FINDING YOUR INNER RHYTHMS
(c)2002 Khrysso Heart LeFey

My life is tangent with a number of diverse communities, and yet from among all of them I hear a common theme: people feel blocked around singing, dancing, drumming, and other ways of experiencing their own musical abilities. I think that opening such blocks is particularly important to the Pagan community in general and the blossoming CUUPS-TC community in particular.

I am a believer in the Zimbabwean proverb, "If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing."

I believe it because I know that the mechanisms that make walking and talking happen are the same ones that make dancing and singing happen. The words or steps have been slowed (or sped up) or choreographed in some way--in fact, their patterns originate in a different part of the brain--but the physical mechanisms are essentially the same.

I believe that what we call "native" talent in singing, drumming, dancing, and the like is often much more a product of nurture than of nature. Not always, but often. In fact, true "tone-deafness," which, it seems, a third or so of the population claims to suffer from, truly occurs in more like a hundredth of the population.

Here is one of my favorite examples: if, when hearing the words, "You're coming to the meeting, then," you can tell whether the utterance is a question or a command, and if, when somebody hears you say the same words, they can tell whether you are asking or commanding, then you are not tone-deaf.

In English, word-order is usually what tells us when an utterance is a question or a statement. But--and we notice this more often when word-order is ambiguous -- voice inflection also distinguishes the two. Inflection is, by and large, just a function of adjusting pitch and of changing the duration of sounds... so if you can distinguish the pitches in spoken voice inflection, you actually can distinguish them in song, because song is basically just speech that has been adjusted for pitch and duration.

However, some of us hear the subtleties of pitch more precisely than others. Some of us are wired that way, and some of us have had more exposure to those subtleties at times of our lives when we were more susceptible to their influence--we have been nurtured into second nature.

Likewise, at its simplest, dancing, physically, requires no kind of specialized movement that isn't done in walking. One lifts one's foot, one places it down--either directly or after a pause... or after a "misstep." The greater part of what happens in dancing is choreographed pauses and missteps as well as steps.

All of us who are typically "abled" do all of the basic steps involved in dancing--in folk-dancing, at least--all the time without even thinking about it. We lift and place, we change directions instantaneously, we hesitate, we duck and stretch. Taking an extra-large step to avoid a puddle up ahead or hopping aside to miss a careless skateboarder are movements exactly like those used in dancing. Such movements are already a part of the vocabularies, so to speak, of the bodies of those of us who can walk.

The fact is that without rhythm there is no life. Rhythm is required to create and maintain us from before our conception through the moment of our death. Consider:

Ovulation is rhythmic: both broadly speaking -- that is, every month (or so) -- and narrowly speaking -- that is, when cilia brush an egg cell from the ovary into the fallopian tube.

Ejaculation is rhythmic: the rhythmic muscle-contractions that propel semen toward an egg happen when nerves have been stimulated... something which is almost always accomplished with rhythmic movement. The swimming of sperm cells requires an undulating motion. Fertilization by other means has often been called "artificial."

Cell division is rhythmic, and so is birth: the norm is that contractions are timeable and powerful. If they are not, life can usually only be saved with surgical intervention.

Blood circulation is rhythmic.
So is breathing.
So is the clearing of toxins from the respiratory tract.
So is blinking.
So is digestion, from chewing to elimination.

The processes essential for the survival of our important organs (if not of our entire selves--or, for that matter, of our species), until we cease to survive, depend on ongoing rhythms. All, with the possible exception of chewing, happen involuntarily. Your body is already intimate with their workings, usually without benefit of your intention... in fact, usually without benefit of your awareness.

When I first began to explore Paganism and magick nine years ago, a Witch friend told me that the best way to open my psychic consciousness was simply to learn how to relax. What a simple thing... "profoundly simple, simply profound," as I am fond of saying. Similarly simple--and profound--are the beginnings of the consciousness of one's own rhythms. I suggest techniques such as these to develop your sense of your own rhythms:

LISTEN
...to your breathing
...to the pulse in your ears
...to your footsteps as you amble, lope, stride, scurry
...to voices of those speaking in your presence: to the pulses and the rising and falling of the language that you, too, speak... or, more intriguingly, of languages that you don't understand at all

FEEL

...your pulse at your throat or in your wrists
...the movements of your loins during lovemaking
...the waves that take you over and the changes in your
   breathing when you climax
...the motions in your jaw as you chew

Your body knows these things without consulting your conscious mind. But you can learn to perceive them consciously.

Often, those who have no sense of their voice or their ear or their rhythms take a long time to develop such senses, but it can be done--I have watched it happen to friends of mine who were told as children that they were completely unmusical. Yet they have learned to dance and to play and to sing... and, in fact, to sing harmony (on purpose!).

We in this endeavor all have different gifts and callings: not all of us are called to sing or to dance or to play or to drum; we have many ways of making ritual happen in ways that fulfill ourselves and the community we serve. But I urge anyone who may feel musically/rhythmically "retarded" to consider that in music, a *R.rdando* (delay of the tempo) can always be followed by a return *a tempo* (up to speed) at the intention of the player. As is often the case, we are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for.