The flute, by means of breath, has the sound of the wind, so its
music easily evokes experiencing the unity of self and cosmos. Kevin
Locke (Tokeya Inajin), a Lakota musician and instrument maker, says of
the flute:
... the flute is the essence of the wind, especially Niya Awicableze, the
Enlightening Breath, the first waft on which the meadowlarks return to
the Northern prairies. The flute gives voice to the beauty of the land and
is the sound of the wind as it rustles the grasses and leaves, scales the
buttes and mountains, or skims the surface of lakes and streams.
To send forth the clearest sound the flute must be made with great
care and understanding of how the wind-like breath of its user will
move invisibly through the flute to draw out a beautiful melody. The
music becomes the means of a mysterious unseen communication that
flows from one heart to another, one spirit to another.^91
The flute can sing the sound of the wind in a canyon, and the musician is
the locus of the canyon-wind’s reinstantiation as sound made by human
intelligence, breath, and the instrument he has crafted. Flutes are gener-
ally made of plant materials, marking another dimension of the relation-
ality of beings realizable through sacred music. The part of a tree used to
make a flute is not severed from the living creation. It continues to live,
not biologically, but as a resonator for the breath of a human being, and
a resonator for the voice of the wind. Locke speaks of the sounds of the
four prime instruments as vehicles of the life-force, and as means to expe-
rience one’s identity with the creation and its sacred forces. The religious
and therapeutic power of music is conveyed in Locke’s likening the music
of these instruments to the thunderstorms that allow the prairies to
bloom. The drum is the thunder “that shakes the human heart out of its
slough of despondency.” Flute songs are “the wind that purifies and
breathes life into the human heart.” The rattle’s sound is the refreshing
rain, and the human voice is streaks of lightning that “illuminate the
heart and charge it with energy and enlightenment.”^92 The power of sa-
cred instrumental music is all the greater if the musician has crafted his
own instrument and experiences the unity of creation in his transform-
ing—for example, part of a cedar tree into a flute with a living voice.
Sound as a Bridge Between Substantial and
Non-substantial Being
Sound is physical—it involves energy being conducted through air (a ma-
terial medium of distantly spaced molecules) and impinging physically on
tantra and aesthetic therapeutics 165