Welcome, you pulsing seekers of experience, you sly dancers on the edges of reason, you lovers of the Holy in its uncountable costumes, oh you beautiful, extended tribe of drum lovers! Welcome to the drum this Friday, July 30, at First Universalist Church, located in cosmically enlightening Uptown Minneapolis! We have plenty of drums and other funkilicous items that you can play with, or you can bring your own wahoo-maker. We love it when people bring their musical instruments to add melody, and we love those of you who come to dance. Friends, the Great Wahoo has many faces, yes, yes it does, and we invite them all.

In 1819 the Poet John Keats wrote in a letter, "Call the world, if you please 'the vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world." He was saying that we are not a perfect soul imprisoned at birth in a naughty body, pining to be released back home to pearly heaven. Like fruit and grain, like metal tools, our journey through life shapes, refines and ripens the soul. We take in the energies and nutrients of this world, use some, toss off others, mix them, fire them, water them, heat and cool them, and we make a soul. I find that so beautiful, so mysterious and so right: we make the soul. If there is a motto for Drumming The Soul Awake, that little phrase of Keats would be in the top 10.

We are entering late summer, the time of the ripened fruits and summer storms, the time when the grain will soon be harvested. In the Celtic wheel of the year, the month of August is called Lunasa, after the god Lugh (pronounced LOO), the God of many skills. Lugh is the very image of the soul fully shaped and ripened. (More about Lugh here).

This Friday we will enter into a powerful shamanic experience on the idea of being shaped (and re-shaped) by Spirit. I will draw from two mythic pools - the Celtic and the Scandinavian traditions. It's one of the most powerful interactions I've been taught and I hope you will find it to be also.

If you have come to recent drums, you may notice how this Friday's drum connects backward to the Summer Solstice drum with the theme of "changing the story," and it will connect forward to the drum in August 14th (the Gathering of the Tribes,) and to the following drums in September and to the fall Earth Ecstasy retreat which, for now is subtitled "Oh Great Dark Mother Release This Love." I build each Drumming the Soul Awake experience as its own unique (hopefully useful and beautiful) experience, but I also try to build a year of experiences that you can connect together to shape for yourself a long, deep journey of soul-making, if you please.

Blessings of the summer thunder, the buzzing dragonfly and the sweet nectarine juice be yours,



Jaime

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