Drum
Share Article From the 4th floor balcony you see the yellow elementary school building. Students are obedient. Teachers are bored, overworked and underpaid. Drones. Going through chalk and talk with dry drab emotions. Memorize the text. Grammar rules. Close your mouth and open your ears. Vomit the material.
A red flag with a bright five-point yellow star is silent. All the hot air is in the classroom. The educational skin drum at the school echoes a long deep resonating thunder. Vibrations bounce off clouds and granite mountains. It is large and stretched tight. Clouds and mountains? No the skin drum.
Remember all the amazing drums at the Ethnology Museum over centuries and A Century Is Nothing, but a long now, drums here are essential for communicating over distance.
Drum language has two tones.
Be the drum, frequency and vibration, said little drummer boy pounding out his message. Thump. Thump. Thump. Three heavy beats. Vibrations echo across Sapa space and curl around the lake into eastern mountains.
Drums call young tribal members. All the children gather. Be the drum with mind-at-large.
It is seasonal mountain music saying plant, weave art, make children, tend animals, harvest fields, celebrate life, all the gathering of Black, White, Flower Hmong, Red Dzao, Tay. Community.
Spirit. Storytellers. Animism. Integrity. Authenticity. Nature is your inspiration, guide and teacher.
You live in an amazing art museum.
Cheap foreign plastic factory junk overwhelms natural fiber markets, threading globalization.
Joyful female cloth sellers in the old fabric market sustain energies in their sewing community.
The Hmong and Red Dzao women walk from their villages to stay in Sapa for 3-4 days like their daughters. If they sell or don’t sell they return to their village.
It’s a long walk.
