We turned off the Panorama Trail in Andrew Molera State Park into a stand of stunted redwoods. They were thin trees, nothing like the redwoods you usually see, and their sparse leafy heads waved at the sky, creaking like a porch-row of rocking chairs. We looked up to see their leaves dissolving into sunlight, and listened to them lean this way and that in time to a silent song.

I had the same feeling sitting in rehearsal on Sunday evening while the basses and tenors sang an old Irish song -- the feeling that music itself was growing up out of the earth, slender stalks of sound deeply rooted and fragile and reaching for the light.

Secrets

A secret is an object whose contents are under pressure, like carbonated liquid in a sealed container. The greater the pressure applied from one direction -- by, for example, strictly limiting the number of people who can be told or by heightening the sanctions for disclosure -- the more violent the inevitable eruption in another direction is liable to be.

A really juicy secret -- the kind that could land someone in federal prison or destroy a marriage or sink a business -- will practically be forced by the pressure of the situation into the minds of many people unknown to the secret's subject.

That's just basic physics.