Last weekend, Daniele and I attended the San Francisco Taiko Dojo's 45th International Festival. As a maker and player of Japanese Zen flutes, he was eager for this first live music experience, and as a writer who loves new experiences, I was just eager.
Taiko, for any less familiar, broadly refers to a range of Japanese percussion instruments and specifically refers to a practice of drumming that involves massive drums and whole-body commitment. The result is sound so shaking you vibrate for hours after.
Taiko, for any less familiar, broadly refers to a range of Japanese percussion instruments and specifically refers to a practice of drumming that involves massive drums and whole-body commitment. The result is sound so shaking you vibrate for hours after.
As origins of traditions go, this story from the Shinto on the dueling of light and darkness, and Taiko as the calling back of light to the havoc stricken world totally worked for me:
Susanoo, god of water and wind, enrages, bringing havoc to the land. His sister, Amaterasu, goddess of light, flees to a cave and seals herself in solitary confinement. The other gods gather in conference: without light, life will decay and die. They devise many an unsuccessful plan to coerce her from the cave, until the elder goddess Ame no Uzume steps forward. Despite ridicule, she proceeds to empty a tremendous barrel of sake, jumps on its lid, and stomping furiously creates rhythms so compelling the gods break uncontrollably into dance and song. Their uproarious behavior reached such a pitch that Amaterasu dared to peer out from her cave. Upon beholding the joyous scene, she lept from the darkness to join in the dance, and again brought her light to the world.
The performance was outstanding and I can almost hear normally again, but what stayed with me was the description of a whole-being commitment to a practice which called light out of hiding and invited it into the dance of existence. Right?
On some level it is almost too obvious to assert that creative disciplines are bound to this work of calling light into places of darkness, not for the purpose of dispatching one from the other, but for the intermingling of seemingly opposite forces from which emerge new ways of being. And there's endless lip service to the application of whole-being commitment, but what does that really mean and how do we actually do it? Ame no Uzume partook of a whole barrel of sake to access that whole-being commitment and she was a goddess of the highest order. So what about me?
On some level it is almost too obvious to assert that creative disciplines are bound to this work of calling light into places of darkness, not for the purpose of dispatching one from the other, but for the intermingling of seemingly opposite forces from which emerge new ways of being. And there's endless lip service to the application of whole-being commitment, but what does that really mean and how do we actually do it? Ame no Uzume partook of a whole barrel of sake to access that whole-being commitment and she was a goddess of the highest order. So what about me?
As it turns out, the moments where that whole-being commitment emerges in my practice are not as mind-eradicating as a taiko drum, though the mind eradication is a key element. These are the moments that flow from making contact with my practice through a stillness of attention that aligns who I am with what I am doing. In the meeting of those two forces, unanticipated newness always issues.
Image courtesy of Sacred Texts.com
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