Where I Live

 

“Grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change.” —St. Francis

 

“Grant me the courage to change that which I cannot accept.” —Angela Davis

 

There you have it. The two goalposts on the field where I have played my whole life—and for both teams. It appears in my little Mission Statement to this Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher Blog, in this E.B. White quote: 

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan my day."

 

And once again, Niall Williams steps in at just the right moment with his “more-eloquent-than-I- can-say-it” version of the same thought. 

 

As far as I was concerned there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. 

 

The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right them, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after ever disappointment, and, until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better. …We lost the garden (of Eden) and our whole lives we have to remake it.

    (p. 269—This Is Happiness)

In one half of the field is music and poetry and meditation, the innocence of babes and the wisdom of elders, and don’t forget actual fields themselves, abuzz with bees and bugs and crawling with critters and splashed with colorful flowers and looked over by majestic trees and looked down upon by a night sky full of stars. The world of wonder and amazement just to behold as it is by the living, breathing miracle of your own self just as you are. 

And yes, to wholly savor it, there is effort to realizing both your own true nature and the truth of nature. Breaths to follow, notes to compose, words to cobble together into a stunning eloquence, legs to carry you over the fields of grass into the woods and the waiting arms of your Mother. None of it comes easily, but at the end is a surprising grace that, if we’re lucky, simply appears and we wonder why we’ve been struggling so long. 

The road to discovering our own immutable perfection invariably passes through the thorny doubts and wandering wrong turns of a human incarnation. It may end with a peace that passeth all understanding, but it begins with a fierce desire to change who we are—or rather, change our notion of who we think we are. To ultimately accept everything we’ve been, everything we are and everything we are on the verge of becoming. An acceptance which is never casual and requires continual renewal. As Suzuki-Roshi puts it, “You are perfect as your are, but we all can stand a little improvement.”

 

The other side of the field often begins with an equally fierce desire to change the world as created by us flawed human beings. To refuse all the toxic notions and ways of living and fictions we create to justify and hide our failings. To try to change those who choose to harm and hurt and harass, who refuse to feel and splash in the mud of their ignorance and greed like squealing pigs dirtying everything they touch. 

We eventually come to admit that we cannot change a single other human being other than ourselves (often arriving at this hard-won truth through our futile efforts to change our spouse or life partner!). But we can build the structures that house our better selves, create communities that diminish the sense of otherness and help dance together as a “we,” assist  others by guiding them to hear all the notes in the music, to see all the colors in the rainbow, to savor all the tastes. To feel feelings more deeply, understand things more profoundly, care about and care for things more vigilantly. To take seriously the old table grace of “making us ever-mindful of the needs of others” and work toward the restoration and healing needed in a broken world. To come out of our exile from the Garden of Eden and remake it through our directed effort to help and be of use. 

 

These are two parts of the same field in which I both labor and frolic and both are necessary to each other. Both are equally difficult and both are equally rewarding and you are always perpetually on your way with both, but never wholly arriving, except in gifted moments of grace. 

 

In company with St. Francis of Assisi and Angela Davis, this is where I live.

 

PS Friends, if any of you are reading this and happen to be present at my Memorial Service, please read this out loud as the summary of what I lived for and died still trying to do.