Lately, I’ve been feeling the deep connection between rhythm, light, and time.
It felt beautifully timed that we picked up a free drumset from my friend on the first day of summer, the day with the most light.
I’ve loved drumming since I was 14, playing alongside my twin sister. She was on the keyboard, weaving complex patterns like Riders on the Storm. What I loved most was how time seemed to stretch when I played. If I was fully in it, especially at a spirited gathering, the drums would take over. I couldn’t do anything wrong. I’d slip into a strange bubble of flow where I was both inside the rhythm and witnessing it all happen.
F. W. J. Schelling taught that time is not a backdrop for events but the very pulse of being coming into form. As he puts it, “time comes into being immediately from eternity into the new”, each moment unfolds out of a deeper, eternal presence. In that sense, a drumbeat is not just a marker in time, it is time being born through light and motion.
After loading the drums into the van, we wandered through the garden, admiring fruit trees and blooming roses. Then her daughter called out, “Look at the sky!”
Above the lakefront, the Goodyear blimp hovered in quiet majesty. It looked like a submarine drifting through a pale blue sea. We stood in quiet awe. There was something nostalgic about it. Once a staple of stadium skies, now it felt more like a floating emblem of coherence and optimism than an ad for tires.
The vibrations of the earth are the drumbeats of nature. Its oscillations are the foundation of time itself. Atomic clocks work by measuring the frequency of cesium atoms, which tick 9,192,631,770 times per second. That rhythm becomes our standard for a second.
Even crickets join the song. They rub their wings in rhythms shaped by temperature and internal clocks, forming patterns of collective chirping that resemble natural coherence.
Rhythm lives in everything. Light carries it. Time unfolds from it. And when we tune in, we become part of the beat.
We don’t have to have moves like Jagger, just a willingness to attune to nature’s rhythms and our own.
nature's zodiac 
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