Nuance

Dear Drummers,

I am looking forward to drumming with you this Friday. I feel like I have been “away” for a long time because of recuperating from surgery to repair a detached retina. All seems to be well with my eye although as any of you know who have had to be patient while healing, it takes far longer than you wish.

So with one good eye and one terribly blurry eye, I have watched the presidential campaign sink into the expected malodorousness, and have wondered why we all – left to right, anarchist to wing nut –claim distaste at swimming in the sewer yet we all so happily jump in every election. I wonder how the mobs of wingnuts can love the eliminator of sin while hyukking it up at Limbaugh’s racist quips, and I wonder how the lefties can decry hate mongers while stretching truth as weirdly as possible to paint political opponents as wholly demonic.

Don’t get me wrong—I live firmly on the angry left; I believe the current administration is full of actual criminals and I believe the GOP was taken over 30 years ago by cynical strategists who understood that because so few people vote in America, all you need to do to snatch the presidency is to turn out everybody in a subset of the populace. They targeted radical evangelicals, people with only a passing understanding of Christianity, and it worked. Their tactic was to create division and righteous anger at “the other” and it worked as it has throughout history. In the world of Celtic shamanism, this strategy would be called an incredibly powerful glamoury- a spell that covers the ugly truth with a dazzling sheen. George Bush, compassionate Christian hero, is a triumphant glam.

I saw Bill Maher’s new movie Religulous yesterday – his rant against religion as dumb people believing in dumb fairy tales. I admired the movie but like all political strategists, Hollywood writers and pyromaniacs his goal is merely to set a fire, not explore the nuanced human condition. Nuance is virtually dead in our public sphere and this is the root of such vast soul loss. Nuance is the place of subtlety, of shade, or as the Celts would say, the “between places.” It is in the between places that, in religions’ dumb myths, we meet God. And this is what unites both Maher’s movie and those he ridicules, and what oddly aligns Maher with the Karl Roves of the political world: all stay away from the between places in order to “win.”

The “economic crisis” is yet another subject that begs for nuance and will not receive it. We revel in the failure because it offers us the glee of casting blame on greedy Wall Street gamblers and the corrupt Bushies who gave them the keys to our treasury. Or we snidely blame the democrats for changing laws that forced honest bankers to make risky loans. Or as our beloved Rep. Bachman appears to, we just directly blame the poor for audaciously wanting to own a house, to participate in the “real” America. Or we blame predatory lenders for tricking people into buying a $600,000 house in the suburbs. The most nuanced description of the economic crisis I have come across is in last Sunday’s New York Times. Click here for it.

In the world of nuance, there is not a war between the light and dark, truth and error, a war between reason and fairy tale, a war between religion and atheism. In the world of nuance there is a path between the hard mountain of literalism and the surging ocean of metaphor, between law and experience, between certainty and doubt. I believe if we are to call ourselves religious or spiritual, or conscious, or smart we devote ourselves to walking the whole path back and forth, to learn how to believe in something that beautifies our lives and to learn how to unbelieve when it is time to do so, so that we may learn how to believe the next deeper thing that we are capable of grasping, that brings deeper beauty.

The drum helps me walk this long path from ocean to mountain, back and forth, again and again. All of you help each other walk it when you choose to gather together around the drum rather than do something else. And that is why I miss the drum so much right now and why I miss all of you.

This Friday I look forward to exploring this path between ocean and mountain and back with you.

Image: Modern Art Images

Dear Drummers,

Last week I was on my way to Antwerp for the annual European zoo conference. In the airport I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s book “A New Earth.” Tolle is the most recent to be anointed as one of Oprah’s telegenic gurus of the month.

Can you hear my ego speaking through that catty last phrase? Tolle’s book is an exploration of the ego - in fact I find it a rather shattering exploration. It’s one of those books in which I see myself on each page and have those realizations like “oh…that’s why I am so often such a doink.”

I like Tolle’s writing because it is non-spiritual. He draws from the Buddhist and Christian worlds, as I often do, with a smattering of the Hindu world, as I do. But there’s no talk of sprits or deity so much as “consciousness.” I certainly like spirit-talk, and I find myself translating what Tolle is saying into shamanic language because I love those images. In my experience shamanic work is mostly about the ego, in just the way Tolle describes it in different words. People come to shamanic work for the magic, but if they stay it’s for the ego work. And when I say shamanic work, I mean any practice with the drum, whether its journeys to the other world or playing rhythms that are a little difficult for you, or merely having the drum group leader ask you to play your djembe a little softer. It’s all ego work and the drum is a master teacher.

Here is one of the things Tolle says:

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as though it were a reality. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means “I am in danger” and it responds accordingly, even though it might be lying in a warm and comfortable bed at night. The heart beats faster, muscles contract, the breathing becomes faster.

He goes on to say there is a buildup of energy, but since it is a mental fiction rather than a real threat, there is no way to dispel the “fight or flight” energy that has been built up—you really have nothing to fight and nothing from which to flee. So the body feeds that energy back on the mind which then generates more anxious thought. If you are like me, you sometimes (or frequently) encircle yourself with rather poisonous thoughts: replaying battles you had or should have had, setting people straight who misunderstand you, triumphing over those who have slighted you or taken you lightly. These thoughts don’t come into the real world because we rarely act on them and they are overwhelmingly thoughts located in the “otherworld” of the past and the future. But the energies from these thoughts lodge in our “now” body.

This Friday we meet to drum and to learn some ways to dispel those energies. We will drum ourselves into a place beyond thinking. We will consider the ego in some very simple ways that I hope may be profound or useful for you. Early autumn is a fine time to do this kind of spiritual work, when the world of delightful days and blossoming flowers gives way to the decay and darkness and death. The ego hates all of that and I think it’s one reason why melancholy is my major daily feeling during autumn. It is not me, but the ego who feels melancholy because it doesn’t like the idea of something else –like nature --having power over it.

So, on Friday we will ask the drum to clear away the thought-toxins…the Thoxins. Hey, I coined a word! Oprah, choose me! Hey! Oprah!

Two Wells

(Painting by Esao Andrews )

Welcome to year seven of Drumming the Soul Awake. (I am astonished and humbled by that sentence!)

The drum is my teacher with 1,000 lessons to teach me. One lesson would be enough to fill a life but the drum does not stop at one. Here is one lesson the drum teaches: we live with two wells in our heart.

When we drink from the well of fear we begin wanting to build a walled garden around our life, to plant only acceptable plants, and to paint pictures of our own face on each wall. We sit in our garden, sipping from that well of fear, and we look for imperfections in our work, where this curve went wrong, and where these colors clash. We try to remember the correct scientific names for each plant, nervous that we will forget or get one wrong. We decide who we allow inside the garden, and it is always only a very few and they must agree to live by our rules.

The walls need constant repair and the beds require constant weeding. The height of the grass needs to be measured. We walk through the garden and we slowly stop seeing the flowers or the grass; we see only the enemies threatening --the weeds, and the crack in the walkway, the insects devouring the bark, and how that one self-portrait on the western wall is already fading and cracking after such a short time. Each time we repair one thing another begins to crack or fade or fall down, and we live in a world of encroaching enemies. We become like single celled creatures, instinctively rejecting what touches us, running or attacking.

We are organic creatures- we have bodies and therefore the world does contain predators. Our lives will have fear. Disappointment, sickness, grief, regret –they stalk us. And death is a predator that will one day devour each one of us. The reward offered by the well of fear is a small, controllable cosmos, a cosmos of that is ordered and reasonable, where mystery is present but relatively inconsequential because it lives outside the walls.

The drum, like all incarnations of the Holy Spirit, teaches us that we also have in us the well of wonder. When we drink form the well of wonder, we install four gates in the garden walls-gates that do not shut. We place welcoming signs and baskets of food and wine at each of the four gates so that those passing by can take nourishment. We often arrive to find a stranger sitting on the garden bench, and we ask them where they are from and where they are going and what is their name, and most importantly what their name means. We are visited by mystery constantly and we learn to play music and we learn to see into poems - the ones written by humans and the ones written by the creator. We learn to live on more than one level at a time. We learn to hold paradox between our two hands. We learn that what we fear cannot be solved, but it can be dissolved.

So we drum to drink from the well of wonder and to balance the effects of the waters of fear which few of us live without sipping. And curiously, by entering into the multi-layered sound for awhile we ride the drum to a place of silence, a place beyond knowing and knowledge, beyond memory and learning, beyond words and names and categories and labels, a place where mystery – the unnamable, unnamed, unimaginable and indefinable – warmly greets us.

(Thanks to Ravi Ravindra for sparking some of the ideas in the above. See “The End of Knowledge” Parabola Magazine, Fall 2009.)

I leave you with this poem form Denise Levertov:

The Well

At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.

I wanted beauty, a dangerous
gleam of steel, my body thinner,
my pale face paler.
I moonbathed
diligently, as others sunbathe.
But the moon's unsmiling stare
kept me awake. Mornings,
I was flushed and cross.

It was on dark nights of deep sleep
that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,
and woke rested, and if not beautiful,
filled with some other power.

Eye of Spirit

Dear Drummers,

I wanted to send you a follow up to last night’s drum. I felt a little discombobulated last night for several reasons, but I hope it didn’t show through too much. The language I was playing with came from a phrase from Meister Eckhart (click here or here): “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The music that inspired me is Hawaiian chants from The Brothers Kanilau. Thanks for being willing to play along. It was admittedly all a bit awkward, but I hope you had fun.

I’ve long been intrigued with the image of the Eye of Spirit ever since a friend and I were driving to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival twenty years ago to perform weird shows, and he said he could never flirt with a woman who was not his wife because then he would feel the eye of God burning a hole in the back of neck for the rest of his life. I thought wow, that’s a powerful guiding force for him. Since then I have asked what my idea of the “eye of God” looks like and acts like, where it burns and where it heals burns. Clearly the Eye of God and Eye of Spirit are two different things. (A few years later my friend and his wife divorced.)

So I often find myself thinking about anything vaguely round as an eye of spirit: the sun, the moon, the arc of the horizon, rocks, fruit, the drum – on and on. This idea helps move me along in the extended meditation I seem to be living: on the divine as present everywhere, whispering, coaching, suggesting, guiding, not just burning my sins out of me from the back of my neck. For me, Eye of Spirit urges us to become open so we can know ourselves better and make decisions out of wisdom rather than fear. I think the eye of God, as my friend experienced it, urges us to become closed. (For an interesting if long winded exploration, see Ken Wilbur’s book The Eye of Spirit).

The poem I read while drumming, so beautifully brought to life by Johnna’s flute playing, is my adaptation of a poem I found in The Gift, Poems of Hafiz (pg 124) here’s my version:

Keep playing your drum, calling, calling.
You have touched something Holy inside
With your spirit body.
And now your heart is blessed and ruined.
Once it has been touched by that divine beauty
It becomes a restless sky hunter,
Circling, searching for more
Sweet kisses
of sunlight.

Thanks for your willingness to play, and to let me explore! I hope we’ll be able to schedule a drum in August. We will let you know.

Jaime

Dear Drummers,

I’m so looking forward to our gathering this Saturday! It’s been awhile, and that has given me some much needed rest, but I’m eager to be inside that earthy beat again.

To be spiritual is to actively dance your way into paradoxes and allow them to work on you. Here is the paradox I’m captured by right now. Since early humans began doing cave paintings, there have been about 1,500 generations, assuming a generation to be 25 years. (Read a cool article on cave paintings here). Since history began being written down about 3,500 years ago, there have been 200 generations of humans. In one way this all seems like a long stretch of time, but of course by earth standards, or cosmic standards it is barely a blink of an eye.

Time moves forward, technology changes the world again and again, whole cultures and their Gods are born, die and are forgotten, but the basic challenges of humanity seem to be unchanging. The need for love and the desire for power, the yearning to know Mystery and compulsion to kill others to gain resources, the fear of apocalypse and the blindness to how we are perpetrating it – on and on the list goes of things that don’t seem to change to for humans, regardless of the technology they are using at the moment or the language they are speaking or the god to whom they are chanting. The biblical phrase from Ecclesiastes 1:9 comes to mind:

What has been is what will be,and what has been done is what will be done,and there is nothing new under the sun.

Or as another passage says:
“Vanity of vanities! saith the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”
(Ecclesiastes 1:2)

That word, vanity, is the moral-leaning King James translation from the Latin translation of the Greek translated from the original Hebrew which has, of course many meanings, one of which is “vapor” or “breath.” So in that context, the phrase might say:
“Vapor of Breaths! saith the Preacher,
Breath of breath! All is breath!”

When we speak of breath, we speak automatically of rhythm, for breath is not breath without both inhalation and exhalation. Breathing is a cycle of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, creation and void. On it goes, on and on, generation after generation, in the human world and in the cosmic world in which humans are but a passing whim.

It’s not that I discount the possibility that I may indeed be all about vanity! But I love the phrase “All is breath” because I do indeed see everything as breath, and breath in everything – movement of fullness to emptiness and back to fullness, carrying with it the life force that swims inside for awhile, is released to the world, and taken in by someone else for awhile, and released, on and on, in and out, exchanging, transforming and exchanging the life force.

I think this is why the drum has been with us for so long – some say for 1200 generations – and continues to be our companion even in a culture like ours that has such an array of amazing toys that so easily replace the drum. The drum reminds us of this cycle of taking in and letting go, and it reminds us that this is the very definition of what it means to live. On the strictly biological level, we take in and let go without any effort: the lungs fill and empty, the heart contracts and expands, we are born and die, all without conscious effort. But we become spiritual beings by becoming more conscious about what we are taking in and what we are releasing, what we let live in us, and how we move the life force through us and into the world. The drum is a tool and teacher for moving the life force through us, for unblocking the life force and letting it flow as it is meant to do. In this way to drum is the simplest act there can be, because it brings us into alignment with fundamental process going on in everything in the universe. So the drum is a natural spiritual cleanser. And we can decide to put more or less thought (read: prayer) into what needs to flow into us, or through us, or what needs to become unstuck.

It’s the height of summer now, and we are firmly in the grasp of the direction South according to the Celtic wheel of the year: the direction of heat, light, music, dancing, joy, feasting, and Fruition – fruitiness, juiciness. The inhale that is the other side of the exhale of the winter solstice.

I look forward to gathering in delicious juiciness with you all this Saturday. If you would like to, please feel free to bring some kind of snacky food or cut flowers to help fill out our festivities.