Circles in Time: Tapping into Cosmic Patterning

This landscape, flat, mostly devoid of trees, home to large fields of industrial agriculture, was once very different.  Just a few hundred years ago, the sea came inland through a network of estuarine creeks - dendritic patterns that from the air resemble a branching tree that reached right up to the Fen edge where the land begins to rise, west of the A15.  The ghosts of these patterns are held in the land and at certain times of year they show as cropmarks, visible on google earth images even to this day.  The land holds the memory of salt marsh and sea air.  Sometimes, walking east, with the wind rippling the wheat as it does the surface of water, I feel as though I am at sea.  Although the sea is now around 35km away as the crow flies, the imprint is strong.  

Humans have inhabited this area for thousands of years.  To the north and east of here are countless salterns - salt-making sites dating back to the Bronze Age.  Round barrows are plentiful, and settlement sites mark the landscape.  Flint axes, scrapers, ancient pottery fragments are regularly turned up by plough.  And even, occasionally, human bones dating back as far as the Bronze Age.

I have a parallel daily practice of drumming.  My drum is a large Irish bodhran.  It is painted with a Celtic cross design, a fitting design for my crossroads and Circles in Time practice.  I am fascinated by crossroads - their symbolism and history.  I work physically and psychically with crossroads as thresholds, liminal places or thin places, and a place of choices.  In folklore crossroads are often where the supernatural shows up (more on that in a future post).

I found the bodhran by chance when I was in Stamford.  I walked close to The Stamford Music Shop and was amazed to find it still there, more than 40 years since I used to be taken there after school sometimes to buy music for my piano and bassoon lessons.  So I went in, and there it was behind the counter - the only frame drum they had.  I had recently started participating in a drum circle, so it seemed fitting to buy it from this shop that had so many happy musical associations from childhood.  

The drum is powerful.  I am learning how the sensitive goat skin changes according to temperature and humidity.  I am learning its quiet power, and full unleashed power.  I believe the drum teaches you how to play (not that I am against being taught by other humans - that is also really important), but it is in relationship and reciprocity with the drum that I feel I am learning the most.  I play at different times of day and I play outside in the fields and the woods.  I don’t play it in the traditional way - I play with a single-ended beater.

As an aside, I have found out that in flint knapping, repeated percussive blows record themselves in flint as concentric rings radiating out from the point of impact.  It kind of blows my mind that something as seemingly solid and fixed as stone reorganises itself into concentric rings when hit repeatedly by human hand.  But I guess that is where we enter the realm of quantum physics and the illusion of the solidity of matter.

But back to the drum.  The exploration of the pacing of the drum beat - the slowing down and speeding up, has led into an exploration of the same with walking pace.  How many beats/footfalls per minute create alignment with my surroundings?  This is a tangible feeling.  As I slow down, there is a point where a certain resonance with everything around me happens that is felt as a marked falling-in with the world, a drop in the external and internal noise. 

At a pace of around 80 beats/footfalls per minute this happens.  At this pace of walking the deer no longer run away, the birds stay put as I pass, and the felt sense of the boundary of my skin loosens so that I no longer feel separate from my surroundings. 

Of course in doing this, in slowing down, becoming aware of and slowing my breathing,  my nervous system is also shifting into parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ state rather than an activated sympathetic nervous system flight-or-flight response.

It brings intense quiet joy to be able to walk without being perceived as a threat to the animal and bird kin around me, to let them go about their business as if I wasn’t there.  To not interrupt. 

On one particular early morning walk I came across two roe deer as I crossed through a hedge boundary.  They were standing just to my left a few metres away by the hedge and were not startled.  I had already slowed my pace at this point, and they looked straight at me.  I looked back and began speaking to them in a low, slow voice, letting them know I meant them no harm.  As I continued on the footpath at a right angle to the hedge they left their cover and walked out into the field, walking an arc around me, crossing the path in front of me and returning to the hedge to my right.  I drew this movement on paper when I got home - mine and theirs, our paths crossing asynchronously.  On paper it appeared to me to resemble the form of a bow and arrow, and I had the sudden sense that this is how people used to hunt.  It was not a hurried chasing affair or shooting from a hide.  It was a look-you-in-the eye out in the open unhurried sacred process - deer and hunter fully attuned, fully aware of each other, neither in fight-or-flight.  The meat would likely have had no stress hormones running through it in those circumstances.

I suppose what I am noticing through all of this is the entrainment of the body and awareness to cosmic patterning, whether that be visual or rhythmic or both at once.  It engenders a sense of humility to experience myself as a mote of dust in a cosmic swirl, as this landscape is teaching me.

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