A Daughter-In-Law's Reminder And Lessons On A Handpan Drum

These are my kids. Three from my bones and one from my son in that roundabout way where a person becomes a daughter when she marries a son. Pretty cool stuff.  So this new daughter, she inspires this writing today in something that she wrote yesterday in celebration of the eve before the wedding that merged her and my son into this quite spectacular unity of love and life and lots of laughter.

She wrote: A successful marriage requires awake, alive, present people, too. The moment you fall into a story about the other person: assume they're going to do what they always do, say what they allllllllways say, react the way they "always" react, it's over. They deserve to be heard for the first time, every time. To be kissed like it's the first kiss. To be thanked, held, encouraged. Every. Single. Day.

Sit with that a minute, because I need to shift the focus to my  really cool new drum.

This is a Handpan Drum. I love this drum. It makes the most amazing sound. And the playing of it is a dancing of the hands around the notes. I know this because I have watched videos of people playing it. 

I do not know how to play it at all.

I bought it for my birthday, which is coming up quite soon, because I have music in me and - in that not a natural musician way - have been searching for something that will allow me to release the music out.  

I've written about music before, my learned piano ability and my quite painful attempt at the cello. The piano still calls but my training is limited to just that: the training and proficiency not that free form letting go and creating that I crave and that the music within me hungers for. The cello..... um.... let's move on.

Ok, my drum. This is how the notes lay out.

So the drum and my by-marriage daughter's thoughts, they connect in me as being the same message.

These wise words - deserve to be heard for the first time, every time - this is the journey round the zigzag notes in the instant that your hands play against the cool metal. Sure, there are melodies that you can learn, and pieces to perfect, just as there are kind and good and nurturing ways that we set up our partnership with this person we are forging a life with.

But there is also the opportunity to just play. To wander round the circle that is this drum and is our relationship with each other, both, and strike a note in any order because how the notes lay out allow for each sound to compliment the other no matter which order they are played.

And so, just as the inspiration of the music is in the moment of the playing, the power that is our partnership with that person we chose to play music with is in the love and growth and wonder of seeing each moment as new. Every. Single. Day.