Wendy K. Laidlaw

I'd never seen anyone do it, even though it turned out to be an ancient practice.

And now, and now my imagination is soaring and then I'm realizing, oh, the rhythm is what connects everybody.

The story is what permeates everybody.

And all of a sudden I'm doing something that's pretty full blown.

And that is endlessly interesting to me and mostly compelling to other people.

And I'd never seen it done before, even though in Ireland, they call it the Shanaki, which was a storyteller, but also was usually a musician.

In Africa, it's a griot who is a storyteller who's also a drummer.

Same thing in Alaska and so on.

So I had discovered or bumped into, rediscovered an ancient thing that I eventually I learned, no, this is an old thing.

But the way it came to me was as a new thing.

And because it was ancient, that allowed me to trust it more, that it wasn't just my ego.

It wasn't just, oh, I've got this gift.

It was no, I've stumbled in to this channel that is both rhythm and language and voice.

And I'm intended to live here.

Yes.

It was coming from genuine knowledge.

And it took me a long while to figure this out.

My psyche...

already knew their wounds because we're all coming up in the same kind of wounded place.

And so my psyche, whatever the soul just said or just pronounced, here's the story we're in.