The Call of the Drum

All over America, people of all ages are taking up drumming in great numbers. In communities all across the country, small drumming circles are springing up, oriented not toward performance and musical virtuosity, but toward personal transformation, consciousness expansion, and community building. Since there are no prerequisites to drumming, anyone can join in and explore rhythms with hands and drumsticks as an exhilarating way of communing.

Folklore around the world reflects the age-old use of drumming for creating communal and sacred space. Realizing that healthy living things are not only internally rhythmic, but also synchronized with their environment, the earliest communities of humans based their survival on keeping track of these rhythms. Living in harmony with the rhythms of nature was of vital importance. Perceiving life as a rhythmic existence, primal peoples used drumming rites to arouse and shape group emotion and behavior, developing a continuous, shared consciousness.

Drumming also served to influence modes of awareness that both underlie and transcend the normal patterns of consciousness. Cultures throughout the world continue to use drumming to initiate changes in group consciousness and to attune to the rhythms of life. The rites may differ significantly from culture to culture, yet virtually all utilize the drum to induce holistic states of consciousness.

Our own western culture is deeply rooted in drum images: the Little Drummer Boy of the Christmas tale, rudimental drumming of the military tradition, and the driving beat of rock and roll. Missing, however, is the spirit or trance side of the drum, a side recognized by virtually every culture on the planet. There are two voices to a drum. One is physical, having to do with the drum's construction, cultural context, and method of playing. To commune with the drum's second or spiritual voice, we must be carried away by the rhythm. We must soar on flights of rapture. It is this ecstatic element that today's drummers are rediscovering.

People are again hearing the call of the drum. As we hear and respect the compelling voice of the drum, we connect with our own inner guidance, which inspires us to heal our own place on the planet. The heartbeat of the drum is breaking through our soulless scientific misconceptions of nature to a new communion with our planet. The drum is calling us to a path of environmental sanity, to rejoining the miraculous cycle of nature. Indeed, it is the voice of our Earth Mother who is speaking through the drum, for the drum echoes the pulse of her heart. Her heart is crying out to the circle of humanity to attune our hearts again to hers. May we all heed the call of the drum.