Master of the Universe

 

After the afternoon that was indeed as glorious as promised, I stepped out of the hotel with my five dinner companions and walking beneath the trees, heard the loud electronic-sounding chirping of hidden cicadas above. My companions told me that they were announcing the typhoon expected to come soon and you could feel that tension in the air. After this weatherless indoor day of teaching, it was a good reminder that we are creatures on this wind-swept, rain-splattered, sun-burning, moon-shining planet and gloriously so, even when a storm reminds us that we are not wholly in charge. Writing this from the comfort of my 2:00 am still-jet-lagged hotel room, I can hear the wind howling outside my window and feel both the gratitude for the shelter and excitement of the storm.

 

Once more I report that the six hours I spent indoors today in company with 35 lovely souls had its own kind of weather, each with a musical soundtrack. Moments of thunderous energy with occasional lightning flashes of insight, serene moments carried on the calm waters of a moonlit lake, lilting, laughing moments bobbing on a bubbling stream. In this world, I am the Master of the Universe, creating the weather the moment calls for and releasing the feeling tone in the room that either I or the participants and mostly both need and delight in. But unlike those wholly unimaginative Hollywood figures throwing their weight around to dominate and subdue, to grab their unfair share of the world’s bounty, to brazenly show off their muscular, sexy bodies and demand obedience and adoration, my hope is, as Joseph Campbell puts it, to be “transparent to transcendence.” Use all the powers I’ve gathered and shaped and cultivated over a lifetime not for my own selfish purposes, but for the hope to release Spirit into the room, to uplift, to unthaw, to release our forgotten promises buried in all the layers of imposed dogmas and misguided fantasies. 

 

Why do kids love super-heroes? Because in their small bodies and growing minds and dependence on their parents, they meet their vulnerabilities with the fantasy of extraordinary powers that keep them safe, protects their loved ones and helps them control their destiny. So part of our job is to endow them with real things that feed their sense of power and control. Like the exercise we did where one person goes into the middle of the circle and conducts the orchestra of voices we created with the first sounds of people’s names. Little gestures of pointing or stopping or lifting the sound with their arms creates an instant response and in that moment, they are The Masters of the Universe, with all the power of Creation at their fingertips. 

 

Music education that continues to develop their power to listen and respond to others, to control mallets or breath or fingers to unleash eloquent and expressive sound, to shape each activity according to their own shape— this gifts the children with a real sense of power. Immersed in these worlds, there’s no need to join a cult or a gang or depend on a weapon’s horrific power. It makes a difference.

 

So after hopefully returning to sleep and awakening to another glorious day of the world as I like to be in it, we will continue this marvelous work. And if the typhoon continues to howl outside our windowless room, I believe it will be a good time to teach my arrangement of “Rain, rain, go away.”

Love in the Room

Any tiny doubt I had about getting back on the plane and spending the next eight out of nine days teaching has now been thoroughly dispelled by the first morning of teaching in Hangzhou. There are simply fewer things more pleasurable to me in this life than to witness the release of the adult’s locked-away child-self in pure, unadulterated play. (Perfect adjective that—unadulterated). The sheer joy of mature, responsible, grownups playing variations of a rock-scissors-paper game, creating fun and fanciful circle dances, creating musical conversations from the first sounds of one’s name, mixed with the intelligent and articulate pedagogy behind it all, clearly and eloquently expressed by my half-century-plus of reflection alongside practice— well, it doesn’t get any better than that. At the end of the morning, I asked the group, “Is it fun? Is it interesting? Is it useful? Are you ready for lunch?” and each one answered without hesitation with an exuberant “YES!”

 

My last course proved that I can still teach at my highest power even when there is a negative vibe in the room, but that doesn’t mean it was easy or I would ever choose to do it again. Working alongside my friend and translator whose company I have effortlessly enjoyed for the 23 years we’ve known each other is such a welcome contrast. There is nothing but love in the room and that’s how it should be. 

 

Still cut off from the outer world by an uncooperative Wifi but re-connected to an inner world that is more important and meaningful. An hour left in the lunch break and the daring risk to lie down for a bit. A glorious afternoon awaits—I have no doubt about that. Don’t know how much more grateful I can be that my vision and my life are still joined at the hip, but if there was room for more gratitude, I gladly give it. 

The Romance of Travel

 (A bit of a miracle that just when it seemed I'd have absolutely NO Wifi connection of any kind, I figured out a workaround. Including the ability to keep posting Blogs! So here are the last two.)

Here we go. 1:00 am in the Hangzhou jet-lagged morning with 8 hours before I teach for 6 hours and not much chance of sleep ahead. Partly my fault, because arriving at my hotel, I decided to “lie down for a bit” and slept for five hours straight. Usually, I would force myself to stay awake until the new evening time, but hey, through that decision, I literally made my bed and now I cannot lie in it. 

 

Meanwhile, had a nice dinner reunion with my host Tonny and good friend/ student/ colleague/ translator Cao Li, a lovely person I met on my first trip to China in 2006 and taught later in Salzburg, San Francisco and in other trips to China. We went to a restaurant and sat briefly at a table with a No Smoking sign over our heads and three people at the table next to us smoking. The waiter just shrugged his shoulders and we got up and left. 

 

Back at the hotel, Li helped me translate with three different people who came to my room to try to connect me with WiFi and an hour later, still nothing. They promised to come back tomorrow with more people and I’m picturing a Marx Brothers scene from A Night in the Opera where some thirty people gather to try to get it to work until one knocks at the door, I open it and everybody falls out. I’ll spare the reader the details about how my efforts asked me to get a code but it was impossible to send it to my foreign phone or asked for something else that I needed WiFi for in order to sign up for WiFi. The song Hole in My Bucket and the novel Catch 22 came to mind. 

 

Ordinarily, I could ride out the long night watching Netflix or catching up on e-mails or researching a thing or two for my class tomorrow, but that’s the price you pay for outsourcing your whole life to be dependent on electronic connection. I do have a good book, my cards for Solitaire, my Crostic book. I could get started on collecting my poems from the last 50 years or so and consider putting them in a publishable form. I could give myself a little meditation retreat and sit a few hours of zazen. I could pull up the list of poems I’ve memorized and kept in a folder and re-thread the challenging Keats poem whose title I can’t remember and can’t look up. Coming from an analog childhood and much adulthood, I have resources to fall back on. 

 

Maybe it’s a good time to report back on the fabulous play The Lunchbox that my wife and I just saw at the Berkeley Rep Theater. Made yet more sweet by hesitating at the $150 tickets and then discovering that if you call on a Tuesday at 1:00 pm, you might get seats in the front row for $25 each!! Not only an amazing bargain, but a fabulous close-up way to see a fabulous show. We got them! 

 

The show is about a fascinating lunch delivery system that exists in Mumbai, India where delivery people (doomballahs) bring lunches daily to millions of people in ecological metal containers (tiffens) and using an analog system that has been in place for a hundred years or so, literally never makes a wrong delivery. Except once in this story. 

 

At a time when the world is dependent on QR codes, phones, robotic voice mails, AI and other all-electronic systems, this remarkable way of organizing a business is ecological, offers employment and is supremely efficient. Nothing is broken that needs to be fixed with an electronic solution and it’s the perfect answer to the sheer wonder people feel when they ask, “How did we do this before cell phones?” The answer is thousands of different ways and many of them more efficient, more pleasurable, more human-centered.

 

My daughter Talia will soon come back from a 14-day back-packing trip where she was entirely off the grid. Could be the same for me here in the next 12 days, though instead of bathing in alpine lakes and lying awake at night looking up at the stars, I’ll be back in the teaching circle in my own form of renewal. For two weeks, none of my family or friends will be in touch, no folks in my Facebook virtual community will see photos of my work and needless to say (but worth saying these days), we’ll all be fine. 

 

There you have it. It’s now 2:00 am and dare I hope that I feel a little drowsiness? Is anyone waiting on the edge of their seat wondering if I got back to sleep? Just by daring to write as I do and following some inbred dubious character trait, I clearly think that I’m the hero of my own story, but at the end of the day, know that no one really cares that much and neither should I. The whole point is that you kept me company in my jet-lagged middle-of-the-night and perhaps a thought or image or reflection spoke to you for a moment and that is enough. If nothing else, a little moment of schadenfreude if you’ve felt I’ve boasted just a bit too much about the romance of my traveling life and you’re comfortably in the midst of your own lovely life where you don’t have to deal with passports and visas and lines at the airport and three days of dazed jet-lag and such. Enjoy it!

 

Good night!

 

P.S. The conclusion to this gripping story? Got back to sleep at 3:00 and slept to 7:00. Yay!

 

Gone Fishing?

 

I miraculously weathered all the mini-crisis’s of the past 6 days— like my hearing aids not working on the date of my departure— and here I am at 9:00 pm heading to the airport for my midnight flight to Hong Kong and then on to Hangzhou. My biggest worry is that I’ve seen all the movies I care to on these flights and any new ones will certainly be the usual fare of guns, guns, guns, superheroes, end of the world, brutality.Snore. Does anyone make real films anymore? (I did see a reasonably good one on my flight from New Orleans called Tow, but having surfed through some 65 movies to find that, the pickings are slim.)

 

China will present the usual challenge of access to the Internet and even e-mail— though I think the Surfshark ap I got last time might solve the e-mail problem, if I remember how to use it. But no Internet means no Blogposts, so if you don’t see anything here for the next 12 days or so, that’s why. Don’t give up on me! And I’ll dutifully write them anyway and post them when I get home. 

 

Dear reader, it’s a blooming miracle that any of you are still reading these things. I wonder if anyone has been following these for the entire 15 years I’ve been posting! Is there really anything that continues to hold your interest? I guess I’ll never know and that’s okay, but in the past months, the readership has skyrocketed to some 10,000 readers per day! But really? Are these real people or bots? And if the latter, why? And if the former, it does give me that little dopamine rush, but as mentioned last time, that kind of “success” is meaningless. It literally changes absolutely nothing about my life, financially and otherwise. It hasn’t brought more people to my books or Podcast or movie or CD, all of which would give me a little thrill and a little money. And if those 10,000 are people, I have absolutely no relationship with them. So better to have one genuine friend than 10,000 fans. 

 

But meanwhile, for you handful of faithful readers, some of whom I know and some of whom I don’t, assume I’ve “gone fishing” and look forward to re-uniting somewhere around July 20^th. Meanwhile, let us see what awaits that justifies the long hours of travel, the carbon footprint and missing the next episodes of the engaging Shetland TV show I’m watching! 

 

Note to Self

Still in the midst of a funk, not so surprising with the windy, foggy, grey weather for six days straight, the return of some chronic dizziness and still reeling from a betrayal hinted at in these last posts. Playing a little game with myself, I wondered what news could possibly come from the outside to lift me out of it and my first go-to answers were revealing. I imagined things like the interview invite from Terry Gross or Oprah, the Podcast gone viral or a Netflix offer to film my Jazz, Joy & Justice book. Interesting that my choices are all about recognition and accomplishment. But when it comes to true healing, that’s exactly what it’s not about. 

 

We all should give ourselves a stern talking-to every now and then and here is mine. I don’t need more recognition or respect or appreciation or mild adoration. All of that, like my favorite quote about money (“How much is enough?” “Just a little bit more.”), are insatiable. They will never be enough.

 

Instead, I just want what we all do— genuine friendship, enjoyment in my company (and vice-versa) and a love that sees all my foibles and loves me anyway. Perhaps loves me because of them. 

 

This is not easy to share publicly, a confession more vulnerable than my usual, but I’ve done my best to be honest here about whatever’s happening for me, highs and lows. Mostly in hopes that others recognize themselves there as well and here we are, together, all the walking wounded just keeping each other company with a spot of tea or coffee and pastry. 

 

Years back, I wrote a poem about it, revealing more than I usually do here, but hey, while I’m at it, why not include it? It is me talking to me, in the most honest voice I could find.

 

These days, most every place you travel to

 

          is where you wholly belong, 

 

arrived at through the ten thousand small steps

 

       you have been walking your whole life long.

 

guided by the thread of your steadfast loyalty

 

    to the things that fit your peculiar blend of being. 

 

 

From childhood, you’ve moved forward confident

 

   that you would arrive and yet… 

 

always slightly astonished to find yourself there, always

 

        the sliver of doubt that you are worthy and deserving. 

 

 

Along the way, you have learned to turn loneliness

 

     to solitude, lovelessness to a love 

 

for all of humanity. 

 

 

But in the end, it is not enough. 

 

Humanity won’t bring soup when you’re sick 

 

             or cast a flirtatious eye or 

 

                 hold you close simply to share the wonder of it all. 

 

 

This you did not expect. That all the love you hoped to give

 

       and all the love you hoped to get

 

              is still waiting to arrive.

Old Tricks

 

Tomorrow I’m off to China to teach for the third summer in a row. When I came to teach in 2024, I figured out that I had taught before in 2006, 2012, 2018 and now 2024. Some mystical 6-year rotating pattern. I joked to my host that it might be a good idea not to wait until 2030 for the next invitation and I guess he agreed, because he immediately invited me for 2025 and again for 2026. 

 

In starting to prepare for the two courses I’ll teach, I asked my host what percentage of the first course’s participants had worked with me before and his answer? Some 75% of them! Last year! That is a game-changer.

 

I looked at last year’s material and noted that we had done some fifteen games, five folk dances and ten arrangements for Orff instruments, amongst other things. I’ve finally come to peace with the truth that you can repeat material in situations like this without apology. The brain’s need for repetition means participants actually often welcome it, having forgotten most of it and needing a reminder. They also feel a bit more familiar with both the material and the way I teach it, allowing them to focus on details impossible to fully appreciate the first time. They also might note how I never do things precisely the same and enjoy, as I do, new twists to the familiar. So truth be told, I probably could do the exact some material and they would be fine with that. All my old tricks cultivated over a lifetime of teaching still with something new to offer. 

 

But I also see each workshop as a new opportunity for me to keep growing and to keep things fresh. I did have the idea of focusing exclusively on the pentatonic scale, so familiar in China, with the idea of comparing their use of it with pieces from some 12 other countries on all continents. I’m also very excited to be collaborating with my friend/translator and let her teach some traditional Chinese pentatonic songs within the framework of the Orff approach. However, it does mean that all the modal and harmonic material I’ve developed will be off-limits for these five days, so that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Looking through the repertoire stored on my computer, I came up with fifteen new games and twenty pentatonic pieces for Orff Ensemble. That should keep things interesting!

 

Much more planning to do—and once again, packing! See you at the airport!

 

New Tricks

When whoever wrote the inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi reminds you to “Know thyself,” they probably weren’t thinking of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. But one facet of self-knowledge is indeed an understanding of how your particular network of axon and dendrite connections work. When you notice what comes easily to you and what is challenging, you have the possibility of following the one in your life-choices and forgiving yourself for the other. We all seem to be gifted one for free— without effort, find ourselves singing notes in our mind or crafting words or imagining shapes or colors or noticing patterns and such. That’s important information. 

 

As is the flip side. When we wonder why this person can so easily perform a musical passage that trips us up or notice the social undertones in a gathering that completely eluded us or speaks with an eloquence beyond our reach, the idea that we are all a unique blend of intelligences is useful. And yet more important, the understanding that we don’t have to be —indeed, cannot be—equally smart in them all. 

 

From my childhood until yesterday, I’ve been terrible at the kind of follow-the-given-direction thinking that had my friends putting together model airplanes, my biology lab partner finishing way ahead of me, my friend taking apart a car engine with the ease I felt in playing Bach. Yet as a young adult I realized that I could keep working on Bach and hire a plumber or a mechanic to deal with the things that I could not. I did feel some slight shame as a man who was never handy, but hey, let’s hear you solo on some blues!

 

Having made it almost 75 years without having done more than change the oil or a tire (I can do both!), it has worked out okay. But the advent of the computer and the new way of getting through the maze of voice mail and codes and Youtube instructional videos has forced me to try to up the game in my non-preferred intelligences. And when it succeeds, there indeed is some satisfaction in knowing that I’m not as stupid as I’ve thought I was. 

 

For example, in the last two days, I finally figured out how to unsubscribe for thebestpdf service that I kept seeing on (and paying for on) my Visa bill. I finally figured out how to pay UPS bills online and find the shipping info on the invoice. I restored a mysteriously disappeared Britbox on the TV. And most remarkable of all, I solved the problem of being out of my Now’s the Time CD’s that accompany my book by remembering that I had an external disk drive and could upload the one remaining double CD that a friend in Bangkok had leant to me and upload the songs to the computer, to be converted into a shareable and sellable item. Go, Doug!

 

All of this drives me mad, but yes, it feels good to finally sit down, be patient, feel some confidence in my overall intelligence and discover that (sometimes) I can do it! Turns out you can teach an old Doug new tricks. 

 

But please don’t ask me to fix your car or plumbing.