Drumming

On Sunday, I attended a drumming meditation at The Source in Albuquerque.  I did not know what to expect.  The leader of the circle, Issa, was a man in his 20s or 30s, whom I met at S's house back in December.  We friended each other on Facebook, but all I knew was that he was a musician and did recording sessions.  And that he had a Swedish girlfriend named Isa, which made talking about them very confusing.

But, he invited me to come, and I was going to be in the area, and what the hey, I am still looking for that perfect way to meditate.  The labyrinth is good, because it involves walking and gives me a pattern to focus on, but I'm open to other suggestions.

The Source is less than a mile from my old home in the Parkland Hills area, but I just discovered it recently. M and I walked up one Tuesday morning and got coffee.  The coffee shop is on the north side of a quadrangle of buildings that are rented out for yoga, lectures, drumming, and other healing arts.  M is friends with the owner, and it is all very New Age.  It's placed in a stark section of Carlisle, just off busy Gibson, near Kirtland AirForce Base and the Sunport.  But if you could airlift it to Portland, it could be set down in the Hawthorne district without causing a blink.

I got there 10 minutes early and followed the sounds of drumming to a little one-room building with doors opening onto the deck and table area.  Issa was inside, seated facing the door.  He had set up a circle of floor chairs (the kind that are made of canvas, have a cushion on the floor and a long rectangular back set at an angle to the cushion.  We used to have them in the kids' area of the library, and they could stack, one within another.) He was beating out smooth practised rhythms on a wide circular hand drum, strong stubby fingers fluttering along the rim, seeming barely to touch but producing a resonant pattering boom.  He was dressed in black, with the sweater hanging over his paunch and giving him a cuddly teddy bear feel. His shoulder length dark brown hair curled around his face, his dark brown eyes looked slantingly down towards the drum, his profile showed clean and Semitic. Then he looked up and saw me and beamed, bouncing to his feet.

He had promised some extra drums, and I wound up with a beautifully inlaid doumbek, which he said he'd taken around the world.  Bits of the mosaic were missing, given credence to a life of adventure, and the drum-head was made of a tough sort of plastic, not leather.  I learned to make the resonant sound in the center of the drum-head, and the lighter "tek" sound along the rim.  And, while I couldn't do it consistently, I  was now ready to participate.

More people arrived, and we formed our circle.  Ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-sixties.  People were dressed casually, in jeans and t-shirts mainly. There was long grey hair tied in a straight pony tail, long red curly hair hanging loose, short curly hair, buzz cut bald, short with a cap.  And my short rakish salt and pepper hair fit right in.

We started with the singing bowl, passed around the circle.  Each person said his/her name, and the rest of us chanted it three times.  (It reminded me of the Unitarian Sunday School getting-to-know-you routine.)  Then we spoke our intentions, and blew into the bowl before passing it along.  Some spoke at length about spiritual connections with the earth, about losing patterns that no longer served.   I was succinct:  I want to let go of grief and loss and I want to embrace serenity and focus.

Then the bowl was set in the center, where it could collect the resonance from the drums.  Issa asked the participant to my left to start us out with a basic rhythm.  When it was settled, the next person took it up, then the next, then the next, all around the circle.  When it reached me, I found it surprisingly easy to join in.  I had the rhythm in my ears and I could feel it in the air.  My doum-tek was tinny and soft, not like the deep sounds the others were producing, but it slid into the sound without stress, giving its own color to the rhythm.
I closed my eyes and gave myself to the drumming.  Then I opened my eyes and looked around the circle.  Some were grave, focused.  Some were dancing with their hands, tossing their heads.  Some had beatific smiles, some were expressionless. Issa looked up at me and smiled, and I shut my eyes again.  The rhythm continued for 20 minutes or so, and then I became conscious of a deep insistent 'doum-doum-doum'....the rhythm had changed, we were all changing with it, and after several minutes we settled into a new rhythm.  It was organic, there was no leader, it just happened.  We played the new rhythm for another 20 minutes and then the sound got softer and softer until it just stopped.

Issa leaned forward into the center and struck the singing bowl so it rang, and our intentions and our drumming went out into the universe.

The whole time, I had been thinking, I've done this before.  And then it came to me.  In the summer of 1995, when T and my cousin were living with me, my friend Tim came by on a visit,  He had driven from Oneonta, NY, staying with friends all across the US.  I was his next to the last stop:  after visiting his cousin in Seattle, he was going to Hawaii.  From that trip, he never returned.  Every once in awhile, I look up his name, hoping against hope that he turned up again. Instead, I find other people's blogs about that time, and what it meant to the people whose lives he touched.  I dream about him.  I blogged about him a few months back.

And I remembered him last Sunday.  Here is the story I shared with the drumming circle, a version of which went into his memory book and into that other blog entry:

One day, he was doing dishes in my kitchen, when he began tapping on the metal sides of the sink.  The taps became hand slaps, satisfying reverberate booms. My cousin picked up chopsticks and began playing the bottles and jars of kitchen utensils on the counter.  I drummed on the counter, and T started dancing.  We must have jammed those rhythms without tunes for half an hour.  I never forgot that feeling, and I felt it again last Sunday.

I don't know if it was a meditation, but it definitely helped me touch something deep. I think I'll go again.