Bliss and Drumming: The Slow Enlightenment of the Hard Rock Drummer

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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I know there is a kind of magic that happens to guitars with all that intense physical connection with their players. Our energy, our emotions, our vibrations, it is all manifest energetically. Wood is porous, once alive, and the work and concentration and passion and creativity flowing from hands on a fret board must sink in, find the space in the soul of the instrument that absorbs this energy of the player. I imagine that the feel is second nature, that a player can pick up their guitar and know the smallest things about the instrument that only she would know, learned in hours and hours of such careful and pinpointed touch. The small anomalies, the rise of the frets, the weight of the strings and their distance to neck. The little things that signal position that only your fingers would know.

So much love is transmitted into a guitar; so many moments of pure focus, of pinpoint attention, of breakthroughs and live energy. So many times reached for to comfort, to console, to soothe. Guitars are cried over, danced with, dreamed upon. For a player who works with the guitar for a living, every aspiration and fantasy, every night of slogging it out or frustration or sold-out show is lived with the guitar in hand. The guitar becomes an appendage, an extension of the body, the player’s heart manifest on the outside.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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I got into a French mood the last couple of days. It rained pretty much non-stop in San Francisco and it seemed that Edith Piaf should be the backdrop here. I love the wistfulness of music from that far-away time. I was wondering about that feeling, so powerful, that romantic yearning for a different era. I was overtaken for an afternoon and watched Les Regles du Jeu, rated the all-time best French movie, from 1939. I got lost for a while in the romance of it all.

I feel so much gratitude for this ability to fall so deeply into this sort of emotion. Beauty is sustaining. I know that Edith Piaf’s life was difficult and yet out of it came music that can fill up a rainy evening with exquisite depth and magic. This music stretches through the years and lights up a life so far from where it originated, both in time and space.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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Oh to create uplifting, transcendent, soul-strengthening pieces of work. What happens as I write those words is immediate defeat. How can you enter into creating anything with the dream of changing the world? I can’t think of anything that clamps down on creativity more. I think of the unslept, fleeing families in Oroville at the moment. What good will a poem do for them right now?

I made it a point to buckle down to play more drums this week. Maybe I’m not creating anything of use or inspiration for the world, but I do need to keep my chops up. I am learning a new Zeppelin song. I need to just physically work at that, and play through the set, work on those things I’m constantly trying to improve. I wanted to get lost in that place without words, that place of geometry and algebra and primal communication beyond story. What lets loose in the moments of freely beating the drums is a deep language, connected to all time and all language. Drums are the first instrument, before words. Drums are the signal to gather, the calling forth of spirit, the connection to a past so long that only our cells remember. Drums are magic. This week, I got lost in the magic for a while. I consoled myself with rhythm.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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When I’m sitting in meditation and an emotion rises up out of nowhere, out of no thought or story, it’s as if a storm is passing through my body. Maybe first my stomach feels heavy, and I’ll watch as the heaviness starts to spread. I can usually name it: “Oh, here’s sorrow. Let me invite it in. Let me feel it fully.” It can shorten my breath to experience these things; tears come, and I fight to not fidget. I’ll watch the mind try to come up with stories, with reasons for pain. The only thing to do is keep falling into that still place, that quiet that lies beneath, and just observe. If I react, the emotions dig in. If I just observe, they rise up like storms that demand attention, that sway the trees and crash the jetties, and then leave behind the clear single note of an infinite bell.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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Fear is such a funny thing. I don’t mean funny-strange. I mean funny- ha-ha. When I am in a hole, I forget that I have tools to get myself out of the wallowing. I guess that’s one definition of being in a hole, that you forget that you are actually able to crawl out. When I remember that I have all the power to change things, that is the first thing that makes me laugh.

Then, what is really funny is when I let fear in. I invite it in, let it fill me up. I don’t tell myself a story about it, I just feel the sensation of it. First, my chest feels heavy, like I can’t breathe right. My limbs get heavy, and my whole body feels weighted down as if something is preventing me from moving. When I feel this way, I see that the way my body reacts in fear is just like a mouse, like a rodent, or like one of those fainting goats. I just go stock still, weighted with fear. The thought is a little funny.

Then, I bring the fear into the mind, and think of the thing I’m afraid of, and follow it out to the farthest conclusion. When I follow any fear out to the very worst scenario, the final conclusion is always the same:

“And then I will die.”

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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I am going to accept that you will believe what you want to believe and I’m going to say, you are right. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what is best for people, except that I know in my soul that compassion and empathy and love is what makes my whole body sing. It’s what makes my life beautiful and I love to believe that each person can find this beauty. It’s what makes me look at the sky and the clouds and the trees and the earth and think, this is all here for me and there is no me. We are all living light of God. This moment you see is the dream you are dreaming. Let go of the fear! Let go of the hate! Let go of the blind acceptance of people who speak only of separatism and hate and fear and realize, you can run, but you can’t hide. We are all here together, and we have all, in the future, or in the past or in some great cosmic understanding of no-time, come out the other side and found that it is all one vibration of love. I am a hippie and I am unknowing, but I can tell you that if I were to fall through this bank of clouds and through the red sunshine on the horizon my last thoughts would be of love. We are all together in this one karma. It’s you and me, together forever. I’ll love you forever. No matter what pain comes, this love will carry me through

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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It should be pretty apparent by now, if you have been reading or listening to these blogs of mine, that I believe we are all One. Connected by one consciousness, a unifying energy of love. I have spent my life on a kind of spiritual path, following a deep intuition that my goal is to open to love more, to widen compassion to an infinite degree, and thereby do my part to change the world, one interaction at a time. I have not been successful in this, the unenlightened being that I am, but I recognize this as my challenge and my path. As I move forward however, my belief grows stronger that each human shares this potential for enlightenment. At the base of the true self, each human is already enlightened.

The Buddha knew that he could not achieve real enlightenment until each being, past, present and future, was also enlightened. Which means that he saw into the future, to the time when each person was there, living in eternal compassion and light. Somewhere in time, we are there. Even people whom we don’t like. Somewhere, they made it. We made it.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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I love the quiet. I guess I’m in the minority, judging from how there are screens speaking to me pretty much as soon as I go outside: TVs in cabs and elevators and restaurants. I went into a beautiful restaurant over the holiday, and sat at a bar that was made of pale golden marble, lit magically from within. The back bar glowed blue between the bottles, and soft jazz played in the background. It was gorgeous, or I guess it was, when I could forget about the six plasma screens stretched above us, each of them playing something different. My brain doesn’t handle that well. I find myself absently staring at the moving images without recognizing what it is I’m watching, but forgetting where I am. Yes, I’m in the minority.

Anyway, I do love getting lost in an afternoon of story. Not only that, but I was connected with my best friend on and off all weekend, and we were trading recommendations of what we were reading, forwarding snippets to each other. It was exquisite.

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine. Photo by Vicki Wallace Caucutt.

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A few weeks ago, driving through Central Oregon with Zepparella I had a thought as the girls lay dreaming in the back: maybe all the natural world is here purely to be recognized. The grass was waving at me as I drove, and I had a flash of gratitude that I could dream it into being. Maybe we are all here to just be seen. Maybe we are a dream of the hawk and maybe the hawk is a dream we set to flying. Maybe my true self is all the dreams dreamed. I am being seen and breathed and experienced and that is all I need to be.

(Noelle said, “did I see you wave at a tree?”)

From the blog www.blissanddrumming.com, read by Clementine.

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No matter how close we get there is no touching anyone. We reach to the singularity of connection and we find infinity there. We gaze through a fog of story and emotion, we reach and yearn for connection and never seem to break through the narrative we are telling ourselves about the person for whom we reach. No wonder this time of year, when we are supposed to feel the most love, many people feel the saddest.

This inability to connect happens when we see those around us through the lens of our own ego, our own story. This inability to connect happens when we are looking for something separate from ourselves, and never see that we are all the same substance, connected at the base of it all. We reach and yearn and strive for intimacy when we are not separate. Underneath every person is this infinite plain of unknowable energy. Infinite consciousness. Infinite love.