Showing Up

Out on my little patio, Room 8 of the Hidden Valley Inn,  looking out at the swimming pool and beyond that, the distant hills. This morning, finished my last class in my two-week run in the sacred space of my old music room, playing music with kids on some of the original six Orff instruments that a parent donated 52 years ago. Instruments that still sound good five decades later while the school garage is filled with computers obsolete after two years.  

Said goodbye again—to that special room in a special school with special people and drove the two and a half hours down to the next sacred space—Hidden Valley Music Seminars. I first came here in 1987, 39 years ago, and shared the teaching with my forever mentor, Avon Gillespie, and others, at the first local Orff Chapter’s Mini-conference Retreat. That began the tradition of gathering here every two years and here we are again, for what I think is our 20^th retreat. I’ve missed some of the more recent Mini-Conferences because of schedule conflicts but have been to at least sixteen of them.

Each one a world unto itself, with more memorable people and music made than I can name. And yet I can name so many of them and so many moments which qualified as sacred. An intensity of emotion and laughter and deep presence and artistic imagination beyond any boundaries that is rare to find in a human lifetime. And yet, time and again, there it was. 

Each one unrepeatable and thus made more notable, remarkable and unforgettable. I’m tempted to list them and evoke their ancestral presence and it would mean a lot to anyone who had been there. But indeed, you just had to be there. 

The depth of that forever presence expanded geometrically when we moved our summer course here in 2012. So alongside the 20 Spring retreats are the 13 other miraculous happenings over two-weeks time instead of just three days. But the sacred cares nothing for clocks. Those three-day retreats—really just a little Friday night, all day and night Saturday and then Sunday morning— are more than enough time to blow the top of your head off. (Emily Dickinson famously said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”)

That indeed can happen in solitude with black ink on paper, but perhaps yet more powerfully with the thundering vibrations of drums, xylophones and the human voice in dancing circles with 50 to 100 fellow human beings. The elders are getting concerned that the young teachers aren’t showing up to these events as we used to (and still do!), thinking they can get what they need online. Nope! It ain’t even close! The screen is too flat, the vibrations too distant, the absence of touch and smell and taste mean there’s no place for Soul to enter. You just gotta show up and we’ll take care of the rest. 

So here we go, bringing the ancestral presence of the Ghanaian legacy to a little sacred place nestled in the Carmel Valley. For those who show up, we’ll open with the song Miawoezon and its welcoming text sung by our guest Ghanaian teacher Vodzi: “Thank you for the trouble you took to be here. You are most welcome.”