I wrote this a while ago:
“Can you feel it, the heartbeat of life around us, the call of The Common Drum?”
I’ve always felt that the Common Drum could be found pretty easily: All life lives by rhythm. Even single-celled organisms have rhythms of activity/inactivity just like the wake/sleep circadian patterns of plants and animals. The seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the beat of our hearts all occur with rhythm, and it’s this rhythm that’s the beating of the Common Drum.
I read an article once on a physicist who observed that the smaller the animal, the faster the heartbeat, and the larger the animal, the slower the heartbeat. He extrapolated this, and believed that cities - so far removed from the “natural” world as we know it - function like giant living organisms, with the daily commute serving as their heartbeat , beating once every 12 hours. Gaia-theory scientists believe the whole planet is a super-organism, and we are merely the cells that make it up. Our rhythms serve a function of the superorganism much as the rhythms of our own microscopic cells govern us.
The Common Drum, the heartbeat, the Rhythm of life is all around us. That rhythm beats in things smaller than our eye can see, and things larger than our eye can behold. It beats in each of us. It’s only ever as far away as closing our eyes and laying a hand on our hearts, a finger on our wrists, feeling the rhythm that beats steadily there; remembering that all life has it, too.
So, how do I feel the Common Drum’s beat? By listening. By being still and quiet, and hearing the rhythms of life all around me. By speaking. By using my words and my voice to connect with people, every day. To lift them up. To show them that together, we’re stronger than the challenges we face. Because at the end of the day, who ever we are, whatever our station in life: We are all the same.
We all dance through life to the rhythm of the Common Drum.
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