Apologies. I can’t be long. I need to buy a drum. There are no djembe drums from West Africa, looking for new owners in my new, rural community.
Since I arrived home last night, my fingers are tapping everything in sight – kitchen counter, bed sheets, oatmeal pot half eaten, sweetened with dates and cinnamon. I wake up with vibrations running through my body, I’m an idling Porche, waiting to hit a highway, drum between my knees.
I did a weekend of rhythm making and TRE (tremors releasing method to induce the let-go of deeply held patterns). I’m told it’s the natural way the body releases trauma – animals do it all the time. We humans have learned to freeze the tremors, which results in anxiety driven patterns we lock into our system. We take pills and alcohol to try to pry them out of us. The drumming helps the body tune into another zone, which allow the tremors to occur more deeply. It seems to work.
I’d love to say more…tell about the interesting women on the course, the joy at release, but…I have to find something to land my fingers on, find that beat…my authentic, original song. Then thrash a drum with it until every cell in my body sings with release. I’ve tasted something and it tantalizes, makes me want to get in my car and drive to Long Street in Cape Town, headquarters of Djembe world, where drums live and wait for hungry whites to free their inner African rhythmic reasons for choosing this continent as birthplace.
It’s taken me a while to find this kind of ectatic release. The timing though, is perfect and the rhythm is as fresh and new as the young child I saw in my minds-eye, dancing with her arms in the air and her hair flying in the sunshine and raindrops of a monkey’s wedding shower on the Highveld.
“When did you stop dancing?” the grandmothers ask?
“When did you stop hearing that driving beat inside you?”
“Perhaps you are the granddaughter to break the patterns?” they whisper in their toothless rasp.