A thousand ways can connect you to the spirit [column]

Wolf Songs and Fire Chats

There are three traditional hand drums in our home. Two were gifts and one was made by my wife a handful of summers ago. They hang on our walls as reminders that we’re supposed to be prayerful, to be in gratitude and live our lives as though they were a ceremony.

When we center our lives on the traditional teachings within those drums everything is harmony. We use them at gatherings and ceremonies or whenever the feeling of praise and thankfulness hits us. They’re good friends and their comforting presence is a blessing. I always feel empowered when I play them, uplifted, made more.

For a long time I had no access to the drums of my people. I was gone for over 20 years, lost in the maze of foster homes and adoption and I was effectively removed from all things Ojibway. But when I found my way back in the late ‘70s I found my way back to traditional teachings and the vibrant culture of my people. My life became better, happier, more fulfilled and when I learned to drum and sing with it, I found a measure of redemption I had ached for.

Nowadays, singing with a drum is natural and my wife and I often collaborate and sing and drum together. It’s wonderful. There is a resilient strength in drumming that feels right to us.

Maybe it’s the echo of the eternal heartbeat within it that resonates with us so maybe it’s just the knowledge that we are engaged in something tribal, something real, something ancient and something infinitely healing. Either way we are heartened and happy when we drum.
But there’s also a traditional African drum, a djembo, that came into my life a little over a year ago. Its head is made of goatskin and its body is the hollowed out trunk of a tree. There’s a hefty webbing of rope that keeps everything in place and provides a carrying sling. It has nothing to do with my Ojibway roots or heritage but it still affects me in the same good way.

I’ve listened to African music over the years and part of my music collection is devoted to it. I’ve always found something similar in the tribal inflections in the music and the rhythms have always entranced me, whether in the guitar of Ali Farka Toure or the mande, the gourd harp, of Toumani Diabate.

But until that drum came into our home I’d never considered how much that form of expression might fulfill me. I mean, I’m a North American Indian after all.
But when I sit and play that drum and allow myself to just express my emotions through it, the time just slips away and I become transported just like I do when I use our traditional instruments. There’s joy to be found there and nowadays my life would be less without that African drum.

I sat on our deck one sunny day in mid-morning. My wife was away and I was lonely. But it was a glorious spring day and I began playing a soft, slow beat on that djembo drum.

I closed my eyes and just allowed it to flow out of me. I beat out that solitary rhythm and I was swept up in its spell, scarcely able to believe that it was coming from me. I don’t know how long I sat there with my eyes closed and my face raised to the sky and my hands beating out that soft rhythm, but I do know that nothing else existed in my world except that sense of communion with the drum and the sky.

When I stopped and looked around me it was the same day, but the lonely feeling had vanished. In its place was a sense of order, of belonging, of being connected – exactly the feelings I get from using an Ojibway drum.
There was no place for loneliness in that. There was no place for emptiness and there was definitely no place for self-pity. Instead there was only room for gratitude and a sense that Creation was smiling and that I was an essential part of that glee.

There are a multitude of spiritual tools in this world. There are thousands of ways to be connected to spirit. I learned some time ago that I limit myself when I tell myself that I can only express myself with Native things.
The truth is that there is no one race of people, no band, no tribe that has a claim on the experience of the spiritual or a claim to owning the right way.

Because it’s all about spirit. There’s no color or no race in spirit – there’s only connectedness and celebration and we all need that.

So free yourself.

Experience.