Entering Life's Rhythms: Drumming a Way into Sacred Time

I wrote this article for The Witness magazine in March 2001. WARNING: It's long. I'm posting it here because I was thinking of my indebtedness to Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect and the brand new Healing at the Speed of Sound, who has end stage pancreatic cancer. He encouraged me at a very low time in my life, and turned me on to the world of music and healing. He was also the person who suggested that Ruth Cunningham and I should sing together, which we currently do as the eponymous HARC.

Entering Life's Rhythm's: Drumming a way into sacred time

God set the sun to rise and set every day, and put the earth into orbit. The moon makes it around the earth every 28 days or so, the locusts come back every seven years, Advent comes before Christmas, Lent before Easter, Sunday before Monday, and work comes before play -- a really bad idea. We eat, sleep, and brush our teeth, our hearts seem to pump without any prompting, and many other events and phenomena seem to repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals through time. We start out riding tricycles, graduate to bicycles, and, if we're lucky enough to reach enlightenment, we get to view it all as one big interconnected unicycle. Through it all, we are rhythm.

The first thing we recognize on this earth is the vibration of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries, and later on, the sound of our mother's heartbeat and breathing while we are in the womb. The ear being the first sense organ to develop, somewhere between the fifth and sixth month of gestation, we begin to actually hear these internal rhythms. By 28 to 30 weeks, we can also respond to both the internal and external rhythms (by kicking or changing our heart rate). After we are born, there aren't many opportunities for such a nice rhythmic massage.

Rhythm is the most powerful organizational tool we've got. Since the ancients, rhythm has been used to mark communal events. The earliest drummers were women, using frame drums for liturgy. Look what rhythm did for King David, and the Benedictines; we're still hooked on the psalms. Armies still use drums to boost morale and energize tired troops (maybe if more people drummed, we wouldn't need wars), shamans use rattles like white noise, to scatter thought, and there's nothing better than Motown or the Poulenc "Gloria" to clean by; believe me, a clean house is a successful revolution. Rhythm has been used to celebrate, to warn of a storm coming, to ensure a good harvest and to accompany farm work. Dancers clap, stomp on the floor, make mouth noises, wear ankle bells or use their bodies as percussion instruments.

So what is it about rhythm that energizes us? What is the hypnotic effect that can happen with any kind of music, from the beginning of "She Loves You," by the Beatles, to a Bach fugue, to the latest sounds coming from the DJ's booth above the dance floor? The scientists say that it is the nature of rhythm to turn on the switches in the limbic system (or what used to be called the "visceral" or "reptilian brain"). The adrenaline starts to surge (bringing up our emotions and feelings), the information is then processed by the neocortex, and we are moved in myriad ways. Or something like that. I can never pay attention long enough to figure it all out; I get distracted somewhere around "She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAHHH..." In her book, When the Drummers Were Women, Layne Redmond says: "Scientific studies have shown that our moods, emotions, thoughts and bodily processes are rhythms of chemical energy. The Puerto Ricans call this fundamental rhythm that marks how we walk, talk, and interact tumbao. It is an expression of the totality of our personality." The verb tumbar means to knock down, to knock over, and is used figuratively in the sense of mixing somebody up, taking the senses away from you, or messing with your whole sense of being.

Rhythm can also calm and soothe us. It's no accident that one of the basic forms of meditation consists of counting the breath. If you're trying to get the kids to sleep, lullabies work like a charm by helping to slow the breath, relaxing them, and sending them to never-never land. Think of the tune "Silent Night," and breathe with it. We are all made of the same stuff. We all breathe the same air, the same air that people have been breathing since the dawn of time. I like to think that all of my favorite people have breathed the same air throughout history. Make a date for you and your breath, and put it in your book. Take a moment, find a quiet place to breathe, and think of all of the people whose air you are sharing.

Rhythm is more like dancing than knowing. We don't have to control or even be aware of what's going on for it to have a profound effect on us. It's our body that hears where to go next. When my uncle was in the hospital a few years ago for an angioplasty, the nurses were worried that his oxygen levels weren't improving a few days after the surgery. They were watching his monitors, and as they watched, his oxygen level rose to normal. A nurse asked, "What are you doing?" He said, "I was just lying here singing John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in my head." She said, "Well, keep singing it, because your levels are great." The body hears where to go next.

I first began drumming around 1990. I had a Djembe from Ghana, in West Africa, and had been told that it was used to invoke the divine spirit and its healing power. Then, while on vacation, I was in a beautiful park in Ithaca, N.Y., with some friends, picnicking on the lake. A man walked by and said "Drums for Sale." I couldn't believe what he had in his arms: four rectangular boxes with slits of various lengths and widths cut into the top that looked like tongues. I called him over and asked him to show me these "drums" he had made, which he called "slit drums." The sound took my breath away. I needed a slit drum. He volunteered that he had "more in the van," so I went for a peek, and found one that I really liked. I proceeded to drive my friends crazy all the livelong day, banging away on that drum.

I started to do some research on slit drums. According to Adrienne Kaeppler (in Mickey Hart's Planet Drum), "Slit drums ... are believed to represent ancestral voices which encourage the living to dance into a state of communal ecstasy in order to banish personal preoccupations and bring those dancing into communion with collective forces passed on from the dead to the living and those still to come."

Whoa! One world at a time, please! But I do need to banish personal preoccupations, who doesn't? Wondering about those collective forces, I looked up "spirit": geist, ruach, geest, spirare, esprit. Why had I never noticed that they all either mean ghost or breath as well as spirit? What else was I missing?

I decided to check out the effects of the drum on myself first. I started with the heartbeat rhythm, because it is the thing we all share. I found I could drum myself right into a trance if I kept the beat at about twice my heart rate. Years later I learned from Don Campbell (author of The Mozart Effect and expert on music and healing) that if you drum a simple eighth-note rhythm at 120-140 beats per minute for more than three minutes, it balances the brainwaves, and you start going into a trance. (Kids and people with blood pressure problems, do not try this at home! Talk to your doctor first. There are very real physical consequences when you mess around with your natural rhythms.)

The heartbeat is still the first rhythm I teach in drumming workshops. Along with our breathing, it is the most fundamental aspect of our lives, and just one of many basic things we do not pay attention to. It's also simple to learn, and anyone can do it. Close your eyes, place your hand on your heart or wrist, and feel your heartbeat. If you have trouble, don't worry, you're not dead yet. Imagine the rhythm of your heart. Now, begin to vocalize the rhythm with your voice. When you feel comfortable sounding out your heartbeat, try playing it on your drum, using your hands or a mallet. Try it for five minutes, and see if you don't feel both relaxed and energized.

The point of using the heartbeat is so that you can begin to get acquainted with your internal rhythms, and also to help you feel more relaxed. Try it with a partner, facing each other. It is a good exercise to enhance listening skills, concentration and intimacy. With your eyes open this time, each begin to play your own heartbeat rhythm. You will soon find that you are in synch. This synchronization is called entrainment, the force that brings two or more bodies vibrating with similar rhythmic cycles into alignment. Go into a music store, and strike an A tuning fork, and all the A strings on all the guitars along the walls will begin to vibrate in sympathy. Place two pendulum clocks in a room and come back a day later, and they'll be in synch too. Sit in a drum circle and lay out for a second, and your drum will still vibrate. That many things happen without my "help" was a huge lesson.

Drumming has been a positive revolution in my life. Like most of us, I grew up in that either/or, right/wrong worldview. Let's just say I did not flourish there. I see more possibilities on the margins, and luckily, in a drum circle, everyone's on the margin. The people who come to a drum circle are the ones who are supposed to be there, to energize the spirit and explore unity through music. No words are needed. If you are six or 90, broken or whole, happy or depressed, tuned in or out of touch, blind, deaf, lame, too smart for your own good or not too bright, a democrat, republican, anarchist or atheist, you have a place in the circle. You are a part of the community. Rhythm is a universal language, and you are the rhythm. I like the image of a circle, because it speaks to the mystic in me. In a circle, everyone is equidistant from the center. There is always room for anyone to come and go. All the members are equal in the circle, each with a voice that can be heard by everyone else. Everyone takes turns leading the transitions to new rhythms. The kind of music that is made in a circle is based upon that circle's relationship with itself rather than any externally imposed expectations.

Since I've been practicing drumming without a license, I have witnessed drumming cure headaches and relieve the pain for a woman with a brain tumor. I've seen the faces of many lighten and radiate the joy that was secretly lurking. I've seen bodies that were stiff become fluid, and people who are shy come out to play. I've seen angry people find a place to work it out. People have told me of their lowered blood pressure and of their reduced stress and anxiety. I've also seen how giving people a rhythm that they're not ready for looks exactly like test anxiety. There's a lot of shallow breathing and tense faces; heads go down, people get timid, stop listening, and withdraw from interaction.

I used to be affected by the rhythms of everything and everyone around me. It was distracting and depressing. I felt out of "synch." We often say that when we're getting sick. Trying to play to another's rhythm isn't healthy if the cost is ignoring your own. Drumming has enabled me to hear my own rhythms amid the noise and haste, helps me to find and maintain my balance, and helps to keep my blood pressure down. The increased awareness of my breathing has helped me to throw away both cigarettes and asthma medicine. Drumming has also enhanced my ability to listen, increased my level of patience, helped to work through grief and frustration, and given me a much more relaxed and positive outlook on life, because of its unique ability to ground me and bring me into the magic place of sacred time.

Francis Henry Turner's Blueberry Conserve

This week's been full of cooking my favorite summer recipes, dreaming up new recipes, and improving old favorites. I love to cook, but only in spurts, so I make big batches and freeze or can when A) I'm in the mood; B) I'm home long enough to enjoy it; 3) the necessary ingredients are so fresh that they leap off the shelf at the market and wrestle me to the ground; Q) I need the practice to keep my skills up; Y) I feel like improvising and there's nobody around to play with; or Z) I need to make room in the freezer. 
This recipe utilizes A-Z. Blueberries were looking particularly fetching (and organic and cheap!) last week, so I bought some to freeze. When I got them home I realized I already had plenty of frozen blueberries, so I thought I should figure out a way to use them. Out with the old, in with the new. Rotate the stock, etc. My dilemma was to figure out a way to use all those blueberries so that I didn't just sit down and eat a whole cobbler, or pie, or too much sugar. Then. It. Hit. Me: the first conserve I ever ate. I've dreamt about that conserve and have never had anything like it since. 
Frank Turner loved to cook. He had about three hundred cook books, and every room in his house had built-in book shelves. He loved to can things. He sang tenor in the choir and acted in the Ithaca Players production of The Nutcracker every year for a million years. When I first met him, he invited me to lunch and served blueberry conserve. I never forgot it. 
Digression: Frank was FUN. One night, a few of us were sprawled around the back parlor watching the movie Halloween. During a break in the action, Frank slipped out of his chair and quietly slipped back with two of the longest carving knives in the house. I saw him, but no one else did, and he had this impish look (his is the picture in the dictionary next to the word "imp"). He sat down in his wing chair and I waited. About ten minutes later, at a very tense point in the movies, I was startled by the sound of knives being sharpened. It took a few seconds for everyone else to notice that the noise was actually in the room WITH US, and the look on Frank's calmly murderous face as he sat in that chair drawing those knives expertly across one another with the most perfect motion, and the people screaming by the glow of the TV light is something else I'll never forget. I will also never forget the look of pure glee and the laughter and yelling that followed. 


Back to the conserve. Once it snuck back into my brain, I couldn't get it out. 


Enter self doubt: Could I do it? I haven't canned anything in a couple of years, and I've never made a conserve before. What if I cook it too long? What if I don't cook it long enough? Someone recently pointed out that it's always the same things that trip us up, or send us to the places where we entertain our self-defeating behaviors. We never look at them as the huge clues they are to finding the things we need to work on. We just get anxious. "God, why is it always the same issue? Couldn't we have a little variety?!"  


Enter confidence: I dutifully moved all the equipment and jars with me in the last move, without a second thought. So, If it cooks too long, heat it up and use it as a glaze for meat. If it doesn't cook long enough, it's sauce for ice cream. Time for a list of ingredients: Blueberries, lemons, sugar, raisins, walnuts, cinnamon (I think).
Then I went surfing, to hunt up a recipe that might be adaptable. Got one on the first try on Cooks.com. I tweaked it a little bit and here it is. When I tasted it I was immediately transported to Frank's dining room with the navy blue and white flocked Japanese wallpaper and his three cats. 


1/2 c. water
4 c.    fresh or frozen blueberries
4 c.    sugar
1/2 c. raisins or currants
1        lemon, seeded and cut into paper-thin slices
1/2 c. coarsely broken walnuts
1/2 t.  ground cinnamon


Combine water and blueberries. Cook over low heat until berries are tender. Crush some, but not all. Add remaining ingredients. Cook while stirring until jam is thick. I use the frozen plate test: spoon a little bit of conserve onto a frozen plate, and draw your finger through it. If the two lines don't reconnect, you're ready to can it. Process  the jars for fifteen minutes (from the time the water returns to a boil), and you're done. Makes about 6 half pints. 
If you've never canned anything before, here's a website that can help you figure it out:  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/fresh-strawberry-jam-recipe/index.html

A Prequel - "Where's the girl?!"

Greetings all,
This is a note about the not-so-recent past. Think of it as a prequel that doesn't require you to sit in a dark theater, or eat popcorn. Feel free to do those things, though, if you think it'll help. Feel free to skip this post and come back another time for something more to your liking... Hey, it could happen! Future posts will deal with life as I experience it (whoa!), and the beauty that is all around us, which lately means music, chanting workshops, recording sessions, 176 high school boys, how to bless one another and ourselves, hundreds of tiny baby apricots, and the peonies, which are now advertising for ants, to begin work immediately, to help meet the late May deadline.

But first, a word about where I've been hiding since early 2006, which past life regression was prompted by one email and two comments by former patrons just this week. It's been two years since I've heard from any of them. In January of 2006, I was dismissed from my former employment as chief bartender, spiritual director, and asst. manager of the Episcopal Book/Resource Center in the city of New York. For about 15 years, I toiled, wondered, laughed, cried, held my tongue with many people, and helped at least a few to find their way in to a deeper relationship with themselves, God and everyone else. I sought and bought the best books available on important topics related to the care and spiritual feeding of God's children on this fragile earth our island home. Then, I'd match up the books with the right people and vice versa. I loved the work, the people, and dealt with whomever God sent through the door. It's a deal I made with God a long time ago. It's made for an interesting life so far.

In 2004, there was a building renovation planned, and we were told that we'd have to move the store to the basement for a while, but that my job was safe. My partner had a brain aneurysm right before Thanksgiving 2005 and had been home from the hospital for less than a month when I was asked to come upstairs and told that my job was no longer my job. This seems to be the way of the world for many, especially lately, but one might expect an institution like a church to hold its people to a higher standard. I seem to recall something about not bearing false witness in my studies, but it doesn't seem to apply to people in the fulfillment of their institutional roles. It took a while to get over the pain of losing that particular job, and for months afterward, I heard there was a big fuss over the decision, which helped my morale, until the health insurance ran out four months later...

There are some patrons I still hear from, and some I miss running into: clergy and DRE's who bought books for their flock for book groups and Bible studies on a regular basis; folks who lived in the congregational development section because they wanted to improve their communities; the ones who lived in the spirituality section because they wanted to give people as much practical knowledge as they could about God and neighbor; the people who lived in the pastoral care section because they needed to take care of the fragile in their midst and/or the fragile in themselves; and all the the other broken, arrogant, certain, mean, sweet, clueless, overwhelmed, tired, happy just to be there, and entirely holy humans (some of you radiate beauty). Heschel said: Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." Amen.

I also truly/madly/deeply miss all of the precious jewels who helped to further my compassion practice, some by lying to my face, and to store patrons about my job status and future plans for the store. Then there was the bishop who asked "If you were a woman, what color Bible would you like?" I was so taken aback that I looked him straight in the eye and said "First of all, I am a woman, and second of all, not all women like the same color! It wasn't my finest hour, but we became friends. He saw me a couple of weeks ago at St. Paul's Chapel in NYC, came over and gave me a big hug. He looks a lot more relaxed since he retired. There was a woman for whom I opened the door after hours so she could prove the old adage "No good deed goes unpunished."
I am a calmer person, and much more patient; you were my teachers, and I thank you all.

One of the people who forced me to realize the depth of service often required (and mostly overlooked) was the loud, half blind and partially deaf old man who came in every other month or so for at least five years to look at Bibles; he monopolized my time, energy and patience, and the patience of everyone in the store because he was SO LOUD. He always took an hour, and never bought a thing, until the last time I saw him, when his shoes were so holey it was a wonder they stayed on his feet. He asked for me by yelling "Where's the girl?! She can help me! My colleague, Constancio De Jesus (and he is) told me "That one will get you your wings." I'd have settled for a new pair of shoes for the guy. He wanted a Bible to leave to his daughter when he died. I sold him one. I still think about him, looking down, yelling "Hey, I want a Bible!"

There was an endless stream of people for whom I know my presence in that store made a difference, and about whom I wonder and still pray for: the woman who came in on her first day back to work after having had a miscarriage, looking for a book on how to deal with it. We cried through the entire transaction. There were people who came in to find books, either for themselves or their loved ones, to deal with the death or impending death of a parent, child, sibling, or friend. There were some who just thought it was a good bookstore. There were people who came in to calm down after they'd been treated badly by their bosses; that's when I felt like a bartender, serving up good books and therapeutic music.

Nowadays I spend a great deal of time listening for that still, small voice to tell me what's needed for the task at hand. This month, I'm doing it in the recording studio. Who knows how anything will turn out? Our God is a very quirky God. I'll let you know what I know as soon as I can articulate it (which is not nearly as soon as I know it, usually). Thanks for reading, and enjoy your week.