Carly Simon, Pema Chödrön, Eudora Welty, Pegeen Fitzgerald

I am a voice geek. I love voices. Certain voices, that is.

As I write this, I'm listening to Carly Simon's "adult lullaby" CD, Into White. I fall in love with certain music and voices and listen to them nonstop. This is one of those CDs. Right now, Carly's singing "Oh! Susanna" in a voice that makes me feel like a tiny kid, hypnotized by the soothing tones of the world's most loving mamma. The track after next is "You Can Close Your Eyes" which she sings with her real kids and one of the most amazing piano accompaniments I've ever heard by Teese Gohl. That piano feels like a dream cascading through my body.

Last week, I was listening to the audio recording of Pema Chödrön's book The Places That Scare You. It's read by a woman named Joanna Rotté, who has one of those voices that feels as if it gets absorbed by my skin. I know this even though listening made me loopy; the recording put me in such a deep trance that I can hardly remember a lot of it.

I know from my yogic experiences that this trance is a good thing. Called tandra in Sanskrit, it's a state between waking and sleeping, and although it feels a bit like being on drugs, and if somebody called my name when I'm in the middle of it, I'd probably sound extremely dumb when I answered, I like being there.

Rotté read a bunch of passages that ended in a mantra: "Just stay. Just stay." That's the main thing I remember from inside my skin. Just stay . . . Just stay with whatever's happening. Feel it. You can tolerate it.

There was a time when I thought my feelings could kill me — literally. I thought their energy was so wild that they might literally blow me apart. And apparently this isn't such a bizarre thing because The Places That Scare You is a very popular book. Maybe everybody doesn't worry about splattering, but everybody does do just about anything to avoid just sitting still and feeling whatever is going on . . . whether it's upsetting or euphoric. We eat, drink, fight, strategize, try to control, blame, or run.

Carly's voice makes me feel as if the world is a safe place to just stay in. Pema's words assure me that I can. And the fiction writer Eudora Welty does something entirely different. Eudora makes me want to stay. I've listened to her recordings so much that I've worn through two sets of tapes. So I bought a CD that I thought was the same, but it wasn't. (Two of her stories were left off it, and a decidedly unpeaceful voice introduced the whole thing. Tip: If you want to hear Eudora, buy the Caedmon Audiotapes called Eudora Welty Reads, not the CD called Essential Welty.) Eudora has a short story called "A Memory" (not on the CD) about how harshly she judged and categorized everything when she was a child. Her honesty about this makes this propensity feel not shameful. And her voice rearranges the molecules of my body until I feel like water.

Carly, Pema read by Rotté, Eudora. I would listen to these women sing or read the phone book. What is it about these voices?

You know what? I don't care. I'm just grateful they exist.

And by the way, another voice like this is Pegeen Fitzgerald's. Before she died, Pegeen used to be on WNYC radio. If anybody knows where to get the oral history that she once mentioned she was recording, drop me a line.

And I hope I haven't offended by referring to these women by their first names. It's just that when somebody enters through your skin or your dreams and rearranges your molecules, it feels as if you can be on a first-name basis.