Two Wells
( Painting by Esao Andrews ) Welcome to year seven of Drumming the Soul Awake. (I am astonished and humbled by that sentence!) The drum is my teacher with 1,000 lessons to teach me. One lesson would be enough to fill a life but the drum does not stop at one. Here is one lesson the drum teaches: we live with two wells in our heart. When we drink from the well of fear we begin wanting to build a walled garden around our life, to plant only acceptable plants, and to paint pictures of our own face on each wall. We sit in our garden, sipping from that well of fear, and we look for imperfections in our work, where this curve went wrong, and where these colors clash. We try to remember the correct scientific names for each plant, nervous that we will forget or get one wrong. We decide who we allow inside the garden, and it is always only a very few and they must agree to live by our rules. The walls need constant repair and the beds require constant weeding. The height of the grass needs to