Serendipity

 

Serendipity: the ability to find good and valuable things by accident when you’re not looking for them.

 

Synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence where an internal thought or feeling aligns with an external event, even though there is no logical cause-and-effect connection between them.

 

Tonight, if I’m lucky and my name gets chosen from the basket, I’ll tell that story of looking for Jim and Karen Bold in the Yorkshire Dales (see An Extraordinary Tale blogposts, May 30/31st)) at the storytelling venue, The Moth. The theme of the stories is serendipity. While the dictionary definition suggests that such experiences are random accidents, I disagree—they’re signs that when you’re on the right path, invisible forces gather around you and helping hands appear. Perhaps that’s more accurately described as synchronicity (see above), but I think both words are deeply related. As suggested by Goethe:

 

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation),
there is one elementary truth…
That the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision,
raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents
and meetings and material assistance,
which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

So having just recorded the last of my ABC’s of Education Podcast, I’ve been searching for the next incarnation of it. Suddenly, I’ve gotten e-mails from several of my recent Level III students asking for advice about specific challenges they’re facing. And then I got one from a teacher in Montana who had never studied with me but had read several of my books and my Blog and followed my Podcast. He asked an excellent question that deserved a thoughtful response and I will share both his question and my answer in the next Blog. But the timing of this serendipitous/ synchronistic moment was noteworthy.

 

1)   It came just at the time I was considering continuing the Podcast with questions from teachers about the details of specific issues in their classes which I would address. After the visionary, ideal philosophical perspective of the episodes in the ABC Podcast, this would be a chance to apply the ideas to the practical world of the daily class. 

 

2)   The stunning unexpected surprise is that the inquiry came from the husband of a daughter of a dear friend who died too young some 18 years ago. I occasionally get news of her and knew she was married, but had no idea her husband became a music teacher! Yet another unexpected moment that affirms my intuition that there are mysterious forces at work that give meaning, shape and design to a life. Certainly to mine!

 

Read on for the question and my answer—which may go on to be the first episode of the new Podcast “Season.”

Communitas

Last night I had a wonderful visit with my nephew Kyle. He lives in Austin, Texas and I hadn’t seen him in 3 years. Imagine my delight to not only see him but meet his 3-year-old son! Kyle is an old soul. We have some of the same poems memorized and he is also writing his own poetry. (As am I.) He had just come from a five-day retreat with Michael Meade, literally an old soul (around 80 years old) who speaks eloquently of the soul’s journey. 

 

Kyle shared an interesting distinction that was made in that retreat, the difference between “community” and “communitas.” The latter is a Latin term made popular by the anthropologist Victor Turner and describes the sense of togetherness and bonding people feel when they go through a shared experience together, a kind of collective rite of passage. Such gatherings are marked by a spirit of equality and unity and often involve some physical discipline with a spiritual/ soulful/ artistic expression —meditation, dancing, music-making. It is often a short-lived retreat kind of experience like the recent Michael Meade gathering, a Zen week-long sesshin meditation retreat or an Orff training. People often leave feeling intensely bonded to others who began as strangers and the echoes continue into the future like the diminishing vibrations of a struck gong as people keep in touch. 

 

Community, by contrast, is a more stable and static type of human gathering, with people bound by common geography, religion, social roles and rules. The members of the community share certain viewpoints or values in common (hence common-ity), feel unified by these norms (com=with/ unity= unity). 

Where communitas is an active verb, constantly creating and re-creating the conditions to spontaneously realize both the diversity and commonalities of fellow seekers, community can feel more like a passive noun, simply existing just by showing up to school each day or church on Sunday. 

 

All of this resonates deeply with my experience of the Orff gatherings I help lead, much more in the spirit of communitas then mere community. And I found this sense again in an old Hermann Hesse book I recently re-read, Demian. He writes:

 

(I was) surrounded by nothing but beautiful, pleasant things and feelings. I  could tell that this was a foretaste of the new, higher community we were imagining. Occasionally I would be seized with mourning for this happiness, since I knew full well it could not last…I could feel that one day I would wake up out of this beautiful picture of love and happiness and stand alone once more, completely alone, in the cold world of other people, where my only choices were solitude or struggle—no peace, no shared life. 

 

…I clung to these beautiful days like a butterfly to the honey clover. This had been my time of happiness, the first time in my life I had found fulfillment and been welcomed into a group of like-minded individuals. 

 

                  Demian: Hermann Hesse (pp, 128-129) —published 1919 

 

I’m always looking for the words that describe that gifted retreat experience and both the Hesse quote and the communitas definition fit well. Somewhere I have Victor Turner’s book From Ritual to Theater, but dang if I can find it at the moment. If I do, stay tuned for further elaboration.

 

Meanwhile, it feels like consciously creating communitas within any given community is a good idea. That’s what my daughters used to call my DTOD. (Deep thought of the day). 

Facial Unrecognition

Looking in the mirror these days, it’s not the happiest experience. I keep wondering how that old man got into my face. But the changes are mercifully small and gradual, giving me time to get used to them. And I can always recognize myself.

 

Not so my phone. Suddenly the facial recognition feature has no idea who this guy is and sends me to cumbersome numerical codes and passwords to simply open the phone, never mind, check out my banking statement and other features. Of course, I did nothing to suddenly make that stop working, unless a new additional wrinkle put me over the line of recognition.

 

Meanwhile, I arrived back home in San Francisco with all flights on time and lovely weather greeting me as I took BART from the airport, boarded a bus and walked eight blocks to my house. The pleasure of unpacking, a bite to eat of food still edible I found in the kitchen and thought I’d enjoy a bit of the new Ted Lasso before bedtime. 

 

But now the TV didn’t recognize me—well, the wireless connection —and all bets were off on Apple TV, Netflix, Prime, etc. Unplug the TV, unplug the router, plug them both in again and the same “Sorry, sucker! We’re just not going to work and you’ll have to spend hours figuring out what the hell is wrong.”

 

And so I think about how I stepped out on the Lake Michigan cottage deck every night to watch the sunset. Though there might be clouds or rain, in one form or another, it’s just there—reliable, dependable, nothing to plug in and not a single code to enter. And in the end, more spiritually uplifting than the next murder on the detective series. 

 

Sigh. Can we learn to just be content with the world at our feet, in front of our eyes, above our heads? Can we recognize “the face before we were born” (a Zen description of our true nature) that never wrinkles or sags? Can we change mirrors reflecting back to glass offering a view out? 

 

Note to self: yes, I can and yes, I should. And you should too. 

Meanwhile, enjoy the sunset!

Summer Farewell

The canoe, kayak and cornhole boards brought up from the beach, the bikes back in the basement, the clothes in the closet stuffed in the suitcase—it’s time to go. My wife will stay another 10 days with a new group of people coming up who care not for canoeing, kayaking, cornhole or biking, but will enjoy their own ways of being at the beach in the last weeks of summer. 

 

Me, I’ll be settling back in in San Francisco with no trips planned until mid-October. Back to my routines there in the best season in that marvelous city. Opera in the Park, Comedy in the Park, Flower Piano, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and other annual delights await, with summer fog (hopefully) gone and winter rains yet to arrive. Some little projects eagerly await me (getting my 12^th book out, preparing for my Flower Piano gig), others less delightful demand my attention (the complicated fiasco of my book publishing business). Happy to return to Trader Joes, Tartinne bread and cooking in my own kitchen, walks in my Golden Gate Park backyard, reunions with friends and colleagues. 

 

Meanwhile, my flight leaves in five hours and hoping for one more walk up Sugarbowl dune and one more swim in Lower Herring Lake. It has been a most marvelous three weeks reviving my biking-hiking-swimming body and remembering my summer self with my teacher identity laid to the side. But all good things must pass. Or from another point of view, the baton of one good thing is passed to the next and the new runner carries it further around the track. 

 

Though technically it’s another month until summer officially ends, this my farewell to that still-delightful season.  

Let the Rest of the World Roll By

 

Our time in our little Lake Michigan paradise is mostly about family gathering, but there are also many friends of my wife’s family who either live up here or summer up here and days are filled with their visits. The other night, seven of us gathered for an evening of singing and sing we did, for over two hours. Old folk songs, 60’s folk songs, rounds, show tunes, jazz songs and more and wasn’t that a delight! 

 

One of the songs that someone taught was a country tune by a singer named Jimmy Dean (not the actor) and besides it being a sweet tune, I love the lyrics.

With someone like you, a pal so good and true,
I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find.
Some place that's known to God alone,
Just a spot to call our own. 

We'll find perfect peace where joys will never cease
Out there beneath the kindly sky.
We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere out in the west
And let the rest of the world roll by.

 

Here in my third week of an authentic summer life, I’m settling into relaxing the busyness of my world-involved life. Giving myself over to just sitting and listening to the murmur or roar of the Lake Michigan waves, watching the sun’s slow descent into the waters each night, occasionally going down to the beach to look up at the starry sky. 

 

But still I’m checking e-mail every day, peeking into Facebook, making and checking off little lists of “things to do” to keep my active life moving forward. 

And then comes this song to remind me that I can start to let some of that go. Just sit on the porch and watch “the rest of the world roll by.” Not try to fix it or express my outrage or even comment on it. Just let it all roll by. The good, the bad and the ugly. Fix my gaze on the sea, sand and sky and not the screens. 

 

Ancient Hindu thought has a way to talk about the various life stages, dividing it into four categories. As noted in a Website called Spiritual Seniors: 

 

1)   The first stage is brahmacharya, the period of the student, when the young learn discipline, faith, and knowledge. 

2)   The second is grihastha, the householder, devoted to marriage, family, work, and social responsibility. 

3)   The third, vanaprastha, arrives when one has fulfilled those duties and begins to step back from worldly obligations. 

4)   The fourth, sannyasa, is the life of renunciation, when a person seeks union with the eternal.
 

That third stage is often described as leaving society and literally living in the forest. But many see the forest as a metaphor—"a loosening of ties, a move toward simplicity, a life oriented around prayer and reflection rather than gain. People in this stage may still live with family, still advise children, still play a role in society. But the center of gravity shifts. The outward call of responsibility is balanced by the inward call of wisdom. A person is no longer defined by striving, but by seeking. No longer measured by conquest, but by clarity.”

 

The third stage in the West would be “retirement.” But instead of golf or pickleball or cruises (or alongside them), it’s marked by that more inward reflection than outward activity. 

 

And so this song, which sings to me in this brief life as a forest (lake) dweller. I still very much am playing a role in society, but can feel the center of gravity shifting in a welcome kind of way. I’ll keep speaking out and offering my perspective on healing a broken world, but I’m also happy to take some of the weight of the earth off of my shoulders, sit on the deck at sunset and “let the rest of the world go by.”

Planned Obsolescence

Still happily at work revising and reliving the account of my trip around the world in 1978-79 and was struck by this entry arriving in Bangkok after 5 months in India. Little did I imagine how much worse things would get. 

 

April 12— how extraordinary! Air-conditioned van, 2-laned smooth-road trafficked lighted freeway, gas stations, neon signs, lighted billboards, thirty color TV sets all turned on in the store window, liquor stores, electric doors— how utterly amazing to re-enter the world you’ve known for 27 years as if you had landed on the moon, seeing the things you’ve accepted as part of life as absolutely weird and somewhat unreal. Little did I realize how happily far away from it all India was for us, how we had eased into a whole other way of life. Alongside the feeling of estrangement was one of recognition and familiarity and I’m sure we will quickly re-adjust. But it is with more than a twinge of regret that we’ll return to a life of red lights and traffic jams, roads in neat squares, paved sidewalks, excessive lights at night blinding the stars, stores overflowing with useless item after useless item, advertisements on billboards and restaurants where people leave food on their plates. India helped me see that while technology makes life faster and more comfortable, extending the human body and mind, it can also drain us of our personal power, do work for us that causes our capacities to atrophy. Electric doors, moving sidewalks, escalators, power tools weaken the muscles, calculators, computers drain the intellect, TV kills the imagination, machine-weaving, drum machines, Cuisinarts diminish the intelligence of the hands, computer banks weaken our social selves. All based on some absurd notion of paradise as a life of leisure in a body that has forgotten how to function. As Gary Snyder says, we live in a country trying to get out of work. Alongside the way technological affluence makes everything so readily and easily available and affordable so that we never know the hunger that makes food delicious, the silence that makes music special. We just stuff ourselves fuller and fuller, dulling the senses and putting the mind and heart to sleep. Already I’m struck by the contrast of the city Thais with the rural Indians, dazzled by bright lights, choked by exhaust, surrounded by gadgets and toys, a mere shadow of a fully functioning human being. Of course, this is over-generalized and premature, just a back-door way to appreciate five months spent with people freed from this kind of disconnected and disjointed ghostly life. 

 

So almost 50 years ago I was complaining about outsourcing the work of the hand, the intelligence of the mind, the artistic imagination, the social self, never dreaming how much worse it would get. Here’s what someone posted on Facebook yesterday: 

 

“Technology was always supposed to remove friction.

 

Faster. Easier. Smarter. More convenient.

 

What actually happened is we removed one human being from the process, added four apps, three passwords, a QR code, facial recognition, a security question asking for the maiden name of your pet hamster in 1987 and a chatbox called Chloe who keeps telling you she “understands how frustrating this might be.”

 

Amen, brother. The post goes on with the details of how damn complicated it is now to do the simplest things. Park a car. Order lunch. Cancel a subscription. Make a payment. Talk to your bank. You know the list. 

 

And so we continue with our planned obsolescence of our humanity, giving away the elegance and intelligence of the hand, heart and head to machine after machine.  Can we press pause—without being sent a code— and re-consider? 

 

Lake Life

This is one of the longer times I’ve stayed at this family cottage on Lake Michigan—close to three weeks before I return home this Saturday. Also unusual because all family members (except my wife) and guests are now gone and the house is blissfully quiet and peaceful. The days are long and schedule-free and I feel myself settling into a happy rhythm. Every day the body exercised with a bike ride or walk on the beach or climb up a dune or stroll through the woods and every day without exception, a long swim in either the front or the back lake. 

 

After each summer loving the swims in the lake, I think I should join a pool in San Francisco and keep swimming all year long. But to pay money and get to the indoor pool and change in a locker room and swim laps in chlorine water and shower and get dressed again and get myself home is so far from walking out the cottage door down to the beach or out the back door to the back lake that I never have followed through on that idea. And never will. 

 

But meanwhile, these daily swims that strengthen the body and soothe the spirit are heaven on earth. Immersion in water is a sacred experience Note all baptism rituals, consider our life’s beginning in unconscious bliss in the watery womb, think about the 60% of our body that is water and our inside reuniting with the outside, feel the constant cleansing, note that when in grief, looking out at a body of water is often recommended— there’s a lot to be said for it. And here the added bonus of the invigorating freshwater blue of Lake Michigan and the calmer, warmer, silky waters of the more intimate Lower Herring Lake— I love them both for different reasons and often swim in each every day. 

 

Back home, The San Francisco School is welcoming the kids in our vibrant Opening Ceremony. This year, in honor of the school's 60th Anniversary, it all made more poignant by six alums from the six decades of the school's existence taking part in the water ceremony.  Had I known about this earlier, I could have made plans to arrive home in time to witness and partake, but alas, I found out too late. So I'll just think of them from afar as I celebrate my own lovely Lake Life.