I am a Happy Drummer

"I am a happy drummer."

These are the words that came out of a rhythm that we played within our drumming circle one Sunday summer’s evening. These words, for me, seem to fit perfectly with one of the rhythms that mingled with two others that were being played.

I have learned to march to the sound of my own drum. It is what makes me not so much happy as centered. When we do not follow the march that is more a dance then we are more easily thrown off centre. Being centered gives you a peace that is more practical than happiness.

Happiness is always moving into unhappiness just as unhappiness is moving into happiness. None of these states last. They are, as the Dalai Lama has rightly pointed out, inherent in each other. Being centered gives you a sense of contentment. Contentment is more restful.

In the American constitution there is the given right to pursue happiness. I think the founding fathers might not have fully thought out the implication of those words. The pursuit of happiness is anything but happy. It can become the very thing that takes you away from the happiness that is inherent in creation.

What if you were to stop pursuing happiness or pursuing the future or simply stop? What if, in stopping this pursuit of an imaginary future in which the idea of happiness was attained, you simply let it be? What if, in letting it be, you found something that gave you more than you could ever be happy with?

What if you stopped all the rush into a kind of conceptual or virtual future – that you stopped and were willing to become a still point center in which you become the knowing of Love.

To know that you are the center point of Love that is never born nor ever dies takes you beyond the duality of happiness/unhappiness. It is that still point centre that is an awareness that at the center there is stillness, there is peace, while all around you there may be turmoil.

A soul friend will tell you that you will become happier as a consequence of learning the practice of centering. This happiness arises not because you pursue it but because it is a kind of perfume. It is the perfume of your real Self.

Any practice will do. This is where you learn to march to the sound of your own drum so that you become a happy drummer – or more to the point, that happiness arises within you and not as a consequence of your pursuit and achievement of some goal.

The important aspect of the practice is commitment. I practice writing. I practice gardening. I practice prayer. All of these for me are part of my happy drummer rhythm. I feel much less centered when I miss these practices. I become what I call my inner drama queen. I live a life not of contentment but inner drama, which always manifests as outer drama. I am not proud of this drama queen display but I try to be kind to her when she appears.

What ensures that, for the most part, that the drama does not arise, is practicing writing, gardening and praying. Any of these practices work for me. You could practice yoga, Pilates, or meditation. What is most important is doing any practice is the intention.

A soul friend invites you to make the intention for the highest good of all. This is intelligence. This is alignment with reality. This is attunement of you small drum, which is always connected to the one sound. This makes rational sense and leads into what is beyond sensational.

Creation made you a human being. This word human means the sound of God. or ,if you prefer, the sound of Love. Here, God does not imply any gender. You are a unique sound in the mind of God, who is the endless becoming. The degree to which you experience lace of peace is the degree to which you forget how to be the play of this unique sound.

Despite my propensity for being a drama queen I am, for the most part, a happy drummer. Each morning I write out my intention. This allows me to feel centered. I have created a life style in order to allow me to do this. I have created time in order to allow this being the sound of Love in form to be the most important rhythm I am here to resound.

In that sense, while others might judge me poor, I am in relation to my soul a resounding success. I am playing my unique sound of intention that expresses in form. This is the meaning of the words in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

I am a happy drummer to the extent that I listen and feel the way that the sound of Creation wishes to move through me. To that extent, like the drum that I play in my community drumming circle, I have to be empty. I have to be still and be willing to know the will of Love.

The pursuit of happiness is only that. The movement is a pursuit. You cannot chase what is arising out of the moment. Happiness is a paradox. When you are truly happy you disappear. You allow creation to express is unique way of expressing through you. Like the emptiness that is at the center of the drum there is infinite possibility. All you have to do is allow that master drummer called Creation to play you in the way it intended that it play you.

In this allowing there is no pursuit. It is the meeting of the lover and the beloved and the sound that arises is the sound of Love in form moving as Love in action for the highest good. This isn’t simply happiness but the experience of joy – joy in your true self.

So I am off to the Benwiskin Center outside Sligo to become a happy drummer in theRuach Rhythms community drumming circle.  There by the fireside I will tell stories, sing songs and centre myself into that placeless place where I know I AM always and forever a happy drummer

I Hear the Waters Lapping

              The Bathers – George Russell (AE)

“I will arise and go now
for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore.”

From - The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By W. B. Yeats

These lines from the poem Lake Isle of Innisfree are for this Irish storyteller an inspiration. It is told that later in his life the poet W. B. Yeats had certain regrets at having written this poem. I have no such regrets.

These lines are the invitation from the mystic heart – the heart that has glimpsed and wishes to return to the Source.  This is the return to the Source that the writer Marianne Williamson writes about in her book entitled “Return to Love.”

In the opening lines of this Lake Isle of Innisfree poem the hero of this poetic journey makes the commitment when he/she says, “I will arise…”  This is not just a poem about a sentimental attachment to a part of Ireland where the poet had lived. I think that is how many people view this poem and why W.B Yeats came to dislike being associated with it. Yeats didn’t write from sentimentality. He wrote from the consciousness of one connected to the timeless and its glorious invitation.

The phrase, "I will arise" indicates the proper usage of will in the development of raising consciousness and its expansion into the higher realms of timeless Love. This is an arising that is also a deepening into the heart’s core.  Then comes the phrase, "and go now." This relates to the poet’s understanding of the nature of time as a window that frames the timelessness of the present moment – the NOW.

When you look at the nature of time you find that the only time there is, is the present moment – the eternal now. When you think about the past you think about the past in this moment. When you plan the future you plane the future NOW. When the future arrives it arrives in the now. Time is a construct that developed with the clock; the clock came into its own with the advent of railways. In this sense we got more and more tied to clock time and now many of us experience what has been termed ‘time poverty.’

When you make your will the willingness to be a servant of the real  then time becomes a living presence? Are you willing or are you wilful? Are you pushing yourself to become what you have been told you should become in order to achieve what is defined in this world of time as success?

The line, "I will arise and go now," is an affirmation to be the willing servant of Love. This means paying attention to the water lapping. Most of us do not have this luxury. The only water we get close to is the stagnant pond of deep self-interest and the pursuit of what the Master Jesus called ‘the dead burying the dead.’

A soul friend invites you to hear the waters lapping by the shore of the timeless. There you will have some peace. There, for a short time, you will have some peace fill your beautiful eyes and the radiance from those eyes will truly reflect your soul and its Source.

W.B. Yeats was aware of this timeless connection to the shore of the timeless. He heard the water calling always ‘night and day.’ However, to enter the water one needs to move beyond the duality of night and day, light and dark, good and bad. This is why the invitation ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ is such an important spiritual practice.

The great Islamic mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi says it this way:

There is a field out beyond
Right doing and wrong doing
I’ll meet you there.

This is the field, the quantum field beyond time and space and form where you can meet and say, “I see you” because you will be one who sees through their beautiful eyes.  You will be a seer with the eyes of a lover reflecting the absolute beauty of Oneness.

To be this willing is to arise and move in the world of time as a manifestation of love in action. "I will arise and go now," requires intention and commitment. In my article "7 Ways to a Wonderful Life," intention and commitment equate with purpose and passion. This willingness is not to be confused with wilfulness, which I liken to pushing the river. What is required is what is a more feminine approach. It is the approach where you allow the dance of Creation to do you rather than you ‘doing’ it. For all our doing we have got ourselves and the planet in the proverbial ‘do-do.

You are a human ‘being.’ The word human translates as ‘the sound of being in form.’ This sound is the sound of Love. You can learn to hear it but to begin to hear it you have to also begin to trust it and allow it to do its creative work through you.

In so allowing you will arise and go into the eternal now and out of this direct experience there is the knowing of the timeless radiance you are. You arrive on the shore beyond the night and day of your life and stand on the solid ground of the shore beyond time.

To find out more about how to arise and go now register you interest in our Deep Heart’s Core Workshop, which includes singing, ‘around the fire’ storytelling, drumming, dancing and community contact

Tony Cuckson
storyteller@tonycuckson.com

or

Debbie Beirne at
ruachrhythms@gmail

Blessed are the Peacemakers

It is Sunday morning and this cottage is filled with a deep stillness for which I feel deeply blessed. I sit with pen in hand relaxing on the sette looking out at what are called the Iron mountains where it is told that the beautiful people, the Tuatha de Danaan first arrived in what would be called the land of Erin.

This week peace activists are getting shot by others who would protect what they consider to be their homeland from those they see as terrorists in the guise of peace makers.

I would that I, in the words of St. Francis of Assisi, “be an instrument of thy peace. The problem being that this I, this little me, am the very resistance to that harmony and instrumentation

I would that I become a peace activist but in so many ways the more I wish for this peace the more reactionary I become. In the greatest of mystical texts I am told that peacemakers will inherit the earth. This inheritance is not of the earth as something that I get but as the realisation of love in matter, love as mother, love as mother earth.

This prospective peacemaker knows (I have no intention of being arrogant in this respect) that most peace activists do not know and thus cannot live peace. Peace in the way I mean it here is not simply the absence of conflict but is a state of being that lives from the direct experience of Oneness.

The state of our world is the reflection of our collective inner relationship to life as we think it is to be lived. The primary conflict that contributes to this non-peace is the sense that we are individually separate. In this respect we are each and every one of us fundamentalists. The idea of separateness, living in a body in time and space is the idea of someone living in terror of non-existence. We ignore this aspect of life and thus we live in ignorance. We live in labels and concepts and false identification with nation state, with political affiliation, with race and any other label you care to name.

To be a peacemaker or rather a peace creator one needs to directly experience that peace that is beyond the dual nature of human existence. In each and every moment each and every one of us eats of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Peace begins to start dropping slow when we learn to sustain ourselves from the Tree of Life.

This is radical peace activism. It at least understands the nature of duality and the process of activity and reactivity. It understands the law of cause and effect. It understands the nature of time and the nature of miracle – an event outside of time. Thus one becomes and instrument of peace as a radiant emptiness out of which radical Love in action arises. This does not change circumstances alone but changes ones relationship to ones brother. One recognises sacred unity at the heart of creation and thus one’s brother is not a separate being but a note played within the eternal.

I am a rather poor peace activist. I wish to be an instrument of peace but the notes I play are not in harmony with the universal song. I know when they are and I know that with intention this harmony radiates out beyond the limitation of time and space and impacts those who are open to receiving this unconditional harmonic.

It is the same effect that meditators have on crime in major cities when they raise the group consciousness of the collective. It is called morphic resonance. You begin to resonate peace without judgement and simply become a sound wave that invites other sound waves to resonate with it. It is the really great way of feeling attractive.

You can do this every day as a peace activist. This way you begin to clean up your internal oil spill that you project out into the world unto the other. You begin to expand borders, you begin to sense the peace that passeth beyond the duality of good and bad. You become you own little flotilla of infinite possibility.
Some will say that I have not lifted a hand to help those in need. However, without a mind in harmony with the Source action is often simply reaction and not the movement of Love in action. Peace activism is much needed. It is to be much respected. Radical peace activism is the deeper awareness of what creates disharmony in the first place – the primary sense of individuality and separateness from existence.

So I invite the willingness to become an instrument of thy peace and leave the plan of action to that still small voice within. Then I surrender my need to make it all alright. Behind the veil of separateness that is the major cause of brother fighting brother there is the deeper primacy of life as Oneness. This Oneness was never born and never dies. It creates for the joy of creation. To live in this primacy of Oneness is to be an instrument of they peace and to live as Love in action.

This is the vision of this peace activist who would be willing to be an instrument of thy peace.