Becomming Preposterous

January 11, 2008

Dear Drummers,

I love the word preposterous. The words absurd and ridiculous always float through my head, especially in reference to myself. Ridiculous means to cause laughter. Absurd means to be out of tune, or to not be with those who are playing the prescribed chord structure or melody. Both imply moving into a place considered by the rule-setters as uncouth or ill mannered. Both words imply entrance into the non-rational.

But preposterous carries the day. Pre / posterior. To have what is behind come first, or to lead with your ass. I’m reminded of a story someone told me that may or may not be true, which does not really matter, I suppose: Sitting Bull, the great leader, sitting in a very important meeting of elders, gets up, leaves the tipi, comes back ass first with his pants down and parades around the circle, then leaves again, then re-enters again, the dignified leader we love to imagine. Imagine how the world would be different if the Pope or Billy Graham did that or even if there was merely a story floating around that they did.

These words absurd, ridiculous, preposterous float in my head every time I begin my prayers and meditations about what I am called to do in our next drumming gathering. I suspect these words float in your head too, as you enter into your own dreaming, drumming prayers. These are powerful words that feed powerful feelings that, as you move along this (or any) spiritual path, become your companions. When you take on a spiritual path, you invite the feelings of being ridiculous, absurd and preposterous to walk with you the whole way, singing bawdy songs and smacking their lips as they eat, making rude gestures to everyone that you pass by. I’m saying this because I assume that you too are accompanied by similar companions. Good God, I hope you are, or it’s only me, and I don’t want to think about that.

These companions get rowdier for me as Drum Friday approaches. Thankfully, over the years the voices of these companions have led me to another word: Sacred, which at its essence, means to be set apart. All sacred activity takes place in a setting that is set apart from the daily world, in other words, the absurd, the place out of tune with the dominant melody. All sacred work draws a circle around the worshipers – with a wand, a rattle, with words or chants, or with stone architecture like a cathedral – to separate the worshipers from the dominant melody for a time, to take them into a different melodic structure and then return them, refreshed, re-made, renewed, again to the world.

Humans need to go to this other world, this absurd place, this place with a different music, and we need to go there regularly, or we become the opposite of Holy, which means Whole. To be whole, to be in balance with the holy, is to enter into the absurd on a regular basis and to discover its alternative melody, and to walk with these uncouth companions on our way. These companions, these words, are your allies, not your enemies.

Well, this brings me around to what I wanted to say at the very beginning, that if there is one reason for our drumming, it is to re-balance. We go to the other world not to escape this world, and not even to find a more beautiful place to be than this world, but to learn more kinds of music that can change the way we play in this world, change how we play, how we compose our personal melody, and who we play with. We drum so that we may live in more wholeness in this world. Balance and Wholeness will be our theme for Friday.

I’m looking forward making absurd music with you. I leave you with one of my favorite poems form the Hindu-Muslim-mystic poets, the 13th Century Kabir:

Between the conscious and the unconscious,
Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world,
the mind has put up
a swing:all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;ages go by, and it goes on
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,and the secret one slowly growing a body.If you see that for just fifteen seconds, it makes you a servant
for life.
-- Kaibr, India, 1398-1518.[1]

The two paintings posted are by Mark Rothko.

[1] Tr. Robert Bly, The Kabir Book, (Beacon Press 1993)
I have altered the poem in two ways. First, I added the lines “Between waking and dreaming,
Between this world and the other world.” I wanted to open the ideas from being purely psychological. Since I deliver this poem orally, and usually with a drum playing under, I like to establish a swinging feel and these slightly repetitious lines help to do that. Second, I altered the last line from “Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.” I think Kabir would be okay with this, changing it from the descriptive (“I saw this and aren’t I amazing?) to prescriptive (“If you do this, you could be amazed.”)

Dear Drummers,

We don’t have a drum until January 11, but I thought I’d send you a new year’s wish. I hope my email finds you in good health and good spirits. As the sun begins its slow climb back into re-activating the land, this is a good time to contemplate our path, our directions, and our actions in the world.

I read recently that Rumi, the magnificent 13th century Sufi saint, once said that you should make a list of the three things you most want in your life. If any of the three conflict with one another, you’ll have a lot of trouble. This is a wonderful meditation for the New Year. For me it seems so much friendlier than “resolutions” which carry the fragrance of sin, and the heaviness of lawmaking.

So you may ask yourself what are the three things – or perhaps three “energies” – you most want to become active in your daily life as the year makes it way out of this round of darkness. Or you may want to pray for help or strength to bring these three things into your life without conflicting with one another.

For me, I’d like to pray more. I’d like to invite the energy of prayer into my life. I’d like to pray in a classic way, on the knees, in the dark, with words, no drum and no joiking; pray for help and strength for that which is most tender and vulnerable for me in particular.

Last night I prayed for the three things I want most in my life:

• For my wife and kids to be healthy and curious;
  
• For me to not become restless within the small container of my life but to have the courage to uncover the depth and beauty inside this container;
  
• For me to wisely expand my skills and abilities as some kind of conduit for Spirit for our drumming community.

William Stafford (1914-1993), wrote a wonderful meditative poem called Ask Me. I pass it on to you, along with my best wishes for a wonder-filled new year.

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We
knowthe current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

See you all soon,

Jaime

Dear Solstice Drummers,

If you attended my Winter Solstice Drumming/Ceremony at Wisdom Ways, thank you! I promised you a few musings on the Reindeer Runes, and here they are below.

By the way, if you purchased a script of the show, the runes in the script are in an inncorrect order. My aplologies about that. The runes in your program, and below, are in correct alignment. If you would like to purchase a script that contains the text from this year's show as well as last year's "Blessing," please send me an email at jaime@drummingthesoulawake.com. There's alot more in the script than actually made it into the show, thankfully - or you would have been there for four hours.

When I began working on this solstice event, I considered using the classic Scandinavian/Celtic runes. Hundreds of books have been written interpreting these runes in wildly different ways. While the runes are a powerful meditation tool, they come from a time and culture far removed from our own. Moderns have to do some impressive interpretive gymnastics to make these ancient runes wholly relevant today. There is nothing at all wrong with interpretive gymnastics. Anyone trying to forge or maintain a connection to a religious text written long ago needs to learn some serious bending, splitting and balancing.

How these runes came to me
Well all of this made me realize that what was really needed for my solstice event was a smaller set of runes created specifically for our purposes together. I asked the reindeer about this and the reindeer gave me eight rune sayings. As I worked with them, they began to fall into a melody. Barbara McAfee helped make the words to the runes fit better to be sung, and that is the song she sang during our solstice show.

After the reindeer helped me make these rune sayings it helped me make the visual runes to go with them. My 8 year old son and I went out to a little place by Minnehaha Creek near where we live, to a clearing with these tall elm trees who we call the nine sisters. Near that place grows two immense willows. Lukas gathered up two handfuls of the slender leaves from the willows, and after doing some singing and praying, we went through each of the rune sayings and cast willow leaves onto my prayer rug to ask for the designs for each rune. We looked at the way the leaves fell, and we tried to see the design for the rune. We went at dusk—the time when it is not quite day and not quite night, the “between place” so important to all myth. And the full moon was rising in the east as the sun set in the west. So that is where these runes came from.

Yes, you can do this in the middle of the city. People walking by with their schnauzers or jogging with their I-Pod, traffic cruising by. You can commune with the sprits right there.

My musings on the runes
I’ve only lived with these runes for a few weeks, so don’t expect that I will have great deep wisdom about them. And y interpretations do not matter as much as your own. Below I’m just sort of shooting from the mythic hip. If you meditate and muse on them you may see much more in them than I see now.

I see in these runes powers of the creator – given to us now, at this darkest time of the year when we need this life force energy the most. These powers exist in the outer cosmos as well as inside each of us. Any time you select a rune of any kind – even if that rune is a bible verse, or a poem or an omen hunt among tree branches, or tea leaves, or Tarot cards or whatever, the assumption is that rune that falls into your hand is the one the Divine wants you to see and muse upon, and perhaps act upon. It is up to you to decide how seriously you want to take this message from beyond. The way the runes are worded they imply someone is taking an action. Perhaps this is the action the Spirit is taking in the world, and just wants you to behold. And maybe it’s the actions the Creator wants to take in you, if you allow it, if you say yes. Perhaps it the action the Spirit wants you to take in this world.

Click on the rune picture to enlarge and see the visual runes...

Moves the dark wind through the sky bones.

I see the sky bones as the bare limbs of trees—like the bones of hands reaching up. The sky bones are also the supporting structure of the sky—the structure of creation. The sky bones are also the bones in you that are not physical bones, but your spiritual structure. The dark wind is one type of wind or breath that the creator blows through all sky bones. Maybe this breath brings a different kind of life to us than the breath God gives in the book of Genesis. Maybe this is a night wind that calms the heat, or takes away what needs to be taken away from us. Maybe it is a wind of death and winter which we see at work at the winter solstice, but which is also part of the breath of life, the part that brings on rest so that sprit may come again and new life will once again emerge from the sky bones. Maybe the dark wind is dreams. Maybe it is the element air in one of its forms.

Flows the a silence from the unknown

The original text here was “flows the silence from the unknowns (plural).” We changed it to “unknown” for better singing. The plural implies a pantheon of spirits or gods which flow through the world doing things, in this case delivering silence. The singular implies a unified Spirit, perhaps who dresses up in myriad costumes as it flows through the world. Either way, silence is a rare and powerful presence in our world. My daily world is really never silent, and my kids will grow up in a world that attacks their silence even more. A lack of silence creates anxiety and neurosis, there is no doubt in my mind about that. So silence is a critical gift of the spirit. As anyone who does silent meditation can attest, there is enormous power in entering into silence for us. It is such a simple sounding act, yet so radical and difficult for one who lives in TV/billboard/IPod land as we do. Of course silence is also reminiscent of death - a power also close to us at this time of year. And the word “flow” connects this with the element water, which, when it flows is never silent, but when we sit by a running stream it takes into a state of silence. Curious.

Flickers fire in the cold hearth

I see this as the actual element fire which cooks food and warms the house, and makes us feel good to be near. But it is also a gift of internal fire that can warm what needs to be warmed inside us, and it is imagination, Spirit, and it is also the fire of justice-making in the world. Maybe there is a part of your hearth that has grown cold, and this rune helps rekindle the proper fire there so food for the world may be cooked and served. Maybe this is an affirmation of home, our center, and that we must remember not to let to let anything, no matter how alluring, put our central fire out. Maybe it is a reminder to stay centered and grounded. Maybe this is the Celtic Goddess Bridget, who is connected with the element fire, and with healing, poetry and metal working. Maybe it is the sun coming back at the winter solstice to warm the earth.

Drums the thunder under earth
Originally this line was “Drums the thunder under old earth.” We cut out the world “old” to be sung more gracefully. The drum opens the religious imagination, and it connects us to the element earth. It opens visions and calls power animals to us. It is inherently an instrument of community because one can only drum alone for so long before the need to combine with the rhythms of others takes over. The drum is subversive to the powers that want to control us or hem us in, because the drum calls wildness into us, and it calls change into old earth. The drum cracks the layers of mud and concrete slathered onto us by the world and it calls us out to dance, renewed, and be authentically ourselves in this mysterious world. This drum is also the reindeer’s beating heart at the center of creation, as I related in the show. It is the pulse of the earth, the deep rhythm of the cosmos, perhaps the Schumann Resonating Frequency, more ancient than “old earth”—more ancient than all of our religions and all language and all thought. Perhaps it is the Logos of the Greeks, which was absorbed into Christianity, perhaps comparable to Wyrd in the Scandinavian tradition- the fundamental weave of creation.

Breathes light into the star room

I see this as an image out of the book of Genesis - the creation of the universe – the immense se “star room.” So perhaps this rune refers to an immense elemental power of air. But the star room is also the womb where human life is born, and the place of any new life that begins in the dark. Perhaps it is the imagination that is also a cauldron or star room of new life, because everything we do begins in the imagination. So maybe this is a fertility rune in one way or another. The star-room is also ceremonial space, or prayer space. So perhaps this rune is asking you to become fertile in your prayer life, that that fertility will result in new life.

Weaves the ice on winter’s tree loom
Weaving is an immensely mythic act – bringing together what is separate into a form that is useable and that transcends the nature of its parts. Maybe this rune affirms that winter is not the “bad” to the good of summer but one of the many ways the earth is woven, or one of the many ways the Great Weaver is at work – or at play – all around us. There is an affirmation of pain or suffering in this rune—that suffering is part of the weave of the whole, as winter is part of the weave of the whole year. We may not see the whole of what is being woven, but maybe this rune encourages us to try. There is in this rune maybe an affirmation that we are not in a world of caprice and luck, but a world that is artfully woven season by season, strand by strand, and so too are we individually, or as James Hillman says that we are “soul making” at each moment. Maybe we look at a stripe of horrible color in the weave and say “how could the creator let this horrible color happen?” but as we see more and more of the weave, perhaps that color becomes something else in the larger context. Perhaps this rune asks us to ask ourselves what world we are weaving. What pattern are we laying down with our actions each day? What is our Wyrd?

Calls the song back from the deep dark

I can’t help but see this as healing rune, a rune of what the shamans call “soul retrieval” - the act of calling, or singing, our soul back from exile. Many indigenous cultures encourage people to find their “power song” – that song that is given to us by the spirit world, and, when sung, brings a bit of that power into this world, and is also a prayer of praise that we carry with us through our daily lives. To have a power song or spirit song is to access a personal connection to the deep - a connection beyond words, a connection to the other world. That song allows us to carry that connection with us in this world and call on it simply by singing. Perhaps this is the rune of the Nordic Joik (pronounced “yoik”) the wordless praise song sung by so many indigenous people.

Flies the arrow to the heart

The spirits help us hunt. If we are respectful in many ways, the spirits will lead us to the food we need. Spirit helps guide the arrow to the heart
. This visceral image is wonderfully challenging and physical, for we live in this world, and we live by consuming other forms of life. We live in a trade-off of course - we use other forms of live to live each day, and we promise that one day we will die and become the food so that the next generation may live off of us. On an inner level, if we are respectful and trusting, Spirit will help us target what we are truly after, what we truly need. But there is a warning in this rune, as perhaps there is in all runes: when we identify as spiritual beings, we may be presenting a target to Spirit to come and strike us with power. If that happens, our lives may change, and we may see that change as a kind of death. Eons of spiritual love poetry romanticize this, but when it happens it is hardly ever truly fun.

So that is what the 8 runes given to me by the reindeer are. They are gifts to you from the reindeer goddess, gifts to remind you that the universe is not closed, that change is possible, indeed radical change is possible. And that you are loved by the cosmos.

Please feel free to leave your comments below in the comments section!

Jaime

Jaime Meyer and Wisdom Ways
to present
Winter Solstice:
Drumming & Ceremony

December 20,21, 22, 7-9 PM
at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality
Cost: $20
Reservations urged
by phone: 651-696-2788
by email: wisdomways@csjstpaul.org
The event is located at Carondelet Center
1890 Randolph Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55105

Following last year’s sold-out phenomenon, BLESSING, Jaime Meyer returns to lead you through another uniquely powerful winter solstice experience combining an evening of drumming, women’s chanting, and deep ceremony drawn from Celtic and Scandinavian shamanic traditions. Be prepared to drum, laugh a lot, and enter into a profound sense of mystery.

“It’s impossible to describe the experience! Jaime took the whole audience to another world, and we came back filled with wonder, love, and healing.” (audience member from 2006).

Meyer’s work is part theatre and part shamanic ceremony, part storytelling, mystical experience, and irreverent laugh-fest. The evening blends Meyer’s seminary degree with his 23 years of studying indigenous spiritual traditions and his many years of performing improvisational street theatre in the USA and England. He draws mainly on his own Celtic and Nordic roots, and on the ancient earth-centered spiritual practices in those cultures.

Everyone in the audience plays drums or rattles supplied by Meyer. Many people also bring their own drums and other instruments. Last year’s show played to about 110 people per night for six nights. This year’s show is only three nights. You are encouraged to make reservations soon if this kind of experience interests you.

“Something so inexpressible and utterly mysterious happens when people drum together,” says Meyer. “As Sun Bear said: A sacred space develops. Everything outside of that space shrivels in importance. Time bends. Emotions flow more freely. The bodies of participants become filled with life energy, and this energy reaches out and blesses the creation around them, and inside them. They become part of the earth rather than tourists or visitors. They bless and become blessed by the deep beauty of the living earth.”

He adds quickly: “But besides all that, studies show that drumming makes you sexy. It raises the energy that the Greeks called Eros—erotic energy. I learned that the very first time I drummed, and it never ceases. One ancient Greek also said that men with too much Eros lose their hair because it rises up inside them and burns the roots of the hair from the inside. I learned that too late.”

Meyer fills his serious spiritual theatre work with just as serious humor. “The day I stop laughing at my own absurdities is the day I become a dangerous spiritual person” he says, “and we have too many of those already.”

Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality, a ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, is producing the event. For 13 years Wisdom Ways has presented conferences and artistic works with internationally acclaimed theologians, ecologists and artists. Wisdom Ways seeks to nurture and sustain an ever-widening circle of conversations, explorations and practices that promote spirituality within contemporary culture.

Dear Drummers,

Whenever I look at my two boys, I think about dying. After the lights are out and everyone is asleep in the house, I sneak upstairs to my 8 year-olds room and watch him sleep. I’m filled with wonder at the unnamable, ungraspable life force moving in him, shaping him from within, this “Secret One slowly growing a body” as the Hindu poet Jabir once wrote. I can’t help thinking though that someday this boy will have to go to sleep without a father. I often wonder if he’ll take up either of my ceremonial drums or if he’ll hang them on a wall (which I consider a sin) or, like my brother did with our father’s watch and dog tags and turquoise rings build a glass case and display them with his 14 guns, a mausoleum devoted to Yang.

I move downstairs to the three year-olds room and gaze at him sleeping with his mouth open and limbs splayed out in three directions, totally safe and open to the world. I wonder if I will die before the point in his life that that he has memories of me. I wonder if he will take my prayer rug, the rug that all of our ceremonies are conducted on; a rug so full of what the Mayans call Its (remnants of spiritual effluvium) that I think maybe it should not be left in this world when I am gone.

The habit of sneaking in to watch my kids sleep and meditate on my death began when my first son was a week old. I watched him in his darkened crib, a stunned and dizzy new father, repeating to myself again and again, “Don’t touch him...he’ll wake up…you’ll be sorry…up all night like last night…don’t…don’t!” And of course I do. I reach out and take his tiny hand in mine. I hold it and close my eyes and then I feel someone taking my other hand. It is my father, and his other hand is held by his father, and I see a line of men holding hands, generation after generation, passing this bluish glow from hand to hand and into my infant son. And I see that I am not really what matters, the glow matters.

I think constantly about the unfathomable mystery of how we pass through this world, from darkness to darkness (although we really don’t know about that) from sleep to sleep (again, who knows for sure?) carrying the glow through this place we call Earth, how we nurture that glow or how we wound it and twist it. But ultimately, the glow is untouched by us somewhow and yet in some mysterious way it learns through us, or experiences through us, blesses and forgives us and heals us. I think about how if we are lucky and if we are courageous, and can get out of its way, we let it speak through us, and sing and move and love this world through our actions. And I think about John Muir’s lovely words--when we truly look at the world we see that everything is connected by luminous strands—glow connected to glow in every direction, and it all passes, all passes away, and is replaced.

I’m not morbid; it’s just that every night and every morning I think about dying.

So I don’t really need autumn to remind me to meditate on the great mystery of passing in and out of this world. But here we are, surrounded by the riled grey skies and exfoliating air reaching down to pluck the last breath of green from the lavender, that tease of first snow behind every gust. So here we are, in autumn, and we cannot help but meditate on the passing of all things, including ourselves.

The Japanese poet Kiko (d. 1894) says:
That which blossoms
falls, the way of all flesh
In this world of flowers.

And Minamoto-no-Shitago (d. 983) summarizes my life in a few words:

This world-
To what may I liken it?
To autumn fields
Lit dimly in the dusk
By lightning flashes

What the shamanist in me loves about autumn is the knowledge that we need regular exfoliation (losing of the leaves or bark, or more mythically, cleansing of the ever-streaked and pitted surface to allow new life to emerge). One of my favorite shamanist phrases: what happens in nature happens in us.

So as we gather this Friday we will call on our electrical potential to generate a few lightning flashes over our autumn fields using our drums as conductors. We will follow the words of another Japanese poet, Hamon (d. 1804):

In stillness I,
Light-bodied, set out for
the otherworld

See you on Friday,

Jaime