I’ve been at school (Harvard, Summer Session) for just over a week, and feeling out of sorts. At first I thought I was just settling in, getting used to the new environment but tonight I realized that I haven’t listened to any music since I arrived. So I plugged in my headphones, turned off the lights and lay down. Bliss!

Concerts. Kirtan. Vodou ceremonies. iPods. I don’t care, as long as there’s music.

I am alone in the dark but my body is caught in the current that flows over and through and from 18,000 people screaming along to Tool, live at the Xcel Center in St. Paul. It is 2011 but 50,000 people fall silent at the opening chords of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” back when Lollapalooza was a tour. It is the 4^th of July but 10,000 people chant ancient hymns on the huge ghat steps leading down to the river Ganges in Varanasi, India; the whole city is lit by oil lamps on this sacred night of Diwali. I am sprawled on my bed but over the course of two hours, 1400 people at the (old) Guthrie theatre slowly lean forward more and more and more until we are taut on the edge of our seats, strung breathless, as frail, white-haired Ali Akbar Khan first caresses, then strums, then totally fucking shreds on the sarod. All these experiences were distinct, but they are all the same.

Laying in the dark in my room, I am everywhere and nowhere. I remember and I become: headphones plugged into a Walkman, a CD player, an iPod. I am 11 years old in India (Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Loverboy), 16 in boarding school in the U.K. (The Cure, Beastie Boys, Iron Maiden), almost 40 here, tonight, in Cambridge (Atmosphere, Lykke Li, MIA). I am simultaneously innocent and brokenhearted, jaded and hopeful, alienated, confused, rapturous, cradled, transported.

There have been grueling times endured only because music protects me, insulates me, wraps around me and keeps the world out. It lets me know that I am not the only one to feel something, yet I feel it more keenly and overcome it: with music, the only way out is through. In buffering me from the reality around me, the music somehow absorbed it. So when I hear that song again, a little of that reality leaks out. Nothing’s changed; everything’s changed. The music is transcendent.

Music also viscerally connects me to reality: it is immanent. The Black Keys are at First Ave and baby, I’m howling for you: so are about 300 other souls. 100 people on a River Boat chugging along the Mississippi jump up and down in unison to Michael Franti telling us to throw your hands up high, ‘cause you never know how long you’re gonna live till you die. The boat is shaking. 40 people crammed in an unfinished room at The New Orleans Healing Center groove to the Afro-Jazz rhythm of Kora Konnection from Senegal. There is no room to dance, but we manage. A dozen people dressed in white do have room to dance around the center pole of a Vodou temple. The drums call the Spirits and we sing: Papa Legba, open the door, open the door, open the door. I am barefoot on the sand, under the stars, listening to music played by gypsies. We are deep in the desert of India, and I dance with my oldest friend.

My husband and I slamdance to Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod” in the ballroom at a Marriot: he is wearing a tux, I am in my ivory silk wedding gown. We are grinning, young, drunk. I plug my headphones in and listen to Guns and Roses: Axl Rose is the only other human being who might be as pissed off as I am right now. I am in a car with my three best friends when Prince comes on the radio. We crank it up, pull over on the freeway, and dance. We laugh like the teenage girls we are, and hug each other. My sister and I sit on the roof of our home in India and listen to squeaky tapes recorded before we left America: jackals shriek and huge bats wing overhead while we listen to Top 40 countdowns. My mom puts on a Peter Tosh record; our Caribbean heritage spills from speakers to fill the room. Outside, the Minneapolis streets fill with snow. I must have been about six years old. All of this is happening right now. When the music starts, the music is everything. It both brings me completely into and totally out of time, space, myself.

This is the story of my life. Then, now, always. This is how the Spirits move me.

I almost didn’t go to the last show we had tickets for because I felt terrible. I have Endometriosis, a reproductive disease which results in chronic pain. I’m not in pain all the time, but when I am, I’d rather be curled up on the couch at home. But it’s hard to stay away from music, so I went: limping a bit, but present. At first I just sit there, listening to the show. But music comes in my ears and out my hips, so pretty soon I am standing, swaying and grooving. Tentatively. Pelvic pain and pelvic motion do not go together. But after awhile, the music just…takes me, and I stop caring. I dance. I stop feeling anything besides the music. I stop being anything besides the music.

When the music gets going the beat comes up through the floor and pounds through the air, pulsing like another heartbeat. Everyone is moving, jumping up and down or dancing in place. I feel the life coursing through me, those around me, the universe. There is no difference. How can there be? We share a heart.