“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

“And maybe that is where rhythm comes from, I think. Our earliest understanding of rhythm. The sound of our own breath, the beating of our own hearts.”

“daddy says the world is a drum tight and hardand i told himi’m gonna beat out my own rhythm”

“There is a value in repetition. When we repeat certain phrases and even actions, like fingering prayer beads, we create a quiet rhythm within our spirits. The beating of our heart is a repetition as is the rhythm of our breathing. All of life has its rhythms, and the repetition of familiar prayers can bring our interior spirits into harmony with the Divine Heartbeat and the breathing of the Divine Christ.”

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

“The Sucking [of the blood] mesmerized me; the warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart - only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the bet began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that that threatened to go on without end.I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness;”