Sympathetic Resonance

 In one of my facebook groups, a blogger brought up a question: why blog anymore? There isn't really a thriving community of bloggers and readers anymore. It's true for me at least - I sometimes click on a blogpost if I see a link on Facebook or twitter, but (apart from two that email me frequent fresh posts) I don't seek out blogs to follow and read regularly. I write sporadically.

When I was in Zambia, one thing that never failed to catch my heart was the singing. At church, the entire congregation sang. Some held the melody, strong and true, while harmonies swelled and swept around it like a murmuration of starlings, some high and some low and all soaring free. Sometimes the leader would sing out the first few words of the next verse just when the previous one was ending because not everyone had a hymnbook. This made for a call-and-response feel that whorled and looped and at the end of the song I'd be a little out of breath and just lost in the wonder and glory of so many different notes sung at once and still sounding so so so good.

 A few years ago I learned about sympathetic resonance. Key-notes.com describes it as "An acoustic phenomenon that helps make a piano sound beautiful ... If we play a note on the piano, other compatible notes vibrate in sympathy as long as there are no dampers to, well, put a damper on them."

And the congregation in our church in Zambia had that nailed down. Sympathetic resonance. Singing together for years, trained since childhood to listen to each other, the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, the mood ... and to join in.  I wish I could be there now.

But sympathetic resonance isn't just for pianos and really good acapella singing. 

For me, it's why I blog. There's something inside that longs to be heard and echoed back. It's why I share (or overshare) the raw or tender things, the silly things, the embarrassing or boring or any sort of things ... 

Because of that resonance in the heart when someone nods and says, "same." When someone says, "I needed to hear that," or "I thought I was the only one." It doesn't always echo back. It doesn't resonate with everyone. 

But the little vibration of harmony when it does - 

the sympathetic resonance -

is glory.