Beneath all being is a universal rhythm that is as deep as natural law and as easy to find as the beat of a drum. After giving up an early interest in percussion 50 years ago when a school music teacher told me “girls don’t play drums, ” I discovered this in a World Rhythms hand drumming class at a local music conservatory. The other students, our uber-patient teacher, and I were pounding away, practicing rhythms and counter-rhythms, when we were suddenly all embraced by the flow of a single central pulse and, freed from the constant task of trying to stay on beat, created, for that moment, an entity of sound that was unique, beautiful and complex, and living.
Later I learned that “entrainment” is a well-researched phenomenon that happens when two or more entities in proximity naturally synchronize their rhythms. Entrainment causes roommates to menstruate on the same schedule, or clock pendulums to begin to swing at the same pace when placed near one another, or drummers to play perfectly on the same beat seemingly effortlessly. Continue reading “Drumming to the Universal Pulse in an Out of Sync World by Carolyn Lee Boyd”
On the morning of January 20, 2017, the world watched Donald J. Trump stand on Capitol Hill for inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. He did not stand alone. Timothy Michael Dolan, Catholic cardinal and archbishop of New York, also stood, and he invoked the divine feminine as he opened the inaugural ceremony with a recitation of King Solomon’s prayer from the Book of Wisdom.
Ever since reading Elie Wiesel’s book, NIGHT, I’ve identified with Madame Schächter, one of eighty Jewish people corralled and hermetically sealed inside one of the cattle wagons on the rail journey to Auschwitz from a ghetto in Sighet. The text tells us, “Madame Schächter had gone out of her mind.” Initially she moaned, confused as to why she had been separated from her family. She soon grew hysterical. “Fire! I can see a fire! I can see a fire!” When her fellow prisoners looked out the window and saw no fire, they attempted to silence her. Nevertheless, she persisted with her cries. They soon tied her up, gagged, and hit her. As the train approached its destination (Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz), Madame Schächter screamed, “Jews, look! Look through the window! Flames! Look!” When the Jews looked through the window this time, they saw flames “gushing out of a tall chimney into the black sky.”
There are two types of authoritarians: those who jump out in front and say “follow me, only I can solve the problem”; the far greater number of authoritarian personalities are those who want to be told how to think, what to do, “this is daddy, I’ll take care of you.” Those are the people who are the followers and while some of those would like to be leaders themselves, most of them are just happy to follow, and they don’t want to ask questions, and they want to be told what to do and how to think. And that’s a very scary lot. —John Dean
ke me, today (and most days lately) it is difficult to be positive in a world that seems so full of hate. In fact, I struggled with a topic to write about because, in all honesty, it is hard to see the greener grass from where I sit – with all of the hatred spilling out in neighborhoods, churches, schools, and college campuses – even between family and friends. As I scrolled through Facebook, I came across a video and was struck by its message – we must be relentless in our kindness otherwise evil will win.
There comes a time in all of our lives when we have to make important decisions. What do I believe in? Who do I want to be? What and who will I stand up for? There has been a lot going on in the world lately and a lot of it, sadly, is pretty awful. While people are learning pretty quickly that elections have very real and long-lasting consequences, what is critical to make clear in the next 4 years of this fascist regime isn’t just that we are taking to the streets to make our voices heard, but that we are willing to disrupt society at every turn to make sure that people on the other side of the proverbial political coin know we will not go gently into that good night.
I’m sitting in my parents’ balcony in Pune, India, on a quiet morning. Well, this being a bustling Indian city of six million, it can’t really be quiet. As I sit with cup of tea in hand, I try and meditate – I’ve been practicing mindful meditation of late, and so, rather than block out the noises, I embrace the various sounds that make up this Monday morning.
As we wander together through the maelstrom of our world today, trying to keep our eyes open, our voices firm and truthful, our feet bravely taking one step and then another, may we reclaim our gift of future-envisioning boldly, outrageously, and together as a global community. In perilous times we may think that envisioning a future that may never be is a waste of time and energy. When we look into the future and see only uncertainty, we may no longer be sure that the kind of world we have been working towards for decades could ever exist.
Feminism and Religion 