Any Size

Last night was my first bookstore reading and I had great hopes for a sold-out crowd. It's a small store, so 30 people would have been more than enough to feel full. I had advertised on Facebook, in my old school’s network reaching a few hundred families, on my 40-plus- people mailing list of music teachers who have taken Orff workshops with me and was convinced that my book’s topic, Jazz, Joy & Justice would both feel appealing and wholly relevant. 

May I confess my disappointment that 10 people showed up? My wife, her friend, four people from my Men’s Group, the retired 3^rd grade teacher from my school, two music teachers who had taken workshops with me and one stranger from off the street (who left halfway through). 

 

My hopes to open up new worlds of fabulous music and musicians, new insights into our present dilemma and ideas how to turn it around, new information that has been purposefully ignored or repressed, were somewhat realized as the people attending clearly felt that mixture of joyful music, historical perspective and determination to help change the toxic narrative we’re all caught in. But again, these stories and thoughts and ideas I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating that I would hope would be of interest to just about everyone and help move that needle closer to justice— well, the numbers suggested either that no one cares or I’m not the person worth listening to. 

 

A while back, I got interested in a small literary genre based on 6-word biographies and one of mine was: 

 

Called world to quarrel. No answer. 

 

That feels about right. My film is now streaming on PBS, Amazon and Apple TV after being shown in some 20 film festivals, I just ordered a reprint of one of my 10 books (I guess someone is buying them), I still get invitations to teach here, there and everywhere (including the recent workshops in China with 110 participants and 65 respectively), so I guess some people care about what I have to offer. I appreciate you faithful 240 Blog followers and my Facebook posts usually get a few hundred reads. But rightly or wrongly, I always feel that the things I care about and what I have to say about them deserve a larger audience. I keep waiting for my big ship to come in and keep being disappointed that at best, it’s a one-person kayak. 

 

But nevertheless, I persist. AS Gary Snyder’s Zen Master advised him: 

 

“In Zen, there are only two things. You sit and you sweep the garden. It doesn’t matter how big the garden is. Any size.”

And so I get out the broom and get back to work.