love is everywhere real things in life love is in us all a few autumns ago i took the overnight greyhound to new york to see pharaoh sanders play at birdland. he was doing a six-night stand and i thought, “i might not have another chance to see him.” i don’t recall exactly how i encountered his music, maybe through my friend max, but i know i heard his album KARMA first and just started living with it. for months straight i had my alarm set to wake me up with “creator has a master plan” and i would lay in bed listening to it half dreaming. there is one song in particular called “greetings to idris” from his album JOURNEY TO THE ONE—the melody it opens with contains, for me, everything in life. beauty, longing, grief, acceptance, simple joy, the messy sum. sometimes i think about this melody, just play it in my head, and i can literally feel it swelling in my chest, turning my stomach over. it’s not one of his most popular songs, so i wasn’t expecting him to play it that night, but he did. i looked what recent setlists of his i could and couldn’t find another instance of him performing this song. coincidence, whatever—i can’t think of another moment in my life where i felt i was so precisely where i was meant to be, or even a moment in which i believed there was somewhere i was “meant” to be. i’ll remember this always. a little over a year later i was back in new york and thought one evening to check birdland’s listings. he was playing that night, in about an hour, and i was downtown forty minutes away. coincidence! life!