Hey ya'll, I'm Dan! I'm in my 30's, reside in the US Pacific Northwest, and when I'm not sleeping, cooking, or looking for my car keys, I am a full time touring/session drummer, private instructor, and all around nerd of all things drums and drumming. I also enjoy reading, writing (especially far-too-long forum posts), keeping my one houseplant alive, adventuring in nature, rotting in bed watching Adventure Time, and of course the study and practice of really weird shit.
I got into said weird shit through my instrument and my roommates, whom are also my closest friends and central bandmates in my non-touring artsy band. Moved in with them in 2017, ran myself into the ground doing college + gigging + working in construction, and then the pandemic hit and I went full burnout. Didn't touch my drums for six months. My journey with magick/esotera/spirituality kicked off out of that. I got into yoga with Adrienne which got me listening to my body, quit alcohol, started gardening, and realized that the only way forward was gonna be through trauma work. My roommates are ethereal really magical feeling people (there are two harps and a piano in the room that I'm typing this), both have science backgrounds, and are both adept at herbalism and mycology.
Through them I rediscovered psychedelics (legal where I'm at but I can edit if the mods would prefer, I'll keep an eye on my inbox to catch it quickly), which kicked off a lot. My big catalyst was a mid-winter 2021 cabin trip/jam. We each took a not insubstantial amount of mushrooms and played for four hours straight. Psilocybin has always taken a strange primal deep spirit energy and that day all of my awareness centered on the ancient ancestral lineage of the drums. During the trip and ever since, I perceived my drumset not as the form of my own physical possession, but instead as a single echo of the grander "spirit" that was The Drums. They felt perpetual, like a fixed constant that weathered the ages, which acted as the connective tissue of generations of humans since the beginning of time. And drumming itself felt like an expression of that. I had a sort of timeless feeling that made me think about how many people since the dawn of humanity have spent a Saturday winter morning with some kind of drum in front of them, steeped in rhythm while dripping in sweat, for a short time becoming engaged with, propelling, and being propelled by the current of that moment's flow of time. I couldn't shake a weird feeling of non-blood lineage, that I was a sort of continuous variable myself, and that I was not Dan but rather the drummer, as much a tool to be utilized by the drums as the drums were a tool to me. Idk how to fully explain it (as is the case with every wacko who ate psychedelics and tried to explain their realization). It was if The Drums were an object, and my own drums, as well as my act of being a drummer were both particulate matter and magnetic force that held the greater whole together (but also were the greater object). Gah.
Anyways.
That led me to some changes. I started playing a lot, started finding myself less interested in the drum lineage of the last 100 years or so (I swear the drumming community sometimes acts like drums begin and end with the development of the drumset), and became more fascinated by the forces behind it. I got into Time and read some cool books (A Brief History of Timekeeping, Your Brain is a Time Machine, Felt Time, The Order of Time), started seeing seemingly inanimate objects as similar pieces of a greater whole, started having full blown conversations with my plants and my drums, and then gradually got pointed towards Magick. My roommate suggested Liber Null which I dug. I'm a baby beginner newbie at this stuff but am currently into some chaos magic, am doing Josephine McCarthy's Quareia exercise 1, give offerings (nice books) to shrines (neighborhood free book boxes) of my unnamed deity/force/god[ess] of Knowledge whom I quite creatively refer to as "Knowledge", am currently reading Dr. Skinner's Ars Notoria slowly, working through Internal Family Systems (an oddly Jungian/magickal way of going about complex trauma healing), and am building a combined birdbath/food offering/bee feeding station/standing stone thingy, each component of which I'm planning to craft and center in a ritual/ceremony of a variety that I will decide on later. Not really sure how to define what my magick is or if that's even necessary to label. I know I want to center my drumming, I know I want to use it to connect with/help/heal folks and myself, but am wary of falling into the "white guy eats mushrooms and decides he's now a Shaman" track. I'm trusting that as long as I keep working, thinking, and listening, that my next steps will make themselves known somehow.
Cheers and Happy late Halloween. I'm excited to have found this place.
I got into said weird shit through my instrument and my roommates, whom are also my closest friends and central bandmates in my non-touring artsy band. Moved in with them in 2017, ran myself into the ground doing college + gigging + working in construction, and then the pandemic hit and I went full burnout. Didn't touch my drums for six months. My journey with magick/esotera/spirituality kicked off out of that. I got into yoga with Adrienne which got me listening to my body, quit alcohol, started gardening, and realized that the only way forward was gonna be through trauma work. My roommates are ethereal really magical feeling people (there are two harps and a piano in the room that I'm typing this), both have science backgrounds, and are both adept at herbalism and mycology.
Through them I rediscovered psychedelics (legal where I'm at but I can edit if the mods would prefer, I'll keep an eye on my inbox to catch it quickly), which kicked off a lot. My big catalyst was a mid-winter 2021 cabin trip/jam. We each took a not insubstantial amount of mushrooms and played for four hours straight. Psilocybin has always taken a strange primal deep spirit energy and that day all of my awareness centered on the ancient ancestral lineage of the drums. During the trip and ever since, I perceived my drumset not as the form of my own physical possession, but instead as a single echo of the grander "spirit" that was The Drums. They felt perpetual, like a fixed constant that weathered the ages, which acted as the connective tissue of generations of humans since the beginning of time. And drumming itself felt like an expression of that. I had a sort of timeless feeling that made me think about how many people since the dawn of humanity have spent a Saturday winter morning with some kind of drum in front of them, steeped in rhythm while dripping in sweat, for a short time becoming engaged with, propelling, and being propelled by the current of that moment's flow of time. I couldn't shake a weird feeling of non-blood lineage, that I was a sort of continuous variable myself, and that I was not Dan but rather the drummer, as much a tool to be utilized by the drums as the drums were a tool to me. Idk how to fully explain it (as is the case with every wacko who ate psychedelics and tried to explain their realization). It was if The Drums were an object, and my own drums, as well as my act of being a drummer were both particulate matter and magnetic force that held the greater whole together (but also were the greater object). Gah.
Anyways.
That led me to some changes. I started playing a lot, started finding myself less interested in the drum lineage of the last 100 years or so (I swear the drumming community sometimes acts like drums begin and end with the development of the drumset), and became more fascinated by the forces behind it. I got into Time and read some cool books (A Brief History of Timekeeping, Your Brain is a Time Machine, Felt Time, The Order of Time), started seeing seemingly inanimate objects as similar pieces of a greater whole, started having full blown conversations with my plants and my drums, and then gradually got pointed towards Magick. My roommate suggested Liber Null which I dug. I'm a baby beginner newbie at this stuff but am currently into some chaos magic, am doing Josephine McCarthy's Quareia exercise 1, give offerings (nice books) to shrines (neighborhood free book boxes) of my unnamed deity/force/god[ess] of Knowledge whom I quite creatively refer to as "Knowledge", am currently reading Dr. Skinner's Ars Notoria slowly, working through Internal Family Systems (an oddly Jungian/magickal way of going about complex trauma healing), and am building a combined birdbath/food offering/bee feeding station/standing stone thingy, each component of which I'm planning to craft and center in a ritual/ceremony of a variety that I will decide on later. Not really sure how to define what my magick is or if that's even necessary to label. I know I want to center my drumming, I know I want to use it to connect with/help/heal folks and myself, but am wary of falling into the "white guy eats mushrooms and decides he's now a Shaman" track. I'm trusting that as long as I keep working, thinking, and listening, that my next steps will make themselves known somehow.
Cheers and Happy late Halloween. I'm excited to have found this place.
