Foremost in my consciousness this week, as I continue to heat other experiments on the back bunsen burner, is how I’ve ended up doing what I’m now doing. It seems, looking back, that most of the things I’ve accomplished came about after the rather simple realization that “oh… I can do that!” And it seems that this realization has served, every time, as a counter to the quiet, hidden, background voices that told me otherwise.

You name it. Whether it’s getting involved in theater or sword-fighting, going to seminary or film school, making a documentary or writing a novel, at some point it dawned on me “oh… I can do that!” and only then was I able to see how, in some way I hadn’t before noticed, I’d been holding that I could NOT do that, and that I’d been settling for something less than what I really wanted.

What has me thinking about this again is music. As I learn to play the drum kit, as I reacquaint myself with my mandolin and figure out how to fit it into rock and roll, as I pick songs and start singing them, and as I ponder with excitement and anxiety the possibility of playing with other musicians, I can see clearly now how Paul’s drum lesson advertisement on the IGA bulletin board sparked the fire of “I can do that!” And now I can look back at my long history with drumming and realize that, when it gets right down to it, I’ve always wanted to play a kit, but never thought I could, and so settled for the hand drums as the only option available to me.

I used to attend a fabulous music festival in North Carolina called Merlefest. I quite love the various forms of music that now get combined under the genre label “Americana,” but what I really loved most was when those banjo-pickin’, high-lonesome croonin’, fiddle-scratchin’ musicians would break out into a rock groove. Sam Bush. Bela Fleck. Chris Thile. John Cowan. The Dirt Band. Yonder Mountain String Band. Leftover Salmon. The Horse Flies. Peter Rowan. These guys could kick out the traditional bluegrass and old-timey and country blues like nobody’s business. But they could also rock out. I remember one afternoon at Merlefest. It was The String Cheese Incident, I believe. In the middle of a bluegrass set they broke out in a Yes tune. Roundabout. The crowd went wild. I remember watching an Emmylou Harris set at the Festival for the Eno in Durham. In the middle of the show, Emmylou took a break and her band, the Nash Ramblers, led by mandolin virtuoso Sam Bush, launched into a Sailin’ Shoes/Crossroads medley that, to this day, brings me to tears just thinking about it.

I used to say of these guys that what they all really wanted to be was rock stars, but their mamas handed them banjos at an early age and they were trapped. Turns out that the person I’ve mostly been speaking about is myself. I’m the one who always wanted to be a rock musician. I remember, as a kid, seeing some local folk doing a skit at a street fair that included Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild at the end. My heart pounded. I remember watching Tommy James and the Shondells on television. I must’ve been ten or so. They were singing Crimson and Clover, with the full-on psychedelic lightshow pulsing and blobbing behind them. I was never the same. Truly.

In my own case, I’m the one who handed myself the banjo. I picked it up in college. Took lessons from the great Joel Mabus. Later got an acoustic six-string. Then a lap dulcimer. Then an acoustic 12-string and a mandolin. Added various hand drums along the way. Played folk music. A bit of bluegrass and Celtic. Did lots of drumming in circles. Took various lessons. But I was never inspired enough to get really good at any of these instruments. And the reason, I think now, is that all this time, unbeknownst to my conscious awareness, and even as much as I do love bluegrass and old-timey and Celtic music, what I really wanted to do was play the music that most stirred my heart, the music that came through those tiny television speakers and broke me open, the music that the Lester Bangs character in Almost Famous called “gloriously and righteously dumb.” That music was, is, and always shall be that monster called “rock and roll.”

I blame my brother Dave for this, of course. As a high-schooler, he got involved in a rock band with some of his buddies, those cooler, older kids with long hair and cigarettes who both frightened and called to me at the same time. I had to be different from my brother, you see. While I’m at it, I can blame my brother Chris, who took up the drum kit at an early age. And my parents, who never really seemed interested in music. And my extended family of origin: sweet, loving, down-to-Earth farming folk who seemed to have little time for such frivolities as music. And I can blame the entire culture, as well. As Lester Bangs put it: “A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might want to accomplish on your own.” Yes. Exactly. How could little Timmy even think of playing the same music as these obvious gods and goddesses? He could not.

But, in the end, blame feels inaccurate, unsatisfying, and disempowering. No matter where those limiting stories came from, no matter how reasonable they were, and how necessary their adoption at the time, I am the one still holding onto them.

Until something like an advertisement for drum lessons shows up on the IGA bulletin board and thrusts those limiting stories into consciousness. Until a blurb about the community college film school shows up in the local paper. Until a friend suggests I might like a science and theology course he took at MSU. Until, watching backstage from the wings, I begin to feel the allure of the stage itself. Until something comes along and challenges a story I did not even know I was telling myself. Until something moves, until a foundation shifts, until a brick crumbles, and the entire edifice of my ego structure falls a bit closer to the living ground of my being. Until…

There is much more to say about this. There are connections I want to make with the Great Reset™ and the Limitations™ of the Physical Realm™, I think. Connections I can make with Evolution™, Maturity™, and Redemption™. Connections with the more Spiritual™ layers of Our Present Predicament™. But I shall leave such undefined terms, and the teasing apart of such connections, for another day in the lab.

Right now, I am filled with gratitude. That I get to be here. In this time. On this planet. With Sally. Both of us doing our work. Gratitude that there’s a drum kit from a yard sale sitting mere feet from my desk. Gratitude that, once again, I realized what it is I most deeply wanted, and that I could find a way to get it.

And outside, the sun sparkles on the bay. The air warms. As does the ground underfoot. Gulls and crows ride the thermals, searching for calories, ecstasy, and connection.

Slowly, I become more like them.

Gratitude.