Listen to the rhythms of life.

So now you want to know some things. Where do you start? That's a good question for you to ask. Maybe just listen. Listen to the drum. Listen to the air. Listen to the breathing...to the earth breathing, Listen to the stars go across the sky.---Masanea, Kickapoo, northern Mexico, from Simply Living: The Spirit of the Indigenous People


Listening. It is how one learns to play drums. Listening. Listening to music on the radio, CDs, movie soundtracks. Listen to live music, whenever you have the chance. It injects itself like hot liquid into your blood. Listen to the rhythms created by others. Feel them in your bones. It is more than counting beats in a measure. Even more than the necessary beginnings of listening to copy and repeat. Listening has to move from the outer ear to the ears of the heart. Until one masters the basics and then listens more than plays, the sounds produced will be only honking and squawking. Only by listening with inner ear can a person be their own musician, playing from within and marching to their own inner drummer.

Listening. It is how one encounters life and the sacred. Listening. Listening to the whirling wind, the dancing droplets of rain, the distant cry of a bird. Feeling creation in your bones. The vibrating energy that is you resonating with the vibrating energy in nature. Listening has to become more than the common awareness of noise and sound. There must be a listening with the heart to the sound which is not a sound, the music within nature. Only by listening with the inner ear can a person be an ordinary mystic, in touch with the sacred in creation.

Listen....hear the beat of a hummingbird's wings. Listen...hear the rhythm of life's drum.