Drumming The Soul Awake

Dear Drummers, I am looking forward to drumming with you this Friday. I feel like I have been “away” for a long time because of recuperating from surgery to repair a detached retina. All seems to be well with my eye although as any of you know who have had to be patient while healing, it takes far longer than you wish. So with one good eye and one terribly blurry eye, I have watched the presidential campaign sink into the expected malodorousness, and have wondered why we all – left to right, anarchist to wing nut –claim distaste at swimming in the sewer yet we all so happily jump in every election. I wonder how the mobs of wingnuts can love the eliminator of sin while hyukking it up at Limbaugh’s racist quips, and I wonder how the lefties can decry hate mongers while stretching truth as weirdly as possible to paint political opponents as wholly demonic. Don’t get me wrong—I live firmly on the angry left; I believe the current administration is full of actual criminals and I believe the...

Dear Drummers, Whenever I look at my two boys, I think about dying. After the lights are out and everyone is asleep in the house, I sneak upstairs to my 8 year-olds room and watch him sleep. I’m filled with wonder at the unnamable, ungraspable life force moving in him, shaping him from within, this “Secret One slowly growing a body” as the Hindu poet Jabir once wrote. I can’t help thinking though that someday this boy will have to go to sleep without a father. I often wonder if he’ll take up either of my ceremonial drums or if he’ll hang them on a wall (which I consider a sin) or, like my brother did with our father’s watch and dog tags and turquoise rings build a glass case and display them with his 14 guns, a mausoleum devoted to Yang. I move downstairs to the three year-olds room and gaze at him sleeping with his mouth open and limbs splayed out in three directions, totally safe and open to the world. I wonder if I will die before the point in his life that that he has memories of m...