Drumming the Autumnal Equinox

If you chose to come to drumming this Friday, you will be treated to an extraordinary evening.

 The autumnal equinox is one of the major holidays for earth-based and indigenous people in many places. It’s a time of balance of day and night, but unlike the springtime side of the wheel, this equinox has us descending down into the meditative, internal darkness, the womb of the Great Mother, the place where Mystery re-cooks us in the universal cauldron. You know those pictures of distant galaxies that the Hubble telescope has delivered to us over the years? This is how I imagine the inside of the womb looking – the human woman’s womb, but also the womb of the Great mother – packed with whirling galaxies.

 In that darkened place we are composted, re-shaped, re-combined with universal energies, the life force is re-breathed into us, and we re-emerge anew at the spring equinox. If you feel autumn calls you down into melancholy, into silence, memory, yearning and grieving, this is why: we are moving into the Great Womb to be re-configured and reborn. For me, it is the Autumnal Equinox that marks the real beginning of this dark passage.

 And that’s why I’ve been planning a whopperly beautiful drum for you this Friday. A whappin’ whompin’ Womb-Wahoo! Oh yeah.

 We will be in our new Minneapolis drumming location: Spring House Center, on 28th and Garfield. Come and check it out, and tell me if this feels like the new home for us. It’s run by cool people.  

 Bring a drum, rattle, or other wahoo maker, or just show up. I have plenty for you to borrow. We will drum a little wildly – okay, maybe a lot wildly – and I will speak a little about how the equinox aligns with the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and how it aligns with the Lakota concept of “right relationship” and the Buddhist notion of “ahimsa” (non-violence.) Then my friend, colleague and teacher Teresa Riley Baecker will partner with me to guide you through a lovely ceremony meant to help realign you with your inner, strong core of peace, that place where we are wrapped in Shalom (Hebrew), Salaam (Arabic), Ah-Sith (“Ahn-Shee,” Gaelic), Ahimasa (from the Sanskrit), or, as our tongues pronounce it: peaceful balance.

 If you come, please consider bringing an item to give away. That item can be anything that represents beauty for you, or peace, or “harvest” (this is the other major image of the equinox.) So for example, an apple or piece of corn would work. But so would an object of beauty, a poem, a photo, whatever. These objects will be placed on the altar, and part of the ceremony will be to go home with a different object than you brought. If you can’t get to this, or forget, please don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of extra items for you to work with. Wahoo.

I look forward to seeing you on Friday!