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Saturday, March 22, 2014. It sure does not feel like my version of spring outside, but at least progress in this northern clime is happening in the right direction although the temps are still frigid. As I work on some finishing work for some handspun, hand woven wool items I am adding to my hoped-for sales inventory I crave what I have done for the past 14 years in the high desert. I want to take myself and my work OUTSIDE into the glorious sunshine to work!!
Not being able to do so means to me that my health-enhancing medicine of the NOT-pharmaceutical variety is unavailable to me – and what a price I pay for being up here with my family by its absence.
Oh WELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I spend a lot of my time trying to keep my thoughts empty of WORDS and my body free of EMOTION!!
There was a time in my life when this state came completely naturally to me. That time existed during all the 18 years of the horrific abuse I suffered in my ‘first life’ and during the following decade-plus of my ‘second life’ as an adult. Then I went into my ‘third life’ into therapy and ‘what-nots’. NOW? Oh MY!!!!! I have so lost track of what ‘life’ I am in today!
Calm.
Hard to get to.
Not impossible.
Takes WORK and literal self-direction of all of my energies.
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After my 4-5 days of online research related to a project my daughter is working on as I mentioned recently I concentrated (after some serious prayers for guidance) on letting LIFE – my life with me in it – show me if I had any reason whatsoever to pursue any of the over-600 research sources I found regarding American Indian/Native American/Indigenous/First Nations health and lack thereof.
My answer was nearly immediate post-prayers. A friend of mine delivered me and my low budget debit card for a short visit at our local terrific music store. I left with my first gorgeous set of DRUMSTICKS (under $10) and a “drumming pad” (under $30)!!!!
Now HERE is my JOY!!
No doubt about it.
Living in an apartment building (SO DARN DARN!!!!!) I can’t make any DARN noise!!! No conga drumming! No spirit to whatever music I am listening to online! BUMMMMMMMERRRR to use a term from MY generation!!
So????
I can do what I can do. True for everything. No matter what.
I have to MUTE myself in my life. OK.
I also want to learn how to take the fantasia of rhythm that comes through my hands and then through the conga drum and channel it through the (distancing) tool of a drumstick. Four measures = hands on conga drumhead. Four measures, same beat = STICKS on a nearly silent pad.
Well. It’s a start. I know now from all my living and trauma-healing research that early severe abuse changed the way my right and left brain hemispheres developed. It changed the relationship my ‘two brains’ have with one another, the way they communicate with one another, the way they process information, the way they gather information, etc…….
I can feel that now that I am 62 distorting the way my left hand plays rhythm versus the way my right hand does. (I am lateralized right!!) As my ‘left body’ is driven by my right brain – my super dominant brain hemisphere for nearly everything in my life except detailed writing, etc. – I need to foster my left rhythms.
I do NOT find myself altering my left rhythms one tiny bit on the conga drum. My two halves dance together like all the tomorrows in the universe are passing right through them. All fun, all fine and good – except – that process is severely altered and interrupted and made massively (ugly!!) once the ‘mechanical’ objects of the drumsticks enter the communication linkage stream.
As I engage in this process I am remembering nearly 30 years ago when my delighted soul worked on clay sculpture. I watched my creativity interact THROUGH TOOLS in interaction with the clay knowing I was experiencing a process so very ancient to our species. We use tools because we WANT TO!! Yet the kind of tools we use greatly determine output as that output cannot avoid being SHAPED into its shape by the shape of the tool that touched it in its creation.
Hands versus drumsticks? Each shape sound differently. And to ME as a super-sound-sensitive-sensitized person sound is alive to me AND physically tangible. Sound HAS a shape to me and no more so than with RHYTHM! Sound is physical to me – how could it not be so?
I also know as the research tells us that little people raised in environments rife with verbal abuse have their brain development changed….. This is part of what I know about my musical process.
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There is an all-day percussion free event at a local college on April 5th (I mentioned in a recent post). My daughter is not going to let me weasel out of going to this. (24th annual)
I seem to have lost track of many, many parts of myself – as I see things – that were active in my adult life. Where am I? This is not so much a sense of WHO am I? as a sense of having literally LOST important parts of myself through stress/anxiety/literally fear reactions to the stresses of my life especially in the past 10 years. Left to myself I would talk myself out of going to this event (alone) exactly out of fear.
A friend just reminded me, “It’s not the things you have done in your life that you end up most regretting. It’s the things YOU HAVE NOT DONE.”
So. Perhaps in time I can take percussion lessons at this local music store. The gentleman who teaches them has a doctorate in percussion. I couldn’t find that kind of teacher in the high desert little town I just moved from. Nor could I find a free event locally with some top-name drummers performing as I can hear April 5th.
So. I am not currently in an inner space where words are much of a delight to me at all. They occasionally become reduced in my reality to a level of purely necessary tools and not methods of delight. I am in one of those times, as my blog neglect is demonstrating! However – I am not far away!
Overall I am working at finding Ms. JOY within me. Never my easiest task. (Why are females not represented among the big POWER DRUMMERS? I want to know!)
I LOVE THIS! “That’s OK, Linda. You CAN LOVE THIS!”
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I will also mention that I met the woman who lives in the apartment on the other side of my north wall. Her sister is expecting a daughter in May. The newborn will be plopped into a daycare setting shortly after birth. I am thinking about talking to my neighbor – if I make this decision – about my caring for the teensy person for some weeks once her mother returns to work. My 20-month-old grandson should do fine with this. The weather will be warm enough we will not be trapped in the prison cell of an apartment. (I am an OUTSIDE person and this climate DOES me no good!)
I could also earn $$ this way toward purchase of the $899 electronic drum set I would love to have so I can practice in this place silently to my neighbors. Keeping yet another little person out of a “day orphanage” even for a few short weeks post-birth would make me very happy. This is a very small apartment so not sure about any of this. Just saying. While words are with me for this short period of time today.
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job) – what a gift and thank you Ben! Click here to view or purchase:
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site
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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »
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Stop the Storm 