The Dancing Puppet

TBTB is the acronym for these last four days (Too Busy to Blogpost). Writing this in Lexington, Kentucky, where I’m leaving the annual Orff Conference a bit early because my grandkids have arrived in San Francisco for Thanksgiving week. I’d rather have breakfast with them tomorrow morning than an expensive banquet Conference dinner at the Conference tonight and so I bid farewell to the scores of people from all corners of my life I’ve had the privilege to walk this path with. 

 

As mentioned in the Taking the Next Shot post, I worried about sorely missing my colleagues who couldn’t or didn’t come to Conference this year, the generation above long retired or passed from this earth and even younger colleagues/students who didn’t get the funds from their schools to make their presence possible. Truth be told, I was too busy to sorely miss them as I so happily hung out with the generation below and even below that. Most satisfying of all, I attended some ten workshops of teachers who had studied with me, people I saw promise in and encouraged to present and they did and no surprise, their workshops were stellar. Carried on the lineage of minimum talk and maximum music and good taste and teaching in the full measure of their authentic character. Without exception, each of the ten workshops excellent and me feeling like a proud papa. 

 

Lest anyone accuse me of taking too much credit, I wholly recognized, to both them and within myself, that it’s not just about carrying forth a style of teaching I care deeply about and have articulated in my workshops, courses, speaking and writing. Their work was part of a greater lineage traced backwards to my teacher Avon Gillespie and back further through him to Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman.It can be traced sideways to my colleagues James Harding, Sofia Lopez-Ibor, Christa Coogan, Susan Kennedy and the next generation with Estevao Marques, Andrea Donahoe, Eloi Fuguet and yet more. It is looking forwards to the teachers that these ten presenters (and others) will inspire. 

 

That alone was worth all the money and effort to be here, but there was more. With over a thousand people roaming the halls, it’s sometimes hard to connect with people you know. But time and time again, without consciously seeking them out or texting them to meet me, I found myself in the in-between moments walking in the exhibit hall or stepping out to find food or simply walking to or from a session, “bumping into” precisely the person I wanted or needed to see. Whether a five-minute little talk in the hall or an hour conversation as we went to a coffee shop, every single encounter like this felt like the necessary next scene in a script written elsewhere. It felt like there was an invisible puppet master pulling the strings and directing my steps to just the right place at just the right moment. 

 

I’m not that interested in naming the person in charge—I don’t care if it’s God, my guardian angel, my karma or just luck. The point is that it doesn’t feel like random coincidence, more like a needed and necessary encounter that simply had to be for the next step in the inevitable unfolding to occur. The specific examples don’t matter here, but I want to testify that it happened time and time again each of the three days. Part of me is perpetually astounded by it and part of me is learning to trust more and more that there is a story that needs to be told through me and that just about everything that happens is meant to be, an integral part of the plot. It’s hard to describe. All I can report here is the grand satisfaction of having had these innumerable encounters these past three or four days with conversations I needed to have and people I was delighted to see. 

 

Now the airport and Thanksgiving week with the grandkids await. Gratitude to all the visible and invisible people and forces that brought me my 43^rd Orff Conference. Onward and upward!