Last night a cricket got into my apartment and gave an uninvited concert intermittently through the night. I had lived the day in my clock and calendar, and so the intrusion of nature reminded me of my deeper home in the cosmos. For a moment, I laid aside my problems and projects and just listened.Some say that being religious means believing in an invisible being who made everything. To me, religion has always been about a sense of over powering reverence before the interconnectedness of life. John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” To me, religion is remembering I am an expression of something deeper and bigger that is more my home than anything that happens to me biographically. When a cricket chirps, it is singing to other crickets but, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, you can count the number of cricket chirps you hear in 14 seconds, add the number 40 and you’ll have the temperature. I doubt the cricket is aware of the meteorological aspects of its song, but its chirping reminds me that I, too, am a thread in an ecological garment. It isn’t true that a cricket plays its leg like a violin, but it does make music with its wing. I have always been struck by the fact that Einstein sometimes played a violin to break up his mathematical work. I suspect he sometimes used the violin to animate the intuitive side of his brain so that his intuition and reason might play together as he explored new possibilities. For me, religion has never been about dogma or magical rituals but a kind of playful exploration of the cosmos. Religion has always been about those moments I “dissolve” into a deeper sense of life than my own little story. I believe it is a mistake to think we have to choose between being good scientists and the singing cosmic song. Science tells us where to place the notes on the sheet music. It is what happens between the notes that we hear as music. I went to sleep last night lost in my clock and calendar. It took the unwanted hymn of a cricket to remind me to listen for a deeper and larger song, to tune my heart to that music, and then to play my own life like an instrument so others might hear my little fiddle and remember their part in the cosmic symphony.