drum

I love the tabla, and have a friend who can play it good! I'd love to be able to play it myself- if possible without spending a lifetime mastering the skill. Yet I have always drummed, and a decade ago was happy to have finally discovered _my_ instrument: I play the African Drum, (called the Jembe or djembe.)  It is made from a hollow tree-trunk in the form of an hourglass with a skin on the wider side. That and the Daff, & I found that I was a natural to what is called the Master Drum, the hardest drum to play.. (but more on that later.)

Have you ever been to a drum circle? I was at one in NYC in 2002, in a sort of a healing ceremony of native americans (aren't we all native by now?) on the anniversary of Sept 11th. Instruments changing hands.. drums and bells and pieces of knocking wood flying around.. some on the ground.. some literally in the air and between newly acquainted intimate friends.. My friend who went with me, (super soul... soulmate kinda friend..) picked up and stayed with a baby-shake.. that was cute. A tune, or a beat, came to me and kept trying to manifest itself.. i.e., I kept trying to play it and just that, but with instruments changing the beat kept morphing .. almost as if I was in communication with something (someone?) beyond my comprehension. I was just being moved by the music to keep increasing the tempo, they wouldn't let me rest with that beat of the evening.. what I felt I really wanted to play. The drums kept changing more and more towards the Djembe, the african drum.. and I kept getting more comfortable in the atmosphere, which certainly had a family quality to it, rather a camping or outing quality of sorts, in the company of true friends. And this was my first time in this gathering! I just knew this friend and Dr. Luz, a great Iridologist (Iris Reader and teacher of human health, that was a nice surprise.) And the beat! Wow.. And I knew that beat. Where from, don't ask me. But I knew that I know that beat. It still comes to me at times, and demands the homage of my hands. The Beat kept prodding me, almost mocking me to give more, with its tempo.. (Does that make sense?) I don't even know why I'm sharing this.. maybe because its the dominant thought at the moment.. and certainly because I'm loving re-living the memory as I write this. The people who organized it, Cathryn and Bill, had lost their Village (NYC) medidation center when I last checked, but I trust more gatherings will come.. I certainly hope they do. It was a great event.. a super strong sharing, and the final instrument I ended up with was such a tremendous gift.. it felt like it belonged to me.. or maybe I had things backward.

Do you know of the Daff? It's the one instrument documented to have been played by Muhammad, the Prophet (S) in public.. Tell that to the fundamentalists!  How could he have played the master drum unless it was in a drum circle?  Well, let this player of the Daff share what he learned: you don't just PLAY the daff. You allow it to be played by your stable and able hands. Really, once I got to the Daff, I settled on just holding the Master Beat, i.e., keeping the pulse of the mood, or the clock of the rythm, the home-base of the game play. Initially I couldn't figure out how to hold it, and it kept changing its posture in my hand as the other hand worked to keep the beat steady. And then I latched onto the rope that was tied to it, and attached my left hand to the rope so that my right could beat! There was only one <i>right</i> way to hold it, and I discovered it by merely refusing to accept anything else. I was initially happy that this simple-yet-complicated drum had revealed a way for my to play it. Yet even in my naivette I realized that it was the drum that was really playing me, or somehow, was allowing something else to come through me to play it the way it was being played. The joy of doing the simplest thing materialized into the most difficult task I could imagine at the moment, because now I was the beacon that others were free to loosen themselves around.  I had made a pillar that my new friends could tie themselves to and dance as if insane.  (Isn't that sort of what happens at Sundance?  But lest we digress...)  And dance they did!  I had never known a jam the way that jam came through that day..  A totally trusting feeling between initial strangers who were all giving their forelocks into the hands of a newcomer who had proven himself in their presence, and allowing themselves to be righted by that single steady hand while they lost themselves within theirselves.  It was humbling, and it was such an embarrassing fact to admit that I am sharing it now, 6 years after the fact, in public for the first time.  How can I say how it was? Oh it was divine, what else can be a better word?

How it happened:
The people there, as soon as I was steady and rock-stable, they started improvizing around the master beat which I was holding, and not allowing to lax.. Literally had more fun beating the basic beat, Dum, Dum, Dum, than the ball I was having jazzing around it earlier. The crowd went haywire.. They were playing and swaying, ringing and knocking and it was the most amazing cacophony of sound I have EVER known AS Music. What amazing music that was.. I feel I am there right now, hearing it in my mind's year. Listening to bells and knocking wood and drums and everyone making their own music which together was better than any symphony I have ever attended. (Was juz liztening to Amitabh paroding "Rang Barsay!!".. I was beating to that too.. what's happening?-)  It was almost like, in the movie "The Doors", Jim Morrison sees the native chief on the stage with him and is dancing in a (Native) Brother Dance, by a large flame... Now, when I visualize that evening, it feels like it was a true "Night Owl" (native term of friends gathering around a fire, telling stories.)  The love that was felt in this gathering of now trusting friends, and each others' smiles and expressions (/exasperations .-) was in direct contrast to the pain that was heavy in the air earlier, even after a whole year, in this - The City of Earth (Al Madinat al Ardh) - which fortunately or unfortunately happened to lie in the one country that felt at the time (incorrectly) that it was the whole world itself, and had the right to exact revenge and do whatever it chose because it had been wronged: the United States. [Land of the FREE to choose their method for paying taxes.]  

Okay, that was unnecessary.  I know, I'm getting "controvertial" by going into this line of reasoning, but I am speaking only the truth, and ask any nonsense to be called out and faced!  I have been a part of many cultures, and even as Muslims, we know that there's more going on around us than meets the eye.. There is so much pain still out there from what these people who call themselves Muslims DID on 9/11.. There was nothing of SaL'M in it. (Root word for Islam, Muslim, Salaam, Shalom, etc.) I cannot conceive the term Muslim as a label for them. There must be another term.. after all, even the people who Ali (KAW) had to fight and kill when he became caliph used to call themselves Muslims.. but .. there is a reason a Khalifah-e-Raashid went against and killed every last one of them. What kind of Muslim would face Allah saying he/she killed X-number of Humans? Allah says that killing ONE human is equivalent to killing all humanity.. these misguided souls killed thousands! So how can we blame the poor and simple President for doing what hes allowing his cronies to do? They're just clutching at straws? They have no idea how to tame this monster that his dad, among others, created. Maybe they don't want to, how else would ARMS Races be justified in this already Uni-Polar world?  *phew* a'ight, I won't call people names. ISLAM is peace. Islam tells me to accept what happened as part of God's Grand Design and move on. Islam is a code of life, what my Peophet followed (SAW) and what his sworn enemies saw and melted by seeing. Islam, to me, is the encapsulation of these words: PEACE - SUBMISSION - ACCEPTANCE.

A true buddhist would be a better muslim than the people who did the mass-violence on the scale of the WTC Disaster.. That is not what Islam is, or means, or preaches... Islam is a system of peace. It spread because of the peaceful acceptance exhibited by the man who was tasked to convey it, and won indegeneous populations where it did not go with an army through peace and example. Coastal India was one such example. Even later, when Muslim saints came to Hind, there were many who were saints of both hindu's and muslims. What would these sages say to what is being made of Islam in the "islamic countries" that want to spread the message as it has become now? What word are we choosing to spread? Can we not choose a word that people will actually want to listen to, instead of this loud banging of rockets and bullets, which even the most patient of listeners will only put up sheilds against?  (There is more welling up inside my heart here, but I'll hope to come to that tangent another time, possibly on this forum itself!!)

Look at where this conversation is taking me now. Lets end this and thank the Infinite Creator, whether you call this infinite being Allah, or Bhagwaan, or Great Spirit, or God, or whatever label you give to The One That IS, for the wonderful foray in time and space, and the thoughts that have graced this man and those few who have taken the time to peruse these with him. I believe I will write more on this. Let me know if you'd like to hear more. My Salaams and Blessings to You and Yours!