This is the kind of thing we forget.
This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and death, tends to fly under the radar of our consciousness, only to be rediscovered and placed in front of our eyes, at least for a moment, so we can look and say, I had no idea.
The earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism, and its song is ethereal and mystifying and weird. It's a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that's not easily analyzed, but that, if you let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.
Scientists say the planet is generating a constant, deep thrum. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music - huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can't fathom it, so low it can't be heard by humans, chthonic roars churning from water and wind and rock, countless notes of vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet.
It all makes for an otherworldly symphony so mysterious that scientists can't figure out what's causing it. Sensitive instruments are getting better at picking up what's been dubbed "Earth's hum," but no one's any closer to understanding what it might mean. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be.
Because then you get to crank up your imagination.
I like to think of Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound disappears and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music and God just shrugs and says, well that was interesting.
Or maybe the planet is more like an enormous wineglass, half full of a heady potion made of horny unicorns and perky sunshine, around the smooth, gleaming rim of which Dionysus circles his wet fingertip, generating a mellifluous tone that makes the wood nymphs dance and the gods hum along as they all watch 7 billion confused human ants scamper about with their lattes and their war and their perpetually adorable angst, oblivious.
But most of all, I believe the Earth actually resonates with the Hindu belief in the divine sound of om (or more accurately, aum), that single, universal syllable that contains and encompasses all: birth and death, creation and destruction, being and nothingness, rock 'n' roll, Christian and pagan, meat and vegetable.
Here's the best part: This wave of sound? The Earth's deep, mysterious om, its perpetual hum of song? Totally normal - that is, if by "normal" you mean "unfathomably powerful and speaking to a vast mystical timelessness we can't possibly comprehend."
All the spheres do it, all the planets and quasars and stars and moons and whirlpool galaxies, all vibrating and humming like a chorus of wayward deities singing sea chanteys in a black hole. It's nothing new: Mystics and poets and theorists have pondered the "music of the spheres" (musica universalis) for eons; it is the stuff of cosmic philosophy, linking sacred geometry, mathematics, cosmology, harmonics, astrology and music into one big cosmological poetry slam.
You don't have to look very far to understand that human beings - all animals, really - adore song and music and tone and rhythm, then link this everyday source of life straight to the roar of the planet itself, then back out to the cosmos.
In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That's because somewhere, somehow, deep in your cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to the source, to the Earth's own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe.
At some point we'll probably figure it all out. Science will, with its typical charming, arrogant certainty, sift and measure and quantify this "mystical" earthly hum and tell us it merely comes from, say, ocean movements, or solar wind, or 10 billion trees all deciding to grow a quarter millimeter at once. We will do as we always do: oversimplify, peer through a single lens of understanding, stick this dazzling phenomenon in a narrow category, and forget it.
How dangerously boring. I much prefer, in matters mystical and musical and deeply cosmic, to tell the logical mind to shut up and let the soul take over and say wait wait wait, maybe most humans have this divine connection thing all wrong. Maybe God really isn't some scowling gay-hating deity raining down guilt and judgment and fear on all humankind after all.
Maybe she's actually, you know, a throb, a pulse, a song, deep, complex, eternal. And us, well, we're just bouncing and swaying along as best we can, trying to figure out the melody.
-- Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.
Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on SFGate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
environment
Main tools used: chainsaw, hammer and 1 inch chisel, little else really. Oh and by the way I am not a builder or carpenter, my experience is only having a go at one similar house 2yrs before and a bit of mucking around inbetween. This kind of building is accessible to anyone. My main relevant skills were being able bodied, having self belief and perseverence and a mate or two to give a lift now and again. 
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