the here of this earth... the now of this sky

i like the way that these particular words by ee cummings express a zen-like awareness and appreciation of nature... an invitation to pay attention.
i came upon these words by ee cummings in a song by the composer john cage.

i remember the day that my grade four teacher showed us some poetry by ee cummings. for some reason, i was really affected (and liberated) by seeing the ways that cummings played with language and broke the "sacred" rules of grammer. i liked the way his words flowed all over the pages. i liked the fact that he always wrote with un-capitalized letters.
this was the first time that i remember anyone saying the equivalent of, "it is okay to colour outside the lines".
i liked a lot of what cummings wrote, even though it didn't make literal sense. this was the first time that poetry actually spoke to me and resonated with something deep inside me. these words made me aware of something bigger.

this was also a time in my life when i really began exploring nature on my own. all of my friends had moved away that year, so I was left with a big hole in my life. i believe that my time alone exploring nature informed me about "awareness" and about nature - in ways that were later echoed in my studies of zen and taoism.

coincidentally, it was john cage's book "silence" that led me to discover zen and taoism, when i was twenty.

park theatre gig

photo by e. comack

Here I am onstage playing my djembe. I love this drum and I play it a lot.
In order to play an authentic West African djembe, one needs to develop a relationship with it. It needs constant tuning and care. Over time, one becomes sensitive to how it behaves in certain types of weather and humidity.
My djembe came from Guinea. The shell is made from a hollowed-out tree trunk from a cashew tree. Someone in Guinea hollowed it out by hand. The wood is a beautiful deep reddish colour, and is very dense and resonant.

I became interested in African music in 1981 when I heard three albums... Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians", Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" and David Byrne and Brian Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". I was instantly hooked. I began scouring libraries and ordering African records by mail from New York and California. (It was very hard to find back then.)
In 2002 I started studying West African Malinke drumming. And I haven't turned back since then. This music literally changed the direction of my life, and continues to bring me riches - beyond measure.