I only recently became aware of Zakir Hussain, probably because my interest in drumming emerged only a few years ago when I learned to play the bodhrán. With a full-time job, I’ve had to keep my focus pretty much on the bodhrán so I could make progress. In fact, I became aware of Hussain’s passing through a social media post by a bodhrán player. Otherwise, I might still be deprived of knowing about him.
I will likely never fully understand the tabla and the traditions in comes from, though over time I hope to gain more knowledge of both. I did listen to Hussain play recently and it struck me that he was so at one with his instrument that a whole new being emerged – there was Hussain the person, playing the tabla and then there was this new being that emerged when he became really at one with the drum:
I noticed this after watching some very intense moments from some of Hussain’s performances, but what made me think of it again was watching this video of Ronán O’Snodaigh demonstrating a technique where he presses a pipe on the back of the skin to get a warped sound. As he warms up, he takes off musically, and that sense of the person and drum fusing into one being emerges:
Maybe these drummers can find this higher state because they started playing music at young ages, and after so many years of practice and performance they became more and more adapted to their particular instruments and musical traditions. The Indian tabla tradition is especially rich and has a long-established system of teaching and learning.
The bodhrán, however, is in many ways a new instrument that has continued to evolve and grow since it gained widespread popularity in the fifties and sixties when players like Sean O Riada of the band Ceoltóirí Chualann, Peadar Mercier of the Chieftains and Johnny Ringo Mc Donagh of De Dannan brought it onto the stage as a part of popular Irish music.
To play the bodhrán well, or even competently, involves improvisation, since the drummer does not play the tune in the same way as melody players do. This makes the instrument both easier and harder to play. This characteristic might play a role in Ronán’s ability to reach such heights in his playing, and insofar as the tabla also requires improvisation, it might play a role with Hussain as well.
I have listened to the Distant Kin album, which features Hussain and the bodhrán virtuoso, John Joe Kelly, couple of times so far, and will give it more spins on the virtual music app turntable in the future. Seems like a good place to learn more about Hussain’s drumming – from what I understand, he was fond of the bodhrán, which is an instrument that is often looked down on, or under appreciated.
Gen AI companies have scraped all the publicly available data on the Internet and used it to advance their tech and enrich themselves. That data includes the creative output of hundreds of millions of people – even my little blog has been scooped up into these software programs. And gen AI flattens everything. It copies our creative works – our inner sparks, as expressed in words – from the world and pastes them into a kind of technological space where there are no feelings, no time and no expressions of love.
For me, love and time go together, because we love each other in time and lose each other in time as well, when our lives are over.
This is a crucial difference between the outputs of AI and those of humans. We create new things and we are each unique. While AI can perhaps write a song or a poem, it’s based on all the songs and poems already written, and does not emerge from constantly running stream of life. Humans are messy and complicated, and sometimes unpredictable and we bring this to everything we do, for better or for worse.
Gen AI collects and processes massive amounts of data, consuming enough energy to run whole cities and use it to make connections we likely would never have imagined, allowing scientists and researchers to make great advances. It is a great achievement that is already leading to scientific breakthroughs that will save many lives and could reduce the impacts of climate change. Instead of undermining creativity, it can be used to uplift the arts by enriching our knowledge as writers, musicians, visual artists and others.
For all that, AI still feels like a huge machine is bearing down on us, threatening to crush original thought and action. It feels like this new form of AI is rearranging the world according to its own inner logic and calculations. The creators and developers of AI admit they don’t entirely know what is going on inside these metal boxes full of circuit boards and wire.
I have been taught that no good can come from something founded on bad intentions, yet that seems to be where we are with gen AI. Scientific breakthroughs, new medical treatments and climate change adaptations are the promise of gen AI – but they are enabled by the investments of very powerful men who like to bet big and win big. Companies like Amazon, Meta and Tesla are not known for caring about human progress. They ignore or downplay the many threats of AI that include loss of privacy, harms caused by algorithmic bias and the disappearance of well-paid jobs. Admittedly, there are some companies that are perhaps better, like IBM, which pioneered ethical AI, and Microsoft which emphasizes human rights and bias detection in AI development.
This new AI is emerging in the context of rising fascism in the US, with its American bro-culture version of racism and misogyny, embodied in Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is difficult not the link these two movements – as democracy weakens, a powerful new technology is ascending that strips away human authorship and copyright as it scrapes every website and devours every database it can get into. Our words are in there, but our voices have been flattened, transformed into the single collective voice of AI. Human curation has already become rare, with curation by algorithm becoming common across the web in news services, streaming, social media and online shopping.
All of this makes me angry – why should mega-rich companies like Meta and Google be able to steal our creations and then profit so enormously? How can I trust the people and the technology behind this wealth? I wish I could say that AI will lead to tools that benefit everybody, but I am far from certain of it. There is much talk by governments and companies of creating guardrails to reduce the risks of AI. I greatly hope that governments worldwide put laws in place to prevent harms. But they need to act fast, because with every passing day, the foundation of this bro-culture AI world are taking shape and hardening, and it will become very difficult to uproot it.
All that said, I still have hope, or I would not have written this blog post. I do believe that despite these pressures and threats to our creativity, as human beings, still we act in the world and create new things. We have emerged from a process of evolution, which has designed us, over millions of years to survive on a complex, unpredictable planet. We breathe and feel pain. We have lives and identities that move through a time-filled world. And our lives tell a story that is unique and precious and passes through this realm only once.
Took my dog outside in the morning and saw the gold and pink sky ready itself for the sun to rise over the St Lawrence. A pair of crows were starting their day with what sounded like an argument. I woke up thinking about the US election – and feeling sick to my stomach. Some of it’s disgust that so many people would vote for such a hateful man. And some of it is fear of what the future brings in the wake of his return.
I worry about the boring things, like the regulation of food and drugs, statistics collection, tracking and controlling the spread of disease. It doesn’t take much for bad leadership to undermine those things. The US is a major part of the complex international systems that allow people to live safely and have some quality of life. What happens when they fail?
I feel a sickness and disappointment that Americans would vote in a leader whose whole campaign was about hate. Hate for women and children, hate for immigrants, hate for minorities. Hate for everyone except his chosen few: mostly white men.
Why have the Republicans allowed their party to be hijacked by a despot? There are what, 335 million Americans? Surely they could have found a better candidate.
I used to think that to do something that really makes a difference, I would have to be an activist. And maybe when I retire, I will be. But these days, it feels a little radical just to play music at a local session. Sessions create a kind of organic, living musical event in a public place that draws people out of themselves, whether they are playing an instrument or just listening while having a drink. I used to take such things for granted, but the pandemic showed me how easily they can disappear.
I wonder if among the reasons so many American voters chose Trump is because they are under the thrall of his mesmerizing form of lying. His speeches are strings of lies – absurd things, like immigrants eating pets, or simple denial of facts, like saying it’s raining when it is not. Or his many, many lies about COVID when he touted fake cures and announced fictitious statistics about his success in defeating it. I find when I listen to him, I note the first lie and think of how I can verify it’s not true, and then there’s a second lie, then a third, and within a minute or two, I’ve forgotten what the first lie was.
I imagine for many people, such a barrage of falsehoods would cause them to doubt reality, especially if they live in regions without good local news, or solid, factual news in general, at all levels. The constant lying by this public figure that many worship, combined with false news from the far right and the lack of a concrete understanding of local and regional contexts has certainly led to a fog of unknowability. Apparently, this like of lying is part of a propaganda technique used in Russia to confuse people until they give up on trying to understand what’s actually true.
I am always looking for the truth. Understanding what is happening by knowing the facts is really important to me in everything I do, whether in my job or my personal life. It’s what guides me. I’m lucky to work with some former journalists who operate in a similar way. Always assessing and analyzing what’s happening, gathering details and being scrupulous about what’s written down or said. I think any experience we have with wholeness and joy emerge from how we engage with reality itself. We honour it by reflecting back its beautiful, living details.
In this vein, I think perhaps the most obvious weakness that comes from using lying as a means of unmooring people from what is actually happening around them is that lies are false. If the people who are spreading lies lose their bearing and make decisions based on their own lies, things will go badly off track, break down and eventually cease functioning.
Maybe this will lead Americans to resist dictatorship by liars. Our species has a strong drive to survive, and we won’t survive very long if our systems break down. Americans are used to getting what they want and have a long history of working hard to get it. It’s a sad thought, but maybe America’s workaholic, capitalist tendencies will be the thing that saves them.
I live in the (naïve) hope that our need for to cooperate in order to survive and flourish might also prove stronger than Trump’s lies. Will the Americans who are in his thrall wake up one day and realize they’ve handed given control of their country to a nasty, ugly old man who has nothing to offer but fear and hate?
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. But it 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.
