Why I love Facebook

Five days since arriving in China, I’m still up every night from one to two hours with a jet lag that just won’t let go. Probably not a good idea to open my computer, but since Internet is spotty, I grab the chance to check in when I can and it seems to work better in the wee hours of the morning. 

 

I’m fully —and painfully—aware that the Zuckerbergian dynasty behind Facebook is cut out of the same cloth as every evil billionaire running the show and refusing it could be a logical act of resistance. And yet. In my little bubble of Facebook friends, I daily find little essays, poems, sharings, that inform and uplift and water the seeds of both resisting the daily beating given to Life-lovers and reminding us that we’re not alone. Many people whose names I’ve never heard of and have come to know simply through their Facebook postings. Like this poet who captured so eloquently what we all know in some deep recess of the soul and we benefit from the reminders. I don’t know why there can’t be a people’s Facebook that allows such sharing without filling the coffers of the evil, but until there is, using the venue to reach those we otherwise can’t seems like a good choice. 

 

So here I pass on this gem from a poet named Matt Moburg. Hope you enjoy it as much as me and are not reading at 2:45 am in the morning!

 

I think every human being 

eventually has a moment

where they are standing outside in sweatpants

that have lost the will to be pants,

holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,

or some other receipt from the universe

that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

 

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face

like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.

The breath.

The weird little bones in your hands.

The fact that we are here,

on a floating rock with pollen counts,

paying bills,

missing dead people,

loving living people

who say “leaving now”

while still fully naked and looking for socks.

 

And still,

the moon clocks in.

No applause.

No benefits.

No note from management saying,

“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

 

Just the moon,

working nights

like a single mother with no applause,

packing silver lunches

for every dark thing

that still has to rise.

 

Tell me that isn’t holy.

Tell me there is a better word

than sacred

for the way light keeps returning

with no guarantee

we will actually stop and take note.

 

I know people who believe in therapy,

probiotics,

tarot,

twelve-step meetings,

manifestation journals,

and waiting exactly eleven minutes

before texting back

so they do not appear emotionally available,

even though their whole nervous system

is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

 

And underneath all of it,

every ritual,

every doctrine,

every smoothie with chia seeds,

the prayer is the same:

Please let me be loved.

Please let me be forgiven.

Please let this strange little life

mean something

before my lower back

submits its formal resignation.

 

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness

of being alive long enough

to watch steam lift from coffee in winter

like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard

they slap the table

as if joy is a mosquito

they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”

and, for one shining second,

realize language

has finally been improved.

 

I know I already noted this in the first piece,

but the older I get,

the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over

because the sunset looked like God

dropped a jar of peach jam

across the whole midwestern sky

and decided to be lazy

and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp

at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me

in the cereal aisle,

holding Captain Crunch,

suddenly remembering

that everyone I have ever loved

was made from stardust,

hunger,

and a series of decisions

we probably should have slept on.

No.

 

It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.

Before committees.

Before men got involved

and started making rules about skirts.

 

Awe was there

with its wild hair

and muddy feet,

saying:

Look.

Look again.

Look until looking

becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back

when you are sick.

Awe, and old couples at Target

arguing gently about avocados,

as if marriage is not one vow

but ten thousand errands

performed beside the person

who knows exactly

how you like the cart pushed.

 

Maybe gratitude

was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.

That woodpecker is trying

to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,

for continuing to drag me through this world

despite the many slim jims 

I have done to you

at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs

who lose their entire minds

when we come home

as if we have returned from war

and not Walgreens.”

 

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us

to be impressive but only needs us

to come through the door.

Because the truth is,

this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,

driving too fast,

eating gas station nachos

with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,

“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”

and the answer is,

apparently,

“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

 

But even now—

even tired,

even grieving,

even emotionally held together

by iced coffee, playlists,

and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons

to stay soft.

 

We plant tomatoes

even though grief is real.

We bake bread

even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky

to people we love

with captions like,

“LOOK,”

as if beauty is an emergency

and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,

“You have to see this,”

because wonder

is the oldest form

of resurrection.

 

So here’s to the believers

and the atheists

and the agnostics

and the people whose entire theology

is just trying not to cry

in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax

and oat milk

and the one group chat

where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality

for six straight hours

and then become emotionally attached

to a perfect peach.

The ones who know

despair has a mouth,

but so does laughter.

 

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty

in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

May we never become so polished

that we forget how to stand

in the Starbucks line of existence

with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,

feeling the enormity of it all

rattle around in our bones

like thunder

looking for somewhere to laugh.

 

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,

whatever mess,

whatever miracle,

whatever cosmic group project

no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.

that we are here.

that we have loved enough to be ruined.

that the moon keeps showing up.

that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece

with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down. 

And then go outside and look at that moon.

 

The Universal Heartbeat

Having taught in almost 50 different cultures, I am perpetually an outsider searching for some universal heartbeat that we all share. According to modern misguided thought, it is culturally inappropriate for me to presume to teach people in other cultures about teaching music to their children. And I agree that it potentially could be seen as the legacy of colonization for Western classical music, for example, to be taught in China. Yet when people listen to Yuja Wang or Lang Lang play piano, I don’t think anyone objects. 

 

At any rate, I’m after something very different here. I believe there’s a way to offer something valuable to diverse cultures that doesn’t lean on an ethnocentric viewpoint. Both my own experience teaching in so many different places and the fact that there are Orff Associations in some 45 countries worldwide testify to this. But without care, teachers from abroad— and so far they mostly have been teachers from Germany, Finland, Australia, Canada and the U.S. doing this kind of work— can indeed impose Euro-centric repertoire and even educational assumptions and ideas. It indeed calls for some careful thought.

 

So on this trip, I thought I’d put these issues out on the table and share my own approach with the participants. After acknowledging an imbalanced meeting of the cultures springing from imperialist and colonialist mentality, I came up with five approaches in my workshop to help turn it another direction. As follows:

 

• Using original English rhymes: For better or worse, the British Empire left its imprint on the world with English far outdistancing Esperanto as perhaps the most universal language. In the face of this, many children in diverse countries are studying English and if this is the case, improving language skills through chants, rhymes, poems and songs is an excellent way to support English as a second language. It also opens up Orff’s idea of using language to teach rhythm and rhymes to create original compositions. In my teaching, I choose short rhymes with much repetition, rhyme and often alliteration so children can gain access to the music of language while also learning music through language.

 

• Using rhymes from many cultures: So far in this course, we’ve learned some rhymes/ songs in Spanish, German, Italian, Shona (Zimbabwe), Japanese. Each brings a different kind of music to the activities and leans towards certain rhythms over others. 

 

• Translating rhymes: Some rhymes lend themselves to translating into the mother tongue of the culture visited. Some not. If the rhythm is too different or style somewhat dependent on the original language or the needed rhyme is wholly lost, it doesn’t always work so well. But in this course, it worked just fine with several short texts and added a distinct flavor to do in both English and Mandarin. 

 

• Finding similar rhymes in pattern or topic. Beat-passing games, partner claps, rock-scissors-paper games and more tend to be universal and after learning one in English or Slovenian or Turkish or Spanish, it is a good challenge for the group to dig back into their own childhood and find similar games. Likewise with rhymes that share similar structures. I’ve found four-line rhymes structured a a b a or a b c a to be quite common. Finally, a song about food or numbers or animals in one culture can call up similar ones in another.

 

• Home culture material/ Orff process: I am aware that teaching Jazz in New Orleans, Mother Goose in England, Lobi/ Dagara xylophone music in Ghana, humanistic material promoting respect in Thailand, etc. can seem from the outside as arrogant, presumptuous and culturally inappropriate, an outsider bringing “coals to Newcastle.” And yet the modern misguided notions that would have me drink the Kool Aid of “staying in my lane” would reduce my “constituency” to zero— who would qualify to be in my affinity group as a as a New Jersey native with Jewish Belarus ancestors living in San Francisco and brought up Unitarian, then practicing Zen Buddhism and playing Bach, Count Basie, Bulgarian bagpipe and Brazilian samba, amongst other instruments and styles? Three things help me refuse that invitation: 

 

1)   While rightfully acknowledging my lack of qualification to represent the culture, language, musical style, the what of a music education program in a particular place, I am wholly qualified to share Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s ideas about the how of the process, modeling creative ways to introduce, develop and extend any given material. That is at the center of the notion that Orff Schulwerk has something to offer in multiple cultural contexts, an idea, as mentioned, wholly affirmed by the existence of over 45 Orff Associations worldwide and the people from some 25 cultures who have attended our SF International Orff Course over the years. (Much of that work of adapting to specific cultures can be found in the book I published through my Pentatonic Press, Orff Schulwerk in Diverse Cultures: An Idea That Went Round the World, with some 70 authors describing their work in adapting the Orff process to their particular cultural situation.)

 

2)   When possible, working side by side with graduates from the SF Course who teach as insiders but also have experience in Orff Schulwerk is both a grand pleasure and an appropriate pairing of skills. In this course, my translator/ former student Cao Li is teaching traditional Chinese folk songs and we both, alongside the participants, are investigating what makes sense to blend with the Orff process models of movement and games and drama and body percussion, as well as elemental styles of arranging on Orff instruments. 

 

3)   The fact that so many places invite me back is testimony that this approach has indeed transformed their teaching. In some cases, it actually has steered teachers back to the roots of a folk culture they haven’t wholly known as they’ve studied in Western-style universities or Conservatories or been brought up by American pop music or their own culture’s version (K-pop/ J-pop/ Bollywood/ etc.)

 

It felt good to treat these matters seriously and share it with the participants. But truth be told, the response from the group seemed to be “We weren’t really thinking about any of that.” Indeed, I told a joke at the beginning as we explored the pentatonic scale on the xylophones that Carl Orff had invented this scale. Rather than outrage or amusement, they just seemed a bit perplexed and then giggled a bit when I followed with “NOT! I think China knows something about this scale!!!”

 

At the end of the day, I taught a few folk dances from Israel, Russia and the Czech Republic, again apologizing a bit for the Eurocentric repertoire and inviting anyone who wanted to later share similar dances to do so. They listened politely, but once the dancing started, the room erupted into unbridled joy and laughter. They especially loved the Czech polka mixer and kept practicing the steps on their own after the class was officially over. 

 

It was a reminder that amidst all the well-meaning tiptoeing around about cultural appropriation, it was the universal heartbeat we all share that is the most important story. “Music is music and dance is dance and let’s not overthink this” they seemed to say. “Just come on out and dance!”

 

And so we will, for three more glorious days. 

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!