Who are you?

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Permalink Reply by Pam McWethy on January 31, 2010 at 11:45am

Who am I is not altogether an easy question to answer.

Sticking to "in relationship to drums and rhythm" for my answer makes it easier. I have spent most of my life embracing the slow rhythms of seasons and life cycles.... I watch weather and delight in the dance between high and low pressure. I have, with great passion and satisfaction, tuned my life's timing to the driving beat of when to till, plant, weed, water, harvest, stack fire wood, cut firewood, prune fruit trees, tap maple trees, boil collected sap, clean sap buckets, order seeds. That is a 12 beat rhythm that only briefly rests at Christmas between stack firewood and cut firewood when the ground is not quite frozen enough to run the tractor in the woods without damage to the earth.

Then there are more personal rhythms that are part of my aliveness. Dancing - feeling the shared communication of movement married to music either in partnership with others or just dancing by myself - that is something I love. As I write, it comes to me that my relationships with people and animals are also a form of dance.... finding and moving with the rhythm that we share by being attentive to the tempo and tone of the invitation. At its best I experience this dance form as delight, joy and grace

As to the Drum. Although I have built a few, I am pretty new with them. They are busy teaching me new skills and awarenesses about interacting with others and cutting loose on my own. It is good food for my soul to keep discovering an expanding unknown within and a great satisfaction to energetically send my heart beat out to the earth and sky.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Deardorff on January 31, 2010 at 9:30pm

Beautiful wide as the sky answer Pam.

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Permalink Reply by Pam McWethy on January 31, 2010 at 10:58pm

Why Thank You Danny. What do you think of a coyote drum... one made with great love and honoring of the mysterious doorways that Coyote opens.... and surely it would need a very special beater. I think it would have to be supple and have a beater head made of rabbit.

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Permalink Reply by Aimee Ringle on July 14, 2010 at 2:06pm

So my drums are telling me it's time to finally offer a greeting post here - even though my computer battery is about to die.
I own three drums -
a metal and plastic darbuka that has been played in rivers and rain and rooms full of flying paint
a frame drum that I strung and stretched myself with a stone from the Ho River wound into the vortex of all the lashings - and heated over sacred Mondorla Fire
and a beautiful creature of a djembe that came home with me from Folk Life after completely captivating my hands and my heart
I have been drumming actively for about 5 years - seeking a balance of the rhythm in my hands that playing guitar can't really offer - and a spot closer to the heartbeat of things. Living rhythms - that steady and syncopate and whisper and shout with hands and arms...these make me come alive like nothing else on earth and so I am hunkering down to listen and feel and learn all I can from this particular deity in the Musical Pantheon. Rhythm is one of my best allies when I need to breathe more deeply, think and feel more calmly, dance more gently or more wildly, or be danced by pulse between everythings - thrumming between my ears and my hands and tumbling through my heart.

I am a student with a big goofy grin on my face - thoroughly inebriated by Rhythm.

The battery dies. Enough for now. I bow to this space and to each of your hands and the world stretched out beneath them - ready to be touched.

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