Chapter 5 - The Sound of Prayer
One October Tuesday night in 1970, a few months after I turned twenty-one, a friend suggested we ingest psilocybin mushrooms. In my railroad flat on the West Side at 10th Avenue and 34th Street, we prepared for what I assumed would be another consciousness experiment. The apartment was nothing special—thin walls, radiator that clanked through the night, the constant hum of traffic from the avenue below. I had no clue I was walking into the musical education that would change everything.
Thirty minutes in, the room started breathing. The walls expanded and contracted, the floor pulsed beneath my feet, the air itself had a heartbeat. Then we put on A Love Supreme.
From the first notes, everything changed. Coltrane’s tone reached something deeper than hearing.
The music stopped being separate sounds. Jimmy Garrison’s bass moved through my chest. Elvin Jones’ cymbals sparked. I breathed with the music. Coltrane’s horn became pure prayer.
When he paused, my heart seemed to pause with him. The apartment walls breathed with the music, the floor vibrated under my feet, and somewhere between the second and third movements, I stopped being a person listening to a recording and became part of the sound itself.
I stopped analyzing and started feeling. The part of my mind that usually catalogued chord changes and identified influences simply shut down. I wasn’t hearing harmony or melody in any conventional sense. I was experiencing music as pure energy, as a force that could reorganize consciousness itself.
Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” chant looped in my head until it stopped being words and became a pulse, a powerful affirmation that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.
By the time “Psalm“ arrived, all boundaries had dissolved entirely. I stopped analyzing what I heard and started feeling it as physical sensation. Each phrase moved through me. Each pause felt shared.
When it ended, I couldn’t move. My hands lay heavy in my lap, fingers still tingling as though I’d been holding live wires. The chair held my weight differently, as though gravity had shifted
during the music and hadn’t quite returned to normal. I could taste copper in my mouth, smell something electrical in the air. My heartbeat felt too loud in the sudden quiet. Even blinking required conscious effort.
The familiar objects in my room—the desk lamp, the stack of books, the coffee mug—looked foreign, as though I was seeing them through new eyes or they had been subtly altered while I wasn’t paying attention.
Only later would I learn the story: A Love Supreme was Coltrane’s hymn of gratitude after conquering heroin addiction, his offering to whatever divine forces had saved his life. But that first encounter contained everything I needed to know. Here was someone who had experienced complete brokenness and discovered how to transform pain into light, despair into devotion.
This marked a turning point. Television had taught me to listen passively. Jazz taught me to listen actively. The counterculturehad changed how I thought. Now Coltrane taught me to hear the sacred embedded in sound itself, how to hear prayer in music, how to find meaning in the spaces between notes.
The change was permanent. Before that night, I treated music as entertainment. After that, I listened for something deeper. I stopped asking what songs meant and started asking what they could do—to me, through me, in the space between sound and silence.
But the awakening didn’t stick as clearly as I’d hoped. Over the following days, I tried to recreate that state—playing the album obsessively, seeking the same dissolution I’d experienced that first night. Instead, I found myself analyzing the music, dissecting it, trying to manufacture greatness through effort. The harder I grasped, the more elusive it became.
I’d sit with the record spinning, waiting for revelation, and instead
find my mind cataloging Elvin’s polyrhythms or McCoy Tyner’s harmonic choices. The magic had become homework. I began to doubt what I’d experienced—had it been real transformation or just the mushrooms? Was I chasing something that existed only in my imagination?
This became my first lesson in metaphysical humility: you can’t force your way back to grace. It finds you when you stop hunting it. The experience had cracked something open, but I didn’t yet know how to live in that opened space. I needed a practice, a way to cultivate in daily life what Coltrane had shown me was possible through sound.
When I put on records now, I don’t just hear melody and rhythm. I hear invitation. I hear the possibility that this sound, right now, might break through whatever needs breaking through. That somewhere in these vibrations lives the same force that pulled Coltrane back from the edge and offered him a way to turn suffering into song.
This understanding changed my writing process. I began each session by listening—not to music necessarily, but to the rhythm already present in whatever I planned to write. Just as Coltrane would warm up by finding the center of a tune before exploring its edges, I learned to find the pulse underlying each piece before adding the melody of words.
I began noticing the breath patterns in my sentences. Short, staccato phrases for urgency. Long, flowing passages for reflection. The space between paragraphs became as important as the paragraphs themselves—places for the reader to pause, absorb, let the meaning settle.
Coltrane had found me in that railroad flat, in the breathing walls and the pulsing air. The rest of my life would unfold as learning what he had to teach: that music isn’t sound organized in time—it’s a doorway, and some nights, if you listen right, you walk through. On the other side of that doorway, nothing looks the same. Ordinary moments stretch wider, silence carries weight, and every note becomes both question and answer.