Drum! if you don’t have a drum get a wooden spoon and cooking pot lid, an old wooden box, a metal wastebasket…

You don’t need to be a student of percussion, you don’t need to have any practice or expertise, you don’t need to be good at it, you don’t need to perform for an audience.

Now begin! Match the rhythm of your heart as you beat your homemade drum. Now add your feet and get moving. Let your body sway and express what you are feeling. Let your whole self dance and move and twirl and stretch and twist and flow with the beat. You need this!

Try new patterns with your makeshift drum. Go slow then speed up, start with a simple pattern, moving into more tricky rhythms. Try multiple noise making objects that you can beat on shake or rattle without breaking or damaging them.

Now as you drum and move, let yourself vocalize and sing. Make beautiful sounds and not-so-beautiful sounds, let them express what you are feeling- joy, freedom, frustration, anger, fear, worry… happiness…

Try growling like a tiger, singing like an angel whooshing like the wind through an evergreen tree. Make up new words, create personal lyrics, specific to your life, or have no words, just the sounds of your voice.

Go high, go low, spin your voice like sugar, let it slide and play. Cut loose and let yourself be one with the sound that originates deep within you and continues outward into the web of life.

Celebrate your life with sound and drumming. Get your heart and body and voice activated. Energize yourself!

Raise up your deepest requests and desires on this wave of heartfelt sound and rhythm. Ask for the world you wish to see and for the life you wish to live. Ask for all the inhabitants of our dear planet, animal vegetable and mineral to prosper with full and robust health, for the web of life to be repaired.

When you drum and sing with focus and heart and sincerity, the spirits cannot fail to hear you and be moved by your requests.