The pandemic created a space in my life for learning and playing the bodhrán. I had virtually no previous music training. Added to that, I was born with a hearing impairment that led me to think learning a musical instrument wasn’t really possible.
During the pandemic, I spent hours and hours listening to tunes, learning to distinguish the different parts. Most tunes have two parts: A and B, but some have many more, like Kid on the Mountain, a five-part slip jig. Learning something while relying mostly on my sense of hearing was new to me.
It took me a year and a half, more or less, to be able to keep the beat. Luckily, we were in lockdown most of that time, so I wasn’t in a position to throw off other musicians. My husband has played music most of his life and took up the tenor banjo at the same time as I started the drum, so we played together. And I learned to use a metronome.
Four years on, I am publishing this recording of me playing along to the Lilting Banshee. I finally like how I sound accompanying a jig! I think my style is influenced by my teacher, who taught me online from Ireland while he was locked down and unable to gig and teach.
Having learned phrases and time signatures (3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 9/8, etc) that I can use to accompany music, I’m now starting to listen more deeply. I am paying more attention to pitch and how to mirror it on my drum through hand pressure on the back of the skin.
The bodhrán is considered to be a talking drum because so much of its potential comes from changing the pitch through handwork.
I added a few photos from a trip to Ireland to the recording:
I attended the Catskills Irish Arts Week this summer, a six hour drive southeast of Ottawa. It was the week that Donald Trump was shot in the ear during an attempt to assassinate him, and a week before Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate as Joe Biden stepped down.
We drove almost due south, passing by the Fort Drum army base, which covers more than 430 square kilometres in northern New York. I glimpsed it from the car window through tall chain link fences topped with barbed wire.
We passed through little towns on our way, and most were festooned in American flags, with many windows and porches decorated in red, white and blue pleated bunting. The occasional Make America Great Again sign appeared on the side of the highway.
A lot of the buildings in these American towns have wood siding and are painted white, but the paint was peeling on most of them, giving many of the towns a dilapidated air. Some of the houses were boarded up and empty.
It was a beautiful day when we headed south, but I felt a bit on edge. At that moment, it felt like the Democratic Party was on its way to losing the upcoming election, which could mean that the world’s only super-power would turn its back on fighting climate change and on women’s rights and welcome a dictator with open arms.
The town of East Durham is up in the Catskill mountains, which is dotted with resorts that prospered from the 1920s to the 1970s, when New Yorkers, especially those from Irish and Jewish communities, would escape the city heat into the mountains. Those resorts are now less opulent, but still fill up during the Irish arts week. The place where we stayed is also a popular vacation spot for biker gangs and even metal detectorists, who attend the resort’s annual Lost Treasure Weekend.
The weather was sunny but sweltering for most of the week, overwhelming the air conditioning in East Durham’s Irish pubs and taxing the window air conditioner in our small motel room.
I had learned to play the bodhrán during the pandemic over Zoom. The classes in East Durham were the first time I had a chance to learn in person in a group setting. I was so excited about it, I attended both the advanced and all-level classes.
Learning the drum has allowed me to feel what it’s like to be in the music, surrounded by other players and connected through a shared tune. It takes many years to play well enough to really connect with others during a session, but there are times when the music extends around everyone in the circle, as if weaving a golden rope and tying us into its knot.
Most nights there were sessions in the pubs, and we attend one led by teachers, which in this case means some of the best players from Ireland and New York. There were about 100 students in the pub, I think. The air was very humid and warm—the teachers at the front set the tunes and the pace, spinning out reel after reel as everyone tapped their feet to the rhythm and played their instruments, including fiddles, banjos, bodhráns, whistles, accordions and uilleann pipes.
Our collective effort made the wooden floor reverberate and the walls hum. The people around me were glowing with perspiration but also with a hint of inner light. The beer and whiskey glasses shimmered, and the tables swung back and forth slightly. The whole building seemed to shift and shimmy a little on its foundations.
When we left the pub, we looked up at the stars in the dark country sky and the world felt a bit sweeter, more peaceful. The feeling of powerlessness faded a bit—these days I see fires in my mind’s eye, burning through forests and towns, as temperatures go higher and higher. I find myself wishing for the winter months to come and damp down the searing heat. But that night, colder air flowed down from the sky and drifted after us as we drove along the road back to our room, where we dropped into the cool darkness of sleep.
Grange stone circle, the largest in Ireland. The cave entrance to Tir na nÓg is nearby.
“Tir na nÓg means ‘land of youth’ although ‘na nÓg’ is probably better translated as ‘the ever-young’ because it refers to a world beyond time in which events occur in a non-linear sequence much like how time was defined by Einstein or Heisenberg in the early twentieth century. Tir na nÓg is the land of youth because without time, aging is not an issue. Everyone is young or at least ageless there.
Some accounts describe [such realms] as consisting of forested wilderness while others describe flower clad meadows buzzing with bees. There are tales of cities and fortresses made of precious metals and feather thatch, while other tales home in on a sacred well at the heart of the land, surrounded by a grove of nine hazel trees or a single dominant tree with a bloom on every bough…
For each element of Tir na nÓg and its other sister lands there are key concepts that must be communicated. For instance, its sacred well was sometimes regarded as the birthplace of humanity, even of the entirety of existence. The tree that looms over the well is considered the axis of the world. It is the central tent post of this circus realm we inhabit and also the central tenet on which the druid’s power is based. The part of the sacred tree known as the silver branch is a metaphor for a concept that is beyond my ability to communicate – a concept as vast as any ocean.”
– Manchan Magan, Listen to the Land Speak
I’m sitting alone on a wooden chair, under an awning that shelters me from the summer sun. I’m surrounded by green cedars, oaks and a garden of flowers and grass. From within, I sense the earth’s opening heart. It unfolds, as if decompressing from being held under an enormous weight.
The old myths seem to tell us that the heart, when finally able to unfold, opens into an infinite space, a place that was present before the heart pumped blood through its vessels and will remain after it has stopped beating.
The weight holding down the heart comes from the time when men began to look at the rivers and lakes, trees and fields and all the animals as a means for their own ends. Not enough to grow food to eat and have water to drink. They wanted riches for themselves.
In the face of this, we need reminders of the deeper reality within the everyday. Sometimes we find it in the intensity of the blue sky. Other times, in the sound of someone making music. I encourage my son to create whatever he can – he’s made trebuchets out of reclaimed wood and carved faces into sticks. He’s printed 3-D figures in resin and built whole armies of fantastical creatures, painted in vivid colours. I’ve found him reading a huge novel, in a corner of his room. I hope that the forces of life and creativity are forming powerful struts within him that will hold up and protect his inner life when he goes out into the world. When he has to deal with the stresses of fitting into the workforce somehow. I don’t want him to lose his inner spark.
I was very interested in Indigenous cultures and stories of Turtle Island for many years. I’ve spent time at Mohawk spiritual gatherings and read books about Haudenosaunee culture and politics. But these cultures are not my own and I will always be outside of them.
During the pandemic I learned the bodhrán from an Irish percussionist who also introduced me to modern Irish culture and the notion of the Irish diaspora. I never really thought I was part of the diaspora because my family has been gone from Ireland for such a long time. But ironically, when I turned my attention away from exploring North American Indigenous cultures and stories, I actually found that I have an ancestral culture of my own that seems to have claimed me. Maybe it’s just that I have claimed it, but it’s a bond that’s undeniable and existed before I became consciously aware of it. Sometimes things really are right under your nose and you don’t see them.
At times when I hear Irish people speaking, I hear my own relatives talking. My grandmother and grandfather had very strong Irish accents and my mother does to a lesser extent. It is uncanny how when I hear those accents, I’m transported back to the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house, where I would sit with my granny. An echo within. The sound of their voices almost entering the present.
My drumming is humble and so is my writing. I am not sure I am connected to the sacred tree that towers above the holy well, where it forms the axis of the world. Empire building and profit making have damaged the beauty of the world and those who fear rivers that run wild and forests that harbour hidden holy wells have done everything possible to destroy any entryways to such realms.
But it may be that simply being open to the possibility of such places by listening and looking for them is enough to be a part of them. Connection to the deepest aspects of living is not restricted to the richest or the wisest or the most talented. Knowing this is the key to undermining the empire builders, I think.
So, back to the heart. For me, the working life weighs down my heart and makes the space I need to be able to create harder to access and inhabit. Yet if I am any good at my job, it’s because it’s fed by creativity. Ability to write and to make connections between concepts are the basis of my working life.
So, the heart opens, and the flowers and bees of golden summer celebrate that fact by their mere existence. Within my heart the infinite realm unfolds and expands. I need do nothing but observe it. Like my son, I tuck myself away in the corner of a room where it is quiet, and I can listen. There I sometimes play my drum, and I hear my heart reverberate throughout the whole house.
“You might need to know again that there is a god of all things; that everything is connected; every raindrop, every tree, every molecule of the earth.” – Manchan Magan from Thirty-Two Words for a Field
My family left Ireland more than 200 years ago. They came to Canada before and during the famine. When they arrived, they likely only spoke Irish, a language that let them see both the material world and another world, the one beyond. They arrived, most probably exhausted and sick and those who survived quarantine eventually forgot Irish, though my grandmother knew a few words of prayer. I’m descended from them – I have an old spinning wheel that belonged to my many-times great aunt, who brought it to Canada from Ireland. It comes from another time, culture and world view, which seemingly has been swept away by the stormy sea they crossed to get here.
I have reflected on and written about Indigenous cultures that exist here on Turtle Island and caught glimpses of ways of thinking and seeing that go beyond the everyday – the mundane world as it is. But that exploration seems to have left mainstream thinking and become the purview of scientists with their strange ideas and experiments in impossible things, like quarks – how at the smallest level, everything is both a wave and a particle; everything is connected across vast distances; everything hovers between states of being until someone actually looks at it and then it takes form.
Could I learn Irish? I feel like it is a sort of birthright. I incur advantages from the English language – working as a writer, making understandable the decisions and intentions of government and its laws. My last name is English and that language is also a birthright, but when I speak it, it feels like something has been stolen away. Maybe Irish is hiding in its pockets, where it stealthily crept and stayed, hiding from the English who invaded Ireland almost a thousand years ago. Will I go to Ireland and study Irish and see what shakes out? Find out how many words there are for simple, beautiful things, like trees and raindrops and a spinning wheel rocking back and forth on the docks, where the boat first arrived in Canada?
When I was in Ireland in September 2023, my bodhán teacher set me up for a lesson with another teacher who plays both bodhrán and drumkit in a band. We were staying in a village in the west of Ireland and the drummer lived 2 doors down from where we stayed while we visited.
The lesson was a bit of a turning point for me. It reinforced the idea of developing a really strong motor rhythm, where your basic playing is really even and you control the dynamics–loud, soft, slow and fast. I have been told before that the most important aspect of playing is the basic down-up stroke. It should both be even and almost perfectly timed.
So when I got back home, I set up my metronome and I’ve been practicing that basic down up pattern along with a few other basic patterns. After many hours of down up down up down up, my playing is much better. I feel I’ve lifted it up another level through that practice.
I have also watched Ruairi Glasheen’s documentary on the bodhrán, which talks about Ringo McDonough and how he developed a motor rhythm, which is what I learned from the guy 2 doors down. Now I really get how important it is. McDonagh’s style was an innovation at the time and his clean, simple driving rhythm is all you really need to play well at a session. Maybe the triplets and fancy fills aren’t really the point. Anyway, it’s obvious but maybe not so obvious!
For a long time, I believed that countries and governments would eventually stop waging war, because it threatens our survival as a species. Wars destroy our infrastructure, cause wide-spread trauma, death, sickness and starvation. So wouldn’t we eventually see that it’s a losing proposition?
I also believed that there would be an end to extreme wealth and sociopathic leaders—the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world. The Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpengs. The glorifying of powerful men who rule through fear, populism and disinformation.
Now I am not so sure. Maybe it’s just going to continue as it is until climate change and war undo everything we’ve become—what we’ve discovered and invented and all our dreams along with it. All the kindness and warmth that people have given to each other, especially to those who are supposed to be our enemies—blown out the shattered windows of our cities.
These days it feels like just doing ordinary things, like playing music with friends or having guests over for supper, is a radical act. Being present and alive to one another seems to matter more than it ever has.
All I wish on the eve of 2024 is for you to find warmth and friendship and to hold onto it, and keep holding on. Light up the darkness.
I’ve made a new friend who’s got a way about him. I mean, he is Irish and laughs the way I imagine an elf might. He’s small too, as an elf would be. Even though he grew up in the Dublin suburbs, it feels like he came into the world as a small creature curled up in a brown nest, tucked into a hedgerow of ivy. Then he grew, and tumbled out into a farmer’s field in County Clare, just missing a pile of ewe berries. How he got from there to Dublin, I couldn’t say. Though he is a modern person—he even owns a commercial van—it’s a Ford. Still, when I was visiting, I had to do my best not to stare at the faint drift of sparkles floating behind him and I definitely did not mention the green felt hat. Or the bells tied around his ankles. When he was a young fellow, he liked to leap in the air while wearing them. At least once, he arrived in an Irish village on a donkey that was wearing antlers. I’ve seen the pictures. But fair enough, it was nearly Christmas. He might have once led an ordinary existence in the city, but now he’s in the west of Ireland, where there are holy wells and old stone walls that you could follow for days. I know our time left on this earth is limited. We have only so many heartbeats and hours of sunlight. So I had better catch up with him one day soon, maybe in summer. I’ll tell him to grab his hat and walk with me for a while. We’ll follow the hedgerows, visit the well and wet our hands and faces in its waters.
I’m feeling the pain and weight of grey November. The rubble of buildings in Gaza is that shade of grey. My computer screen is the same colourless glare. It’s seeping into my eyes, draining them of colour. All the leaves have fallen to the ground, staining the fields in red. Red runs through the sewer grates when it rains, then turns to brown and eventually, grey. It happens season after season, year after year, century after century. And I fear it’s been so much longer, but I can’t bear the thought of millennia of war. Thousands upon thousands of wars. Homes, playgrounds and children ground into grey dust, over and over. We know this story so very well. We even have the means to change it. But that doesn’t matter. The seasons will still roll around again and again, and the living will fall away, after spilling their blood. The buildings will crumble into the ground until everything is obscured in dust.
“…I had heard whispers over many years about a chamber of female divinity that was said to exist somewhere west of the Shannon, but I could find no reference to it in any book or journal. Then, finally, two years ago I stumbled upon the chamber, as some in the local community in Tulsk, Co Roscommon, had chosen to make it public again. It’s a cavern called Oweynagat in which an ancient goddess energy is said to reside…When the time was right, they were able to point small groups of individuals towards a tiny opening beneath a hawthorn tree in the bank of a field that led to it. The field is down a narrow laneway, apparently leading nowhere.”
These are dark days. Sometimes, before dusk, I walk across the street from my house to sit alone in the field. After a while, I feel vibrations coming from a great distance through the earth into my body. The movements remind me there are places where the goddess lives, even in these times. I imagine they are hidden safe houses where she appears. They are not written down in books or recorded in databases – they’re hidden in plain sight – maybe through that small opening among trees that could be a fox’s den. Except it opens to a much bigger place, where from time to time over many centuries, people have sat in silence, holding each other’s hands, listening to the slow, soft whisper of time passing. They are listening for the long story, the one that opens up and folds back, further and further into the past until they find themselves at the roots.
In the dark and stillness, I feel afraid. I don’t have time for this. I check my phone, but there is no signal. I’m off the grid. But I’ve already begun to sense vibrations in all directions from where I stand, which is in an ordinary field beside the bike path. It’s as if I always suspected this place was here, and somehow found that fact reassuring. Right now, I have to force myself to stay still and not run back to the house. And resist the urge to get back to business. Because this place is deep and asks a lot of me. But I know the world is at stake now. Maybe it’s always been, but we’ve reached a tipping point. We need the goddess who loves gentle creatures, like my little dog who lies in a patch of sunshine on the floor. I love to look into his glassy eyes and smell the warmth of his fur. I need to visit the goddess. I must let time take me back and further back, all the way to its roots.
To help me deal with panic attacks and flashbacks that I now experience more often because of the pandemic, someone gave me an info sheet called the “Distress Tolerance Handout.” In it, I found a page called Cold Water Can Work Wonders:
“When you put your full face into cold water . . . or you put a zip-lock bag with cold water on your eyes and upper cheeks, and hold your breath, it tells your brain you are diving underwater. This causes the “dive response” to occur. (It may take 15–30 seconds to start.)
Your heart slows down, blood flow to nonessential organs is reduced, and blood flow is redirected to the brain and heart. This response can actually help regulate your emotions. This will be useful as a distress tolerance strategy when you are having a very strong, distressing emotion.”
I tucked this information away somewhere in my memory – maybe I’ll give it a try some time, I thought
I am glad I read about this technique because it helps me to appreciate the movie, My Octopus Teacher. In it, Craig Foster, who is both protagonist and filmmaker, talks about returning to False Bay in South Africa, where he grew up free-diving in the kelp forests of the Atlantic.
After many years away he returns, suffering from burnout and great emotional distress. He can no longer do the things he loves, like communicating with his son and making documentaries. There in False Bay, he begins free diving again — with only a snorkel and flippers – no oxygen tanks. He says:
“In the beginning, it’s a hard thing to get in the water. It’s one of the wildest, most scary places to swim on the planet. The water drops to as low as eight, nine degrees Celsius. The cold takes your breath away. And you just have to relax. And then you’ll get this beautiful window of time for 10, 15 minutes.
Suddenly…everything feels okay. The cold upgrades the brain because you’re getting this flood of chemicals every time you immerse in that cold water. Your whole body comes alive. And then, as your body adapts, it just becomes easier and easier. And eventually…after about a year…you start to crave the cold.”
Foster finds a way to slip inside of nature through his dives in the kelp forest and the friend he made there: a common octopus (octopus vulgaris). As much as I love the story of Foster’s octopus friend, I need to keep this story moving, so now I’ll talk about Claire Paris, another freediver.
Paris, a master at holding her breath, can do six-minute plus breath holds in a pool and dives more than 200 feet down in the ocean on a single gulp of air. Once she gets down there, she feels an immense sense of calm.
She prefers to dive without goggles to enhance the diving reflex, the body’s response to submersion in cold water. This mechanism kicks in when you immerse the nostrils and face in the water. Paris and other freedivers say that so far beneath the ocean’s surface, everything slows down.
I have a friend who lives by the Irish Sea and swims in the ocean every day—he loves both swimming and surfing. But it’s also a way to dealing with the stress of the pandemic. I’ve seen photos of him with his friends, pushing their way into the sea through the big frothy Atlantic waves. Soon enough, I’ll be up near Killaloe, Ontario, where I can swim in a cold lake and catch the last of the summer’s rays. Maybe I’ll try a few dives and see if cold water really can work wonders.
Now that vaccines are rolling out here in Canada, it’s time Canadians and their representatives turned their attention to ensuring that citizens in poor countries around the world are vaccinated as quickly as possible.
An internally displaced Afghan family on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan; People enjoying the sunshine in Ottawa. PHOTO BY OMAR SOBHANI/REUTERS; ASHLEY FRASER/POSTMEDIA
Currently, there are not enough vaccines to quickly inoculate high priority groups in poor countries. Canada’s vaccine plan puts vaccinations for all Canadians, even low-risk groups, ahead of the most vulnerable in poor countries. This is inhumane and even dangerous.
By putting ourselves first, we are increasing the risk that more variants develop, some of which could evade our vaccines completely. As Hilda Bastian, the Australian expert in analyzing clinical trial data and founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration says:
“We need to reduce the chances of the virus morphing into more dangerous variants — vaccines might not protect communities enough from new variants sweeping through. The notion that there can be countries where there’s going to be 40-year-olds and 30-year-olds vaccinated while there are terrible outbreaks in other parts of the world, and even the health care practitioners are unprotected, isn’t okay on any level.”
Given the limits on the number of vaccines doses that can be produced this year, wealthy countries like Canada are putting citizens of poorer countries at risk for severe illness and death while we put our low-risk citizens first.
Canada has an obligation as a wealthy nation to help prevent this tragic outcome.
The time to act is now. The Liberal government must reverse its decision to keep 50% of the COVAX vaccines and ensure that all doses go to poor countries. It must also look beyond that program and donate a portion of all vaccines to ensure that seniors, healthcare professionals and other vulnerable citizens in poor countries are vaccinated as quickly as possible.
For most of my life I’ve been a writer. And over time, I’ve learned that all creativity, whether it’s writing, music or something else, is an adventure.
Over the years I’ve seen many Irish music groups, and watched bodhrán players moving their sticks over their drums, performing rhythms and patterns impossibly fast. And they even played with both ends of the stick! I’ve always wanted to learn this instrument.
Just before we were all sent home in the middle of March, I picked up a cheap bodhrán at Long and McQuade and signed up for lessons through the Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM).
By nature I’m an extrovert and usually find staying home for days at a time pretty hard to do. I like to be out and about, doing things with friends.
But suddenly I had more free time and all of it had to be spent at home. So I began to play the drum, doing online lessons and practising, sometimes for several hours at a time. The first thing I learned is how to pronounce bodhrán. It’s “bow-rawn.” Hard to say!
The OAIM drum teacher, Brian Fleming, was very good. So I thought I’d see if he gave lessons online. Sure enough, he does! We started meeting via Zoom in March—connecting County Kerry in Ireland with Ottawa for an hour or so every week.
Since then, my learning has accelerated and I can even play the stick doubled-ended on the drum.
Bodhráns are made with goat skin and they can be finicky things—if the drum is not tuneable, you have to wet the skin every 15 minutes while you play. So, after a couple of months of dribbling tablespoons of water, I was ready for a tuneable drum.
Brian recommended bodhrán maker Ben March who lives in Country Clare. I gave Ben the specifications, he made the drum and FedEx delivered it a couple of weeks ago.
I was able to have Ben put an inscription on my bodhrán: “on the adventure.” I can’t wait to see where this drum takes me. Already I’ve visited the seaside in Ireland and discovered my favourite bodhrán player, Ronán Ó Snodaigh.
My husband plays the mandolin and we are learning jigs and reels so we’ll be ready to join an Irish session at our local pub when we can all finally get together in person again. Check out a video of us playing the Ashplant Reel together on our front step.
In the meantime, my wonderful drum will be my portal to a new kind of creativity and way to connect with others both at home and far away.
