Living the Questions: Part II

Here I go on to reflect on the forces that shaped my life and formed my vision and values, from teenager to the doorstep of eldership. 

 

The teen years are when an independent self starts to form, something aiming for a future authenticity. Now notice the connection between authentic and author. A big part of forming a self is to read and then read and then read some more. Find out what attracts you, what challenges you, what affirms you, what gives you a new unexpected point of view, what moves you. Somewhere around 15 or 16 years old, I read books that opened worlds and set the tone for a lifetime of investigation, books that did not casually accept the way things were, but opened the window to the way things might or could be. For example:

 

Walden: Solitude and Nature are worthy lifelong companions. How can we keep them alive in us amidst a busy, social, urban life?

 

Manchild in the Promised Land/ Malcolm  X: Social justice matters and turning things around begins with understanding how they got that way. How can we perpetually awaken ourselves to such understanding and help awaken others?

 

How Children Fail/ Summerhill: Schools can put us to sleep, are too narrow, content with simple answers using a small part of the brain. But what of the body? Might we also train the body as an instrument of knowledge, as a sublime tool of expression, as a means of standing firmly on this earth with grace, agility, dignity, groundedness? Might we train the hand as an organ of intelligence? And what of the heart? Can feeling take a seat at the table, especially those things that ignite us and connect us—joy, wonder, excitement, enthusiasm and dare we say, love? And what of the imagination? We are never more involved, more connected, more ourselves, than when we create, be it a dance, a poem, a song, a painting, a woodworking project, a Science Fair presentation. Creation is always the real final exam, that takes everything we know and can do and marries it to that which we don’t yet know but begins to reveal itself in the creative act. In short, how can we indeed teach the whole child using the whole of our intelligences in places that welcome our whole curiosity and give us a sense of genuine welcome, meaning and fun?

 

The Three Pillars of Zen: We are not born into an original sin, but come “trailing clouds of glory” and arrive as spiritual beings. But our original Buddha nature is clouded over by ignorance and requires our attention, intention, and practice to realize. Not belief, not faith, not blind acceptance of dogma, not prayer to an omnipotent Being, not dutiful attendance at a weekly service mouthing platitudes one ignores the other six days, but the direct experience in this body, in this mind.  There is no God in Buddhism, yet God is always with us. How to experience this first-hand?

 

And not just books. Music! Bach, Chopin, Debussy offered glorious answers with one question only: How can I erase the awful gap between my fingers and the notes on the page? But then came jazz with a more interesting question: How can I express something unique and personal, treat each song as the beginning of the venture, not the end and each time, sing it differently? Not only to begin to improvise, but to get to know a music born from a powerful African soul-force struggling to bring beauty, power and meaning to the world, a lily born from the swamp of purposeful oppression and violence and injustice that somehow was tied to the good, bad and ugly of my American identity.

 

And then the Nonesuch Explorer Series recordings offering new ways to join sounds together, on new instruments with new timbres within new structures with new meanings. If, as Coleridge suggested, “each piece of art, rightly seen (or heard) unlocks another faculty of Soul,” then my little fledgling Soul was growing with each note from the gamelan, mbira, shakuhachi flute. And then films like Black Orpheus that brought world-opening new music together with story and dance and images. Without a passport, the world was flooding in and I found the waters that carried me far beyond my “Leave It To Beaver” New Jersey childhood to worlds far beyond and yet, also forever inside of me.

 

And so here I was at 20 years old, a junior at Antioch College, beginning to weave together an emerging vision from the separate strands of solitude, social justice, spiritual seeking, schools that serve our whole selves, jazz solos that sing the self, world music that soared beyond the borders of our culture, our thinking, our feeling.  And without knowing it, waiting for the one thing that would tie it all together and point out the long and winding path that would be my future life. 

 

And it came one day in the person of a silent, smiling and soulful African-American man who motioned us to remove our shoes, follow his gestures and sing out, “Head and shoulder baby, 1-2-3.” The man, of course, was Avon Gillespie, a man I never tire of thanking and whose legacy lives in all of you who ever worked with me— and certainly the few of you who got to work with him. 

 

And the song “Head and Shoulders” proved prophetic, singing a clear message to me as the initiate. We will need to use the whole of our body, the head, the shoulders, the knees, the toes. We will need to work. If we want the milk of human kindness, sustenance, comfort, we need to milk the cow ourselves, not buy it pre-packaged on the supermarket shelf. And alongside the work is play, the divine childlike quality that adults too often put to the side, but would be in the center of our life’s work, bouncing the ball just for the fun of bouncing, not to win the game. And the wisdom we seek will mostly not be found in school or college (though it actually was in San Francisco!), but on Balinese verandas and Indian homes and Bulgarian hotel rooms and under Ghanaian trees and in school gymnasiums and big barns out in the countryside. 

 

And so it was Orff that tied all the strands together, allowed me to integrate jazz and use it both for its sublime musical expression, its carrier of joy, its perfect democratic model where all the voices get to both blend in and stand out in conversation with each other, its stories that lead to the needed awakening of social justice in this country. Orff that demanded the intelligence of the body, the mind, the heart, that married intellect and imagination. Orff that opened up music far beyond the Western canon to xylophone music from Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Java and Bali, to drumming from Ghana, Brazil, China and Japan, to recorder music from Medieval times to the Andes. Orff that demanded first-hand experience, hands-on exploration, that celebrated imagination and welcomed all questions. Orff that connected elemental music with this great, glorious, green earth and its elements, that sang the fire of metal, the breath of air in songs and recorders, the water of flowing movement, the earth of drum skins and wood xylophones. Orff that could transform schools into places of joyful celebrative community marked by ceremonies and rituals both invented and transformed. Orff that would demand that each class be planned anew, never going through the motions of yesterday’s successes, but always revitalizing and dreaming anew the next needed step born from the next revealing question. 

 

And so it continued for 45 blessed, crazy, happy, heart-breaking and joyful years at The San Francisco School, teaching teachers 3 times a year in my music room and then 35 years of teaching this summer course and traveling around the country and then the world to all those marvelous places meeting all those marvelous people and working with my two extraordinary and marvelous colleagues and then inviting four more to the party. Always accompanied always by the question of how this might touch people in Iran or China or Estonia or South Africa or Colombia or Iceland or 45 other countries I had the good fortune to teach in. How might this work with folks in their 90’s, with babies, with the blind or deaf, with folks in wheelchairs or with Down’s syndrome, with Zen monks or food store workers or corporate IT people, with modern dancers, high-level jazz musicians, high school orchestra students, South African choirs, body-music musicians, with classroom teachers, with my neighbors? All of whom I have worked with. And the answer always was, “Marvelous! Marvelous! Marvelous!”

 

And then came—retirement from the school. The pandemic. My 70^th birthday. Time to ask a new set of questions beginning with “Now What?”

 

 

Living the Questions: Part I

As promised, here is the talk I gave on my birthday, which I probably posted five years ago, but who would remember? The talk was almost exactly an hour long, so here I post in three parts. 

 

Once on an airplane, I saw a movie “Happy. Thank you. More please.” That title a  little 5-word mantra that says so much. Five years ago, I gave a talk in this very room for my 70^th birthday. In preparation for this next milestone, Re-reading it felt like I could have written it yesterday— and it holds up as something I can repeat five years after I wrote it. 

 

That mantra summarizes my last five years. “Happy.” Even in the face of the horrors of the news. The blessings of getting to continue to do what I love, what makes me happy, what seems to make others happy. The blessings of both the physical health and the mental energy to keep teaching, to keep writing, to keep singing with people from 3 to 103 years old, to keep working on piano, to keep walking, biking and swimming, to gather with my extended family. The blessings of the opportunities to keep working, keep teaching both kids and adults and the extra blessing of some heart-opening travel while getting to do so.  

 

One of the great lessons of aging gracefully is to dig deeper and rise higher into gratitude. Amidst all the inevitable disappointments of a human life at any age, amidst the decline of the body and the senses and the ravaging good looks, the only proper response is, as the movie title suggests, is “Thank you.”

 

And then “More please.” The gods answered my petition and as shown above, there was just the right amount of “more, please.” And here I publicly petition them again: “More please.” If you Level I students are interested in working with me, you can join me in that little prayer! I have no plans to leave any time soon, but these things aren’t always in our control. If all goes well, I’ll give this exact same talk with this exact same intro when I turn 80. And now to the talk itself, opening with a quote from poet Walt Whitman.

 

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

I was 16-years old when I first read this passage from Walt Whitman and for the rest of my life that followed, I ended up mostly taking his advice. Especially the part about reading and re-examining all I had been told at school or church or in any book or newspaper, not only dismiss whatever insulted my own soul, but embracing that which fed it. Living my life as a question that led to the next needed question. 

 

We begin life with questions. From the toddler saying “Whazzat?” to the 5-year old pestering you with “Why is the sky blue? What happens when you die? Why do I have to eat my broccoli?” to the eye-rolling teen asking “And just why do I have to be home by 11pm?” And then more profoundly, “Is this really the way the world has to be?”

 

At first, the adults are charmed by our questions, but we finally discover that the world grows weary of our questions, that schools and churches are more interested in answers, particularly in answers to the questions they ask (99% of schooling is answering questions no kid ever asked). Wanting to be nice and accepted and part of the crowd, we slowly stop asking the questions out loud and worse yet, stop asking them to ourselves. That curiosity that was the engine that moved us into life and set us off down the long, intricate path starts winding down. Yet the Soul, that unique threaded part of ourselves that is by our side our entire lives, thrives on questions and begins to die fed only on easy answers unquestioningly accepted by the multitudes.  

 

We discover that society likes answers, likes compliance, likes blind faith and acceptance. And so the drama begins— the inquisitive self pitted against the dogmatic institution. How we negotiate that mine-field says a lot about who we are and who we become. Of course, we love the New Age posters—"Go for it! You can be anything you want!!! Express yourself! Just be yourself!!”  But the fine print reads: “Except not in my class or not in my church or not in my family or not in my social group or not in my political party or not in my affinity group. We don’t really want to see all of you, so check it at the door or risk a life of loneliness and constant battle.”

 

It’s not easy to be yourself. Poet William Stafford tells us “The Way It Is” in his poem of the same title. 
 
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

And that’s just what I’ve done. Somehow, I managed to live 75 years of non-stop constant questioning. I never let go of the thread. A part of that thread was a lifetime as a troublemaker. I spent most of 3^rdgrade out in the hall, got in trouble often challenging the culture of my good-ole-boys high school, found a college that fit my way of being and accepted me and turned the troublemaker outward, marching on Washington in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War and identifying with the hippy counter-culture out to build a new world. Then a glorious 30 plus years building that world in the San Francisco School until I felt the school culture being threatened from within and in the next 15 years was suspended twice and put on probation for speaking up. And the same mixture with AOSA, at once feeling like I found home and then sometimes, speaking up when something smelled rotten in Denmark (and then the sweet redemption of receiving the AOSA Distinguished Service Award in 2018). A troublemaker. 

 

And yes, there was a price for it— people wanting me to shut-up for the wrong reasons (okay, occasionally the right ones!), people uncomfortable with the questions, the feeling that I’m part of many groups, but not wholly a part of any group.  Not entirely a teacher or a musician or a social justice advocate or a Zen student or a writer or even a music teacher in the conventional sense, or even an Orff teacher—and yet part of all of them and more. 

 

I think we all have that troublemaker in us and its intimately tied to the dreamer. Because side-by-side with the eye-rolling teenager is the dreamer, filled with pimpled doubts about how we fit in and what we can accomplish, but also starting to hope for something larger and daring to dream about something better. I think we all have had that moment when the world fully announced itself to us, gave us a glimpse of possibility, called to us “like the wild geese, over and over announcing our place in the family of things.” Can you remember yours? From those seeds of doubt married with dream, new questions came that could not be easily answered, that would need years, or decades or a lifetime to properly chew over and digest. 

Thanks to McDonalds

 

Many years back, I had the great pleasure of teaching in Finland. I arrived in Helsinki and they gave me a room in the Conservatory Sibelius Academy.  My first night, a taxi came with a somewhat famous Danish Orff teacher, Minna Ronnefeld, who had studied directly with Gunild Keetman, Orff’s brilliant colleague. Off we went to the opera to see Verdi’s Othello.  I enjoyed it and just had to giggle at the supertitles with the long Finnish words that took up the whole little screen. Afterwards, Ms. Ronnefeld gave her erudite opinion about all these details of the opera, the way educated Europeans do, and all I could honestly say was “That was interesting.” But I faked my way through, nodding my head to each of her points. 

She put me in a cab closed to midnight and the cab dropped me off at Sibelius Academy. I went to enter the large building to go to my room— and the door was locked. I tried other doors—all locked. I looked for bells and knocked loudly and even shouted up at the building, but all was dark inside and no response. Meanwhile, it was March in Finland and freezing cold. This was not good. I pictured them finding me the next morning frozen at the doorstep.

 

Then I remembered that maybe a half-mile down the road, we had passed a McDonalds that was open. I walked back there and never was I so happy to step inside a place I had refused to enter most of my adult life. (Even as a teenager, I preferred Burger King.) Of course, all of this was long before cell phones and texting and maybe even e-mail, but either I miraculously I had my hosts’ Soili Perkio’s phone number or the McDonalds worker I spoke to was able to find her number. In either case, she miraculously answered her phone at 12:30 am and told me, “Oops! I forgot to tell you the code you need to enter the building. Sorry about that!” I dutifully wrote it down and to thank the worker, ordered some French fries. It seemed like the right time to break my vow never to support McDonalds. And it was!

 

I told this story to some students at lunchtime the other day. Another day, the subject of It’s Its, the San Francisco treat of ice cream between two cookies covered in chocolate, came up. Why am I telling this story?

 

No secret that yesterday was my birthday. My colleague James so expertly and cleverly got the group in morning gathering singing in 3-part harmony and then overlaying it with the Happy Birthday song. One of many advantages of having my birthday here is that that song is light years more tuneful with 90 music teachers than out-of-tune waiters singing at a restaurant. But there was more to come. 

 

I taught my first two classes, so happy to be doing what I was born to do on the day commemorating that birth and at the end of the second class with half of my 33 students, the other half arriving bearing gifts and another song. On a giant tray were 34 It’s Its!! After we all had eaten dessert before lunch, another student took me by his side and said, “We want you to stay healthy in all situations, so we bought you a special emergency kit.” And took out a McDonald’s bag with chicken McNuggets and French fries. People, it doesn’t get any better than that. 

 

After my afternoon class, I did my annual ritual swim of one lap per year (luckily a small pool) and remembering who I was and significant events from each year while swimming. (I have two pretty interesting stories from when I was five that are worthy of sharing sometime!) I then drove to Carmel to search out a house called Hawk Tower that the poet Robinson Jeffers built with his own hands many years back. It figures into the book I’m reading titled Typewriter Beach and all these years coming down here, I never had heard of it. From there, I took a short stroll on Carmel Beach and dipped my feet into the icy waters of the Pacific. A lovely moment of solitude and connection with the elements, while pelicans flocked overhead. 

 

Back for dinner and my annual lecture, which was a re-visit of the talk I gave for my 70^th birthday in the same room five years ago. (I will re-post it here in the next day or so.) I felt wholly present in that talk in a powerful way and ended it on the dot of the allotted hour. I was hoping for a musical jam session afterwards, but my colleagues invited me back to the hotel for a cake and we ended up laughing uproariously at the stories of past and present events the way that we can. Such a fine group of people!!

 

And that is how I commenced my 75^th year on the planet.

The It's It.

Emergency Kit

 

Facing the Music

The last night of my 74^th year— well, technically the 75^th, since our birthday celebrates the end of a completed year, as when we turned 1— was well-spent folk-dancing with this oh-so-joyous group of some 80 teachers, lovely souls each and every one. All with live music put together this afternoon by my colleague James Harding. The last dance was the Brazilian ciranda and then samba led by Estevao, another colleague who never fails to infect everyone with his exuberant dance. Though he could, he never shows off but invites us all into his orbit. At the end, the Brazilians kept playing and when I left the theater after an hour, they were all still going at it. 

 

In my short walk back to the room, there was the full moon and the night sky and the predictable evening chill. It feels right to sit out on my little veranda to soak it all in and write a few words in my handwritten journal. I can’t quite shake the weight of that number associated with this 5-year-old, 15-year-old, 25-year-old and more, all still glowing under all the layers added to them. It’s easy to accept philosophically mortality as the companion that keeps us honest and grateful and determined to savor every precious moment of this life, but when we honestly face the music, we question why we just can’t keep going on forever. At least I do. Trips to the dentist, mid-term elections, the takeover of machines and all.  But if we have to face the music—and we do— let’s take Irving Berlin’s advice: 

There may be trouble ahead
But while there's moonlight
And music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance.

 

Or to paraphrase e.e.cummings

 

who are you, little i

(five or seventy-five years old)

peering from my window at

a July moonrise

(and feeling: that if day

has to become night

 

this is a beautiful way) 

Fourth Act

If I think of my life as a 4-act play or 4- movement symphony, today is the last day of the third act/ movement before the curtain closes for the 4^th. Each of the first three are 25 years long and though it’s possible that the 4^th could be also, I suspect it will be a shorter one before the final curtain. A short summary: 

 

 First Act: From a free-range childhood to resisting repressive schools to first steps towards a unified vision in the turbulent and liberating late sixties/early seventies. 

 

Second Act: Travel, family, work. Zen, Jazz, and Orff Schulwerk. All at a remarkable school that allowed for and helped all of the above to thrive and develop. 

 

Third Act: International teacher, author, performer, grandfather, stitching all the threads together into one uniform multi-colored cloth. 

 

Fourth Act (unwritten—or written but not yet lived): Recapitulate all the themes of the first three movements of the symphony, tie up the loose threads of the first three acts to a meaningful conclusion. Then the inevitable decrescendo of the body/mind fading into silence. 

 

These my thoughts on my last day as a 74-year-old. As always, happy to spend it teaching. 

Sage Advice

In these days of social media, anyone can be a sage or a prophet or deep philosopher at the click of a button. Of course, the wisdom doesn’t come from the medium, but a life lived with intelligence and integrity. And the good news is that there are more people who are doing this than the daily news and polls would have us believe. I’ve saved many a comforting, insightful prose piece or poem from people I’ve never heard of and will probably not again. Though I feel gratefully far away from the conflict that challenged my serenity, this advice from a 65-year-old woman looking back on her life’s lessons and ahead to the next pathway to her well-earned peace speaks to me. My comments in italics. 

 

Protect your peace like it’s your property.

 

·      Not every argument needs your voice.

That’s a challenging one for me, but an intriguing thought that I don’t always have to solve the world’s problems! (Which, of course, I never have!) Figure it out yourself, people! I have a lake waiting for me.

 

·      Not every insult needs your response.

Tell that to my brain stem, poised for fight or flight! But yes, it’s often more their problem than mine and in bright moments, I might even feel an ounce of compassion for their misery that they’re trying to heap on me. No thanks— it’s yours, not mine. 

 

·      Not every relative deserves access to your emotions.

Interesting that she chose “relatives.” Don’t think mine care a fig for my emotions, but for the people I know in general, they don’t really need to know how I feel and most likely are not all that interested. 

 

Peace is expensive. Protect it from drama, negativity, and draining people — even if they're your close ones. 

A hearty yes to all of that! Who needs it? As I said, I got a class to teach and soon a lake to jump into. 

Every Cell of the Body

 I remember a moment teaching back in May at the Havergal School in Toronto when I was walking down the hall and thought to myself, “I’m happy in every cell of my body!!!” And I was. 

 

It happened again tonight after our opening ceremony for our International Orff Course. A new group of some 80 souls, many from familiar places like Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Hong Kong, Macao, China and then two new ones—Mongolia and Israel! Quite an accomplishment in a time when it’s both so difficult to get into this country and so unappealing to come here in our present state of chaos. Many also from around the U.S.— Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon and more. But the largest segment from—as it should be—California. 

 

Do I love the mix of energies from cultures gathering with the common goal of engaging in joyful music and dance and learning how to better serve the children in their schools? Yes, I do. Does the buzz already in the air uplift me and energize me? Yes, it does. Is it a grand pleasure to reunite with people I taught in the New Orleans Jazz Course, Orff Afrique, my recent trips to Bangkok and Hangzhou and get to work and play with them again? Yes, it is.

Does the perfect temperature Carmel Valley and its gentle rolling hills and cypress trees touch me with their natural beauty? Yes, they do. Was I delighted to have a little time free to swim in the pool? Yes, I was. Was I mightily impressed that this Hidden Valley Music Seminars Retreat Center made a giant inch of progess by having real metal silverware this year so I don’t have to nag people to keep re-using their plastic forks? Yes, I am. 

 

Could I go on? Yes, I could. But I do have to plan tomorrow’s lessons for the 33 people in my class, so I’ll stop here and just celebrate that rare feeling of utter and complete happiness— in every single cell of my body.