One Drum

Tonight Pat, my wife, and I went to a free concert in the park near St. Joseph’s Hospital to hear One Drum. One Drum is an eclectic world music ensemble performing “songs, stories, and dances rooted in the cultures of Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, the Middle East, and Americas, weaving a tapestry that illustrates the common cultural origins of music.” (From brochure) One Drum has more than one drum but the music is grounded in probably the first musical instrument in the history of the world, the drum. Pounding out a rhythm is very basic to humans. At one point one of the lead singers asked us to put our hand over our chest and feel the beat of our heart. Drum music is as fundamental to music as a heart is to a human being. Today I heard my adult son playing his drums in the basement with a friend on the electric guitar. Their sound, as my son’s friend called it, was ‘raw.’ Their music was like raw compost bringing together all kinds of sounds, like waste, into the grounded beat of their experiences.

I made a compost run to Bay View today to deliver some castings and pick up some more compost as part of my trading composted waste for castings. Time will tell if the additional castings on garden plants will enhance the growth of plants but time, history and experience says it will. For thousands of years human beings have been using worm castings to enrich soil for growing. Although it is common knowledge, vermicomposting, it goes ignored and unused by farmers and gardeners. Gardeners and farmers spend lots of money on equipment, seed, fertilizer, water and plants, when the most valuable resource rests in the dumps. Working together with compost we can grow a diversity of food. We can be the One Drum of the Garden.

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