Atomizedlife’s Weblog

I have now been learning the Djembe for the last couple of month, on and off actually. I started rather by chance, having been lured to purchase an average Djembe at Soweto by a smooth talker. Mine is an antelope skin stretched on mahogany – nice enough for me. I am able to make some music though I am far from where my heart strums inside me.  It is so very basic and fundamental – drumming, hitting, sounding and clanging, beginning from the time we are a baby. These days, the whole universe is one large percussion instrument, from my heartbeat, to the metal on metal construction, the whoosh of the coffee machine to the skytrain mouthing into the station and the nasal Thai sounds to even the uncanny sound and drumming of fear I have. This latter is a new one for me. It is a slowly seeping panic starting innocuously when I see something or remember or get yet another call. LAst few months, it seems a dozen grandmothers fell like a house of cards. All in their 90’s so they lived well. Of course, but it seems like that all of one’s life is a preparation for its end. But, I was talking about drumming.  I drum when I feel like, usually with no regard for neighbours. They are Japanese and polite.  As I learnt during one such workshop by Fidel Marquez, I worship the drum, the Gods of the Djembe – the animal for the skin it shed, the tree that gave off its bark and trunk and I imagine the Mali’an who chiseled it. Then I shut the lights and play. In the beginning I worried, I was not drumming ‘well enough’. I still do but I am teaching myself to just play, play with my heart and it is liberating to resonate with the myriad wavelengths that come and go within me. I turned 43 this past month. It caused me to pause – just enough to move onto another rhythm.