Many Rhythms
Good Monday Morning!
First things first here this morning I want to acknowledge that the rhythm of things is changing. For many years, these notes came every Monday probably for 48 weeks of the year. This year, I am noticing that between client retreats and personal needs an every other week rhythm has appeared.
My internal clock is choosing a rhythm that is different from the many rhythms around me, the seasons, the sunlight, the birds. Instead, I feel almost a siren call from the depths of my being. It is a call that is, for now, indistinct but audible, a call that has no words, but seems to have the deeper flow in its message. It is a rhythm both my own and arriving from somewhere I haven’t been yet. That stirs both my excitement and my curiosity.
Interestingly, as I have been learning to play the frame drum during the last year, I have learned to hold so many rhythms in my body, many at the same time. This is both literal and emotional. Literally, we step our feet, shake our hands, and speak the different rhythms aloud. Emotionally, it is hard to express the feeling of this, it can be a cacaphony or it can be a harmony. Literally it is hard to do, step one rhythm, shake another and speak a third.
Yet, when I can relax, allow these many sounds and rhythms to occupy me wholly, something magical happens. It is something about being a multiplicity, being a little city of my own while walking the streets with others. It is something about loving so many things, while letting them go. Something about carrying so much and letting it all speak through the multiplicity, through the profuse joy and profound bliss of simply living through my own body.
Layne is the reason I am learning to play the drum. You can see as you watch the many rhythms all singing together in her body and her hands while she is simultaneously listening and synchronizing with Tommy Be. I can’t imagine that my hands will ever fly over a drum like this; Layne was a virtuoso, an almost supernatural talent. I also can’t imagine the end of my gratitude for the ongoing teaching in how these many rhythms yield oneness.
In Chinese medicine we talk about the rhythms of different systems in the body, and we speak of the harmony that is the result of rhythms being well synchronized. Of course, you don’t have to think about these many rhythms in your body for them to sync up, but sometimes, you do have to consider where they aren’t syncing up, find the rhythm that doesn’t know when to chime in or to rest. For myself, the deeper flow is calling for more rest even in this strong light. When the light of the year reaches its peak as it will in just a week or so here in the Northern hemisphere, in response you can nourish your body by tuning into your deeper flow, the low slow flow at your core. You can let the world around you do all the growing, while you do the slowing, the listening, and you can be nourished by all that hum and vibration, allowing the many rhythms to flourish within and around you.
I don’t know what will become of the Monday morning rhythm. I am listening. I will keep you posted.