interesting Times.