Truth, beauty, art, God and McDonalds

Yesterday afternoon I was driving around in our new/used Prius with my iphone hovering in the air supported by a holder designed to fit into the beverage holder hole in the console.  This same holder will fit into the beverage holder hole in a golf cart thus enabling me to easily view how many yards my golf ball is from the hole using a nifty GPS iphone app.  So the iphone is sitting with one wire coming out of the top connecting it to the car speaker system and another recharging wire ( inconvenient springy spiral thing) attached to the bottom. I'm slowly moving in the drive thru lane at McDonalds in Vestal waiting to pay 85 cents at the middle window for a senior coffee with two creams and Neil Young is singing "Out on the Weekend"  Bass pounding, harmonica soaring, I'm right in time with it and the the chubby girl with too tight blouse opens the window.  I give her a dollar bill and smile with the music blaring.  She looks annoyed muttering something I can't hear above the din and she jerks her hand away after dropping the dime and nickel change into my palm.  I drive to the next window to  pick up the coffee.  Iphone shifts to Tom Waits singing "Hold On" and things shift to a new level.   I'm swaying, right there with his gravely voice,  swaying to the music "but its so hard to dance that way when it's cold outside and there's no music"  and the red haired kid  with the tilted hat, ironic smile and sort of goatee sticks a bag in my hand.  Definitely not the senior coffee.  He apologizes and Tom's still singing and I'm still swaying amazed at the locale and circumstance of this ecstatic visitation.  And I'm sipping the coffee.  Perfect taste and texture and  Hold On is still there and I know what I want to do with the rest of my life its this.  Plain and not so simple.  I want to be in communion with whatever it is that was in my car with me in that drive thru lane.  I want to find a way to feel that chord change and that bass line as deep as I felt it while the girl was dropping the change in my hand and the goateed redhead kid was saying he was sorry about the coffee.  But it's more than feeling the music.  I want to find my own voice.  My own chord and bass line that will some how connect me with myself and others the way that those songs went right to my soul.

 I have only vague hints of how to get from here to there.  I think the biggest thing I have to do is stop being afraid.  Weird to say that.  I went to a meeting at church last night of a group called "Good God."  People shared spiritual/mystical experiences.  I tried to talk about my McDonalds trip.   It was the old problem of not having the words to capture what happened.  Someone said there is a language that works and that's the language of poets.  Yeah, and musicians and artist's of all stripes who have found their authentic voice, their original face, their window into the infinite.  I hope and pray that someday I may, in some smalll way, join their holy chorus.