“Thoughts On ‘One’” is one of a 12 part series of posts reflecting on the songs of Julia Wade’s CD, Solos, with lyrics from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and Music by Peter Link.

It is 1866.  Mary Baker Eddy sits in her little attic room in Lynn, Massachusetts and scratches out her thoughts on the science of Christianity, a series of divine revelations that become her best-selling book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, cited by the Women’s National Book Association as “one of the 75 books by women whose words have changed the world.”

The Wright Brothers were not to take their first flight for another 35 years.  The ideas of nuclear power, the Internet, a man on the moon, heart transplants, the human genome system and quantum physics simply did not exist.

Somehow she grasps the future, or perhaps the present, in a flash of forethought, and sees through time and space into the truth of being, the truth of matter, the truth of time and space and the reality of existence.

In one sweeping sentence, which has captured my imagination over and over again throughout my life, she escapes time and sees and understands pure quantum physics.

Years later I decide that this sentence and her further thoughts should be the unusual but extraordinary lyrics to an inspirational song.  Not the kind of lyric that most writers would attempt to set into music, but nonetheless, what can I say, it had to be done.

The compounded minerals
or aggregated substances
composing the earth,
the relations which constituent masses
hold to each other,
the magnitudes, distances, and revolutions
of the celestial bodies,
are of no real importance,
when we remember
that they all must give place
to the spiritual fact
by the translation of man and the universe
back into Spirit.

After a half century of consideration, I am still trying to get inside this sentence.  Writing the music that surrounds it was a flash of inspiration in itself.  In the moment of creativity, once I had done my usual mental preparation, the time came to put my hands to the piano keys.  The first thing I played was the opening theme of the song, complete with its oddball style and quirky feel.  The song simply spilled out of me as if it had been waiting there behind my eyes and ears for the past fifty years.

And why not?  She has already suggested that time, space, matter, were “of no real importance, when we remember that they all must give place to the spiritual fact …”   Why shouldn’t I, as well, learn from this moment and carry on.

As a lyricist, I often think in rhyme.  Years of pouring through my beloved Clement Woods Rhyming Dictionary searching for that right perfect rhyme, have created in me another language, a poetry of sorts that hears and thinks thoughts in meter and rhyme.  I’ve been doing it for so long that it has become like a natural voice inside – I suppose sort of like our present day rappers who think and express themselves in verse.

Sometimes my thoughts are random and illogical and grab rhymes from the far corners to illicit egregious results.  Sometimes the rhymes that appear are simply silly in their odious results.  But sometimes, when the brain is plugged into the moment, and the being is running parallel with the flow of thought, when the doing of the moment is connected with the pure act of creativity, the right idea and the right rhyme meet in time.

I suppose it’s called “Inspiration”.

So Mrs. Eddy’s follow-up sentence to the above goes like this:

In proportion as this is done,
man and the universe
will be found harmonious and eternal.

As we remember that the physics of matter are of no real importance and that all matter must give place to Spirit, we (and all the rest of existence) will translate into the world of spirituality where all is eternal harmony.

I was trying to get my arms around this concept and found myself repeating this sentence over and over trying to find the right expression in meter and rhythm of such a grand idea and then it happened.

That old rhyming muse in me or above me or of me simply did its thing and poured this thought through me:

In proportion as this is done,
man and the universe
will be found harmonious and eternal.
And one
One
One!!!

I suppose this thought has been hanging around inside my brain since the 60s.  “We are all one” is not a new revolutionary idea, but has been with us for centuries.  I am certainly not the originator of this idea, just the latest to throw it up again for consideration.  And so, 2012 meets 1866 in a rash of rhyme and creativity.

Most importantly, to my mind, it made total sense.  If we are to be in the place where we are all one, it is certainly not in this mortal world of war and greed and confusion.  Rather, we exist right now in the world of spirituality as one with one another living in God’s light.  Often we lose track of this and must translate back (or forward) to this noble idea, to this true reality.

In proportion as we remember to give our thoughts and actions to this idea, we translate naturally into our real selves, our essence.

Perhaps this song can be a small reminder of this all-important daily step in our lives.

I hope so.