Medicine of the Land: the story of a new drum

Last week I made a drum. I’ve made several drums over the last 10 years, but this one was different. She took six months to come into being. It involved a lot of waiting, a lot of learning, several wells and springs, and meeting women I would not have met otherwise. Her name is Medicine of the Land, and this is her story so far.

It’s also the story of how I am slowly preparing to teach drum making in a new way: using hides from local deer, and connected to the land and the waters where I live.

So many of the places and people in this story came to me through the drum.

The pull towards water

Early in the year, I started feeling the pull of being near sacred springs and waters. I first visited the springs in Ashwell, which is the source of the river Cam in which I have been swimming all year round for the last 8 years. I have always had a deep affinity for water.

Learning to make rawhide

In the spring, I learnt to process local deer hides into rawhide for making drums, under the gentle guidance of local tanner Jess Peace. I processed four hides over 3 weeks, two fallows and two muntjacs, both from the land where I live near Cambridge.

I found it a welcome slow and deeply meditative process. I loved reconnecting with ancestral skills this way, and whilst doing the prep I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. It felt important to have done this myself before getting ready to teach women how to make drums.

I also got a tanned fallow hide from Jess to use on an altar when I would start making drums with women.

The download

In June, whilst drumming at home, I received clear guidance. I needed to take women to drum and make drums at sacred water sites on the land I live on. Not far away, not somewhere famous, just close to where I live, within a 30 min drive radius of my home. That way women can connect with the land they live in, and stop believing that magical land connection only happens in faraway “special” lands.

I’ve taken women drumming on sacred sites close to where I live for a few years, but this was something new. This was a pull towards the waters.

Clearing the spring

Soon after, I did something really special with a small group of friends. We cleared a small natural spring in my local nature reserve so it could flow again. After we worked, removing stagnant water, mud, sticks and rocks, we sang and drummed, and created a small shrine, the little stream of chalk stream water became crystal clear, flowing freely and started making a beautiful little tinkly sound. We made a little shrine and honoured it with drums, bells and songs.

One spring leads to another

When I shared about the spring clearing online, it connected with several women I had never heard off, who are also being guided to connect and work with the waters and the drum.

One of them is Charlotte Emily Rose, who clears wells in Ireland. We swapped our books (hers is a stunning illustrated one, called Well-being). I was invited to drum with a group of people to honour St Helen’s Well in Thetford Forest. And I also met Charmaine Porter, and we went together to honour a hidden red well I had been wanting to visit for 2 years, which is in a woodland only about 25 minutes from my home. The first time I went there, on a hot 30 degrees day in July,  I was amazed by how wild the space felt, like nothing I had seen around Cambridge, and how magical and soothing the energy felt there. I loved it so much I ended up staying there for 2h, alone, feeling my whole nervous system exhale, and feeling a sense of deep peace within. I also found a green woodpecker feather and a buzzard feather that day. I have visited this place about 5 times since, including with others.

Learning to make hoops

In July I spent a few days learning to make drum hoops with Toni Vyse.

Then the hides and the hoops sat in my garage through the rest of the summer and into early autumn. I felt a bit impatient at times, wondering when I would finally use them. And yet I also knew that I’d need to make my own drum before I took women through making their own. I wondered how long it would take, but it wasn’t the right time yet

Meanwhile, the deer

Things kept moving gently in the background. I first sat and asked which of the hides I had made were for me, and then let a friend choose one of the remaining hides, and offered to make a drum with her. I offered to another friend to make a drum with the remaining hide, and also ordered another couple of UK deer hides, and committed to making a drum with one of them with another friend.

Then I spent a day with an amazing artist, Suzi Edwards-Goose, at her Deer Woman Knowing workshop. She unveiled a series of deer women paintings, and we connected with deer up close in a park near Leicester where 650 deer roam freely. The day confirmed something I had been feeling: the hides I use when I teach women to make drums need to be local to me. That same day I asked Jess, who had taught me to make hides, if she would make some to order for the land connected drums I’m going to make with women and she said yes.

I also got a set of antlers to place on a future drum making altar from the park.

The call

After all that waiting, it happened all at once, and very fast.

Once the date was set to teach my friend how to make her drum, the message became extremely clear. I needed to make my own drum, connected to local land and springs, before teaching my first drum making. I would also need that drum for the water blessing ceremony I’m leading at Samhain this coming weekend.

The hide said that I start the drum NOW. So I listened. I soaked the hide in my bathtub that very day, then cut the drum head and the lacing. The next morning I took the hide and lacing to accompany my weekly drumming in the woods, because it had told me it needed to be connected to several places on the land, not just the red well.

The next day I used a woodburning pen to write some words on the hoop. These words appeared as I wrote:

Sacred waters
Sacred lands
Sacred women
Sacred drums

Making the drum at the red well

Last week I took my hide, hoop and tools to the red well, alone. Once I got there I gave an offering of rose petals and yew berries to the well, then I drummed to ask for guidance first, and was shown that I needed to bathe the hide in the well water and place the hoop on the well head.

So I did just that. I place my cut hide and lacing onto the water and my hoop on the well head, and  while the hide was in the water, I asked the waters, the land and the deer to help infuse this drum with an energy that would guide women back to the land, to the waters, to themselves, to the drum and to each other. I also asked that it would ripple out to many more women.

Then I retrieved my hoop and hide and I sat on a log with them on my lap and started lacing the drum. It wasn’t easy. I had only ever made drums on a table. The lacing broke at one point. I repaired it and felt ok with it, because it felt linked to my change of work direction. The lacing kept tangling because it didn’t have the space between a table and the floor to drop into. I had to collect more water to keep it slippery.

Eventually the sun got low and the woods started to get dark. I knew I had to allow time to pack up and walk back through the woods. I lit a mugwort stick I had made in the summer, smoked and cleansed myself and my drum then placed my drum onto the well head again, thanking the well and the land for their energy and guidance. I also offered the offcuts from the hide back to the land.

Then I gently placed my not quite finished drum inside my drum bag and took it home (I had done half of the handle cross by then) and finished making the drum on my kitchen table. This means this drum is now beautifully connected to my home as well as the water and the land.

Her name

That evening I placed my newly finished drum on a shelf at home to dry. The next day I held her and asked why she had come into my life and what her medicine is.

She said: My medicine is to slow down and breathe with the land. My name is Medicine of the Land.

Opening the drum

Five days after being made, my drum was finally dry enough to be played properly for the first time. I asked her to guide me. Different locations and images came up, but the timing and the weather had other ideas. The only sunny day coming up, I was actually in London. There was also the matter of making a beater for her, and I was told to make it from a local willow, because of its connection with water, and that I would need to write the same words on the beater.

The clear image that finally appeared was to play this drum for the first time inside an old willow tree near the river in  a nearby village. This tree, which I have loved and visited many times, was hit by lightning a few years ago, and all that’s left of it is a big hollow stump, blackened by fire in the middle, big enough to walk inside, and facing the river. Amazingly, it still grows. I call it the grandmother tree. It also turned out to be the full moon that day which felt special.

So on Monday, despite a forecast of rain, I went there in the late afternoon, with my new drum, some smudge and some secateurs. Interestingly the gate access to the meadows was overgrown, so much that I had to duck, so I first used my secateurs to clear the access, which in hindsight feels significant as a path clearing process.. When I reached the willow tree, in the misty damp, the tree looked more alive than I had ever seen since the lighting strike, with luxuriant branches and leaves sprouting from it like hair. I first asked permission to cut a branch to make my beater. Then I went inside, smudged myself and my drum, and I was delighted to discover that the tree sheltered me and my drum from the light rain. I was guided to dip my villow branch in the river and sprinkle my drum with it, to connect it with the waters of the cam as well as the well. Then I started to drum. Within minutes this chant came:

Sacred be the water

Sacred be the land

Sacred be the women

Sacred be the drums

Here is a video of me singing it inside the willow tree

I sang for a while and then I drummed some more asking for more guidance and connection. It was so special and beautiful, and I felt so happy there, I didn’t want to leave, and ended up staying until it was nearly dark.

Playing this drum for healing and with others

Yesterday, I did a closing the bones ceremony. I had planned to use a different drum, but as I worked my new drum called loudly to be used instead. So half way through the ritual, I moved to the next room where my new drum was on a shelf, and used it for the drumming part of the ritual. It was surprising because I hadn’t intended or planned to use this drum for healing. And it also made sense as this drum is designed to help women on their path.

This morning I took my new drum to my weekly morning woodland playing with my friend. In the past I acquired some drums that didn’t feel like they belonged there. But this drum did and my friend shared that whilst this drum clearly belonged to me and felt loyal to me, it also felt welcoming. 

I reflected on the fact that I used to make drum to heal others, and that for the last 3 years I started making drums for myself first, reflecting a move from the saviour syndrome I use to have when I started working as a healer and doula, into a more balanced,  integrated way of being.

The updated scale of drum acquisition

I used to say my scale of acquiring a drum goes like this, in order of the power of the experience: getting a factory made drum like a Remo, getting a handmade drum, getting a handmade drum made for you, and finally getting a drum you had made yourself. But now I realise there is a fifth category: a drum you have made yourself using a hide you have processed yourself.

Decorating the drum

After making the drum, I also wondered how to decorate her. She’s told me she needs me to place the antler and deer bones I received at the deer workshop and also representation of the 4 elements, with the water element needing to be a fresh water representation and not a sea shell, that I need to use some of the feathers I found at the red well for the air, and a deer bone for the earth some tinder fungus for the fire. I happen to have all of these already. I am yet to decorate my drum and make my beater but I trust in the gentle timing of this process. For someone who used to be massively impatient, this feels like a big deal.

What comes next

This drum has taught me a lot before I made or played her. She taught me to wait, and then to move quickly when it was time.

Next I’ll make a drum with my friend from the muntjac hide I prepared, and then comes the water blessing ceremony at Samhain. After that, slowly, I will start offering drum making to women in this way: local deer, local waters, local land.

We don’t need to travel far to find sacred places. They are often right where we live, sometimes hidden under mud and sticks, waiting for someone to find them.