Drums and Spirits

I’ve been thinking a lot about an intense experience I had at my dad’s in Deland, Florida, with the trees. I won’t go into more detail because it was so damn incredible that for it to be ridiculed or shared with the wrong people would screw with me. But it reminded me of an experience I had before that, in middle school, that I can share.

My dad is a percussionist, mainly hand drums, mostly Djembe. I used to go to his classes since I was there (then unfortunately I hit a retarded time in my life in high school and missed out on a lot of free drumming and dancing classes because I’m RETARDED), and I got decent enough that he used me to keep the rhythm when we had beginners. (I still miss that. I haven’t touched a drum in so long – I bled on my drum, too, which apparently is like… a bonding rite with it. It’s probably mad at me… I’m so… lethargic… it’s so… lame…)

But anyway, apparently sometimes if acoustics are just right, and you’re standing in just the right place… and probably also if you’re in the right state of mind… sometimes a drum circle can do some CRAZY thing with harmonics and you actually hear “human” voices. From the drums. As a collective.

I got really lucky to experience this (no one else in the room heard it, though.) I was dumb enough to stop drumming for a minute in shock, but it didn’t interrupt it, thank god. It was gorgeous. I have no way to describe it. The rhythm was speaking, it was singing, through dead wood and animal hide. It was beautiful. It was a flowing, deep, watery singing. Watery harsh and deep though, more like the ocean than a stream. It was incredible. I remember that moment in such joy because it’s one of the experiences that I can share and also confirmed so much life for me. People, using materials of dead tree and animal, sitting together in a circle, without even realizing what they were doing, created this life, this joyful singing, this reminder of where we come from and how joyful human nature can be, how joyful nature can be. Whoever tries to tell you that living in a box is more joyful than living in the trees is insecure or trying to sell you.

We may have been in a room, but we were using some of the oldest human tools, and even older kinds of flesh: of tree and animal. Those things are not new. They are not “progress.” But they helped me much. It’s really good that it happened, too – I was in a really, really bad stage of life. I was masochistic, recoiled, reclusive beyond quiet into the realms of vicious, and hated almost everything. I mean, people think I’m uncommunicative now… jesus, if only they had seen me then.

And then that! I wrote about it, and it was likely one of the few joyful things I had written in forever. I wrote that the drums spoke to me. It was just… incredible. One of those things you know will affect you forever, whether you think of it often or barely at all.