Bad Buddhist

Sitting zazen with others during a Zen meditation retreat, it is not so difficult to accept the idea of non-attachment and be wholly content with just the body, mind and breath, alongside the three meals per day served. But the real test is out into the maelstrom of the world with its insistence that you need this and you need that and if one of those gets lost, stolen or breaks, you’re up—at least temporarily—the proverbial creek without a paddle. And that test I failed miserably yesterday.

 

It started with working on a document for 40 minutes and then it seeming to have disappeared. Deep primeval grunts of frustration came up from my belly, much to the chagrin of my wife who happened to be in the room. Then another frustrating moment when our plan to visit our grandson Malik in his class and me teach a few songs was thwarted by a new school policy that required 24-hour notice, as explained by the principal who we knew and liked and seen how we gave wonderful classes to the kids at the school for the past seven years. Aargh!

 

But the worst was at the airport when my bag didn’t come out of the security tunnel machine and when I asked the woman, she shrugged as if she hadn’t seen it. I had to rush a long loop back to security check-in thinking I left it there and then while running around, realized I hadn’t picked up my backpack. The bag wasn’t at the check-in, so I checked in again to at least get my backpack and no one knew where it was. So for that brief moment, I was faced with the loss of my computer, my journal, the new books I had bought, a suitcase full of clothes and toiletries. 

 

The Zen master in the old stories would just smile and say, “Is that so?” and accept it all with equanimity. Not this bad Buddhist, wrapped in deep confusion, outrage at the system, threatening-to-erupt tears and generally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was at that moment when I saw my bag and backpack on the other side of the belt, where the woman who said she didn’t know where they were had put them for a completely unnecessary bag check. AARRRRGGGGHHHHH!! Of course, I was relieved, but the damage to my tender psyche had already been done.

 

Everything in those bags was replaceable, though of course the loss of the computer would have been a huge nightmare. I still had my phone and my hearing aids with me, but still there was a snowflake’s chance in hell that I could have just taken a calming breath and accepted the situation. And this revealed not only my failure as a Buddhist, but my unchangeable identity as a contemporary American who expects everything to go my way, to work, to be fair.

 

Think about it. We are brought up in and live in a world where there is a pill for every ailment, a therapist for every symptom of mental disquiet, a plumber to fix our leaks and a doctor to fix our other ones. We expect food on all supermarket shelves and feel outraged if they’re out of our particular brand of mustard. We feel we deserve the best car in the best neighborhood with our children going to the best schools. We hire mediators to solve our disagreements and lawyers our bigger ones. We expect the answer to every question with a quick click on Google, curse if our computer is three seconds too slow or the bus 3 minutes late. We expect to get into the best senior care home and never stop to think we might be grateful for not being sent out on an ice floe to our death the moment we stop being useful to society. We expect all our children to grow up happy and healthy. We expect to be sheltered from the rain and snow and wind, cooled when it’s hot, heated when it’s cold and if the weather goes too far, FEMA better be there to help. We expect and expect and expect and if the world doesn’t meet our expectations, we are disappointed, let down, outraged, angry and astonished as if a promise were broken. And I mean “we” literally here. I’m in that club.

 

But that hasn’t been the case and still isn’t the case in so many cultures around the world. People used to have 9 or 10 children as a survival mechanism knowing that half of them might not make it past birth or five years old. Much of the world hasn’t and still doesn’t expect leaders to care about them, corruption and bribery is simply another tool of survival and many can't speak freely about their feelings and thoughts in public without risking Siberia, a Turkish prison or a public execution. 

 

None of these contemporary expectations are bad in and of themselves and indeed, some of those expectations are what keeps life in some sort of balance and opens the door to increased justice, compassion and quality of life. At the same time, it’s useful to take a step back and notice when we’ve gone too far, taken things for granted that are rare blessings, forgotten how to be grateful for what we do have and what does work rather than incensed over all that doesn’t. Especially in this moment when the expectation of democracy working as it has and possibly one day better than it has been has been thrown back in our face. Here’s how one of the characters in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible puts it:

 

Maybe I’ll never get over my grappling for balance never stop believing life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided. It’s in my blood. I anticipate rewards for goodness and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of years I’ve rocked in this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I’ll suddenly wake up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix. I loved my father (here I substitute”country”) too much to escape being molded to at least some part of his vision.

 

I’ve come a long way from my almost-lost suitcase here! Still I’m grateful that I still have the computer to write this on and my clothes are back on their hangers. At the same time that I hope to increase my gratitude for life as it is and always has been and always will be, with its mixture of calm sunny days and tornados, beautiful births and hard-to-accept deaths, unexpected human kindnesses and outrageous human cruelties, I will take full advantage of what can be fixed this week— going to the dentist, my haircutter, taking the car in for a check-up. I’ll go shopping today and they better have my mustard on the shelf! 

Windows and Mirrors

After the movies yesterday, we all went to Powell’s bookstore on Hawthorne St. and wasn’t that a delight! I bought books for both grandkids, even more satisfying than buying them the ice cream they always expect from our visits, and got two more for myself. I now have four books on my bedside table I’m looking forward to reading and that makes a distinct difference in my day. Or more accurately, my night.

 

I believe I have had a book to read my entire life, probably beginning around 9 or 10 years old, and often several. Fiction, non-fiction and poetry side-by-side. The non-fiction took a steep rise after reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth back around 1988 and following his ideas out to the various books he had read and beyond. Since his extraordinary insights and eloquence and knowledge base came from reading some 9 hours a day for 5 years (similar to the amount of time Charlie Parker practiced his saxophone), it inspired me to aim for at least an hour a day for the rest of my life. Which I have done, perhaps more counting the Audible books I listen to while walking or in the car. 

 

And my house is testimony to this disciplined practice which is better described as an effortless pleasure. In our small apartment—and much to my wife’s chagrin— there are some 600 books spilling out of bookshelves in four different rooms. I love the library, but I still buy books and so it means that the periodically cleansing of taking books to the used book section of Green Apple Bookstore or the little Free Books structures on sidewalks throughout the city means there are many more that I have read over the years. 

 

This line of thought made me curious about the average American’s statistics and the results are pretty damn depressing. It appears that in 2023, 54% of Americans reported reading ONE book and 82% reported that they had read 10 or less. In 2021, 17% of adults said they had read no books at all. In the same survey, college graduates read 6 fewer books than in previous years. 42% reported that they read no books at all after graduation. 

 

The sobering statistics continue:

• 21% of adults in the U.S. are illiterate.

• 54% have a literacy below 6^th grade level.

• 65% of Americans have not read a book in the past year.

• 80% of US families did not buy a book in the last year. 

• 70% of Americans have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.

• 60% of US public school students do not read at grade level. 

• 50% of American adults do not read a book in a year. 

 

The source of this information is https://www.abtaba.com/blog/59-reading-statistics# and it continues with another list:

 

1.    Reading for just six minutes can reduce stress levels by 68%.

2.    Reading can increase empathy and emotional intelligence.

3.    Children who are read to at home have a higher success rate in school.

4.    Reading can improve sleep quality.

5.    Reading can increase vocabulary and improve writing skills.

6.    Reading can improve mental focus and concentration.

7.    Reading can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

 

It’s clear that this cost-effective, ultimate simple way to improve our national mental health, physical health, intelligence, capacity for empathy, capacity for critical thought essential to effective participation in a democracy, is quite literally at our fingertips. No further away that a local library or bookstore. 

 

My personal testimony is that reading can be a window out into a world we’ve yet to know, a way to travel far beyond our limited selves and come to know our larger selves through the simple act of imaginative participation in another story. A way to take an intellectual journey into ideas beyond the ones we think we know. An opportunity to make friendships with characters who bring us excitement and comradery. A way to choose between good and evil and wrong or right by deciding who to root for in the unfolding plots. A look at historical or psychological or cultural patterns that help explain how we got to be where we are and point the way forward to how we might be better. 

 

Or it can be a mirror revealing the hidden faces within ourselves we can’t see in the one in our bathroom. An astounding revelation seeing ourselves in another and comforting us with the knowledge that we are not alone. 

 

Imagine living in a windowless, mirrorless house where you see nothing but the furniture you’ve put there and the decorations you’ve hung on the wall. Day after day the same tired story, with no new input into a brain hungry to make new connections between axons and dendrites hanging useless in our grey matter. Day after day a heart that pumps out the same old feelings without a single opening to something more expansive or beautiful. Combine that with the statistic that 50% of Americans have not read a book in the last year and you just have to wonder if it’s the same 50% that could only read enough to mark a dot in the voting booth for an ignorant man and his cronies who will make their windowless house yet more toxic and poisonous to the soul. 

 

I’ll close with two of my favorite quotes about reading:

 

• A book is an axe for the frozen sea within us. —Franz Kafka

 

• Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.  —Groucho Marx 

The Melody Lingers On

“The song is ended but the melody lingers on…” wrote Irving Berlin. He was talking about the ongoing presence of lost love, but it works to paraphrase it a bit when watching American musicals—“The play/ film has ended, but the melodies linger on.” Helped, of course, by all the jazz and popular singers who recorded it beyond the actual play/ film production—Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, for starters. On through Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Dinah Washington, Johnny Hartmann, Nancy Wilson, Blossom Dearie and more. And still going strong with Mary Stallings, Diana Krall, Dianna Reeves, Kurt Elling, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cecile McClorin-Savant, Samara Joy and more. Not to mention all the jazz instrumental performers who continue to re-invent the rich repertoire of the Great American Songbook that was mostly used in musical theater.

 

All of this certainly helped lodge these exquisite melodies in our musical memories, but it was more. The fact is that these tunes by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hart/ Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, many of which were used in both Broadway and Hollywood musicals, had a melodic genius that got us whistling them on the way out of the theater. Take The Sound of Music as just one small example. Hum a few notes and many will burst into the songs, Do a Deer/ Edelweiss/ My Favorite Things/ Climb Every Mountain. In fact, SF’s wondrous (and now tragically dormant) Castro Theater would often have Sing-a-longs based on the conviction that people would know and be able to sing the tunes. Some of the favorites were The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz.

 

Why am I writing about this? Because we just took the grandkids to the wonderful Baghdad Theater in Portland (similar to the Castro) to see Wicked and yes we all enjoyed it. But I defy anyone in the theater to whistle any one of the songs sung. Even a phrase. They couldn’t do it. I can virtually guarantee that if a movie theater 10 years down the line tried to host a Wicked sing-a-long, the results would be pitiful.

 

So while I still believe that artists and art is still evolving, the musical theater song style since 1965 or so, in my humble opinion, has taken a sharp nosedive into melodic oblivion. On the surface, these songs qualify as melodies, but they are sorely lacking something in their structure that makes them eminently singable, memorable and just plain beautiful. Maybe I should get a hat made; “Make American Musical Melodies Great Again” as I lament the passing of a bygone era. Of course, there’s no going back. Styles change, tastes change, American musicals are different. But still I would hope that their “melodies might someday linger on.”

Down the River

It’s Dec-ember. The 10^th month that is the 12^th.  (Look it up.) The full pond fed by the waterfall of the preceding 11 months before turning to the future new year. This image comes to mind as we—wife, daughter and grandchildren— spent the last day of November hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, with this waterfall greeting us after some 3 miles of walking.

 

December, the month of miracles— the oil that kept burning, the Virgin birth, the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe, enlightenment of the Buddha and more. Yet again I propose that the more interesting miracles are right here, right now, right in front of our eyes and ears. Like this waterfall. How can it be that this forceful gush of water that feeds into a small pool and then keeps rushing out into a river never runs dry? How does the water actually cycle around without losing a drop? I’m sure there is a scientific explanation, but to me, it’s an extraordinary miracle. 

 

It's also a potent metaphor for past, present and future. I think of present as a pond or lake that may seem still and calm and complete in itself but is actually fed by the underground stream or overground waterfall of the past. Somewhere in the lake, there is an outlet that flows into a creek or river into the future. So though the present of the lake may appear self-sufficient, it is not a vibrant and living body unless perpetually fed by the past and flowing into the future. If the inlet is blocked, the lake will eventually dry up or simply run out through the outlet. If the outlet is blocked, it will overflow and flood the land. If both the inlet and outlet are blocked, the lake turns into a stagnant pond, no new water to cleanse and refresh it. All three are necessary to each other.

 

So what happens when we don’t know our past? When we choose to ignore the source of our health as a living body? When history in schools becomes a list of meaningless dates to be corrected on meaningless tests by computers?

What happens when we don’t attend to the future, making decisions based solely on what we think serves us now with no forethought about what will happen downstream? As mentioned, we grow stagnant or dry up or overflow aimlessly. 

 

Welcome to 2024. 2025. And more unless we finally commit to getting the cleansing water flowing. Kids graduating schools without an ounce of historical reference. Adults voting for their savings account in the moment. Politicians and corporations selling the future generation down a dead-end river for profit and power. 

 

Meanwhile, the waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge keep flowing in their magnificence, in their miraculous and relentless renewal of life, inviting us to notice, be properly awed and follow their example. That’s my plan, at any rate. On a small level, I’m swimming in it all as I make music for the elders in their 80’s and 90’s, music from 300 to 50 years ago, as I teach teachers in their 20’s through 50’s how to make their students’ lives happier in this moment, as I teach the kids themselves to send them downriver prepared to navigate the rapids and leisurely float down the calm waterways. When it works well, miracles abound, in December and every month. Down the river we go.