Perpetual Halloween

Witches, ghouls, ghosts, goblins, gremlins, demons, devils and zombies are afoot and fear is raining down on us all. I’m not talking about kids on the street, but the sub-humans in the government who every day are trick and treating. Treating the billionaires to free passes while robbing from the poor to stuff the rich people’s coffers. Tricking the voters to choose chaos, mayhem, bedlam, pandemonium, over simple human decency. We’re choked in the stranglehold of a perpetual Halloween that is as far from the fun of the real deal as it could be. Like the way children in Chicago wanting to celebrate their favorite holiday have to stay off the streets for fear of being strafed by rubber bullets from ICE agents. No Hollywood horror movie can come close to our current reality, a seemingly endless night of the living dead walking the Earth. 

 

And yet. Wanting to honor Jack DeJohnette (see yesterday’s post), I slipped into the rabbit hole of Youtube and was catapulted into the stratosphere of human beings at their finest. I started with the Keith Jarrett Trio’s With a Song in My Heart and the way it works on Youtube, all these other suggestions appear on the right. So on I went to Bobby McFerrin and Jacob Collier singing at Davies Symphony Hall, where Bobby later conducts a movement of Mozart Symphony, Victor Borge playing a hilarious and artful duet rendition of Brahm’s Hungarian Rhapsody, a compilation of Yuja Wang playing piano between 8 years old and 36 years old, some Herbie Hancock clips, Oscar Peterson on the Dick Cavett Show. 

Such a welcome relief from being flushed down the toilet watching bits and pieces of mainstream news, with the most despicable human beings I never hoped to imagine dominating the screen and taking me down with them. Here I was lifted up into the extraordinary beauty of hard-working artists devoted to bringing beauty and healing hope to all of us beaten-down by the zombies. That they inhabit the same species as the heartless, mindless and soulless pseudo-humans who are paraded in front of us every hour of every day, as if this is what normal people look and feel like, is a matter of great consternation. To put it mildly.

 

While we have Youtube and Facebook as free venues of sharing, may I suggest choosing wisely what you put before your eyes and ears? When despair wraps its bony fingers around your throat and starts to squeeze, some time spent with any of the above will loosen its grip. And on Facebook these days, I keep reading stories about courageous, brilliant and neglected women in history who were purposefully shunned and neglected. People like Francis Perkins who I never heard of, but wish I had. And now I have. And you should too.

 

My favorite teaching story is the spiritual teacher who said, 

“I have both God and the Devil inside of me.” 

Her student asked, “Which one is stronger?” 

“It depends upon which one I feed.”

 

So make a wise choice every day and offer the food to our children that serves their better selves, with the stories, music, dance, art, poetry that lifts them up and leads them to their own beautiful promise. Happy Halloween! (The October 31st version, that is.)