The Way of the World

In a recent interview with a fellow Orff teacher, I was asked this intriguing question about AOSA (American Orff Schulwerk Association), the national organization to which we both belong.

 

What has AOSA meant to you as an educator and a person?

 

This interview will soon be made public to AOSA members, so I wondered if I should temper my response. Yet in my new incarnation as an elder, I mostly stop worrying about being politic for fear I might offend someone or close doors to professional opportunities and simply tell the truth as I feel it. So my honest answer was:

 

Most importantly, it provided a home for all this to happen—the Level trainings, the workshops, the annual the Conferences, the Orff Echo magazine. None of this life of getting trained and training teachers could have happened without it. It’s a home with a family feeling—outsiders always comment how friendly and open everyone is, how inclusive the act of music-making and dance is. Someone you might admire from a distance, someone you dislike, someone with a dubious political hat on, could turn out to be your partner in the evening folk dance or in your small group making up a body percussion piece in the workshop. Music doesn’t solve human conflict but puts in a larger perspective and can help heal it in small doses. That’s what a healthy home with a family feeling can offer.

 

Yet it’s also a home with a family’s dysfunction. At different times and in different ways, I’ve at once felt like the ignored or misunderstood kid, the rebellious teenager, the rejected job applicant, the betrayed husband, the beloved father, the weird uncle, the respected grandfather, the in-law and the outlaw. Over a beer, what stories I could tell! And I suspect that all my colleagues in AOSA have their own such stories to tell. It’s just the way of the world whenever and wherever  human beings gather. 

 

But in the end, AOSA is the home in the way that Robert Frost says it in his poem The Death of the Hired Man: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’

 

I could have written the same about The San Francisco School where I worked for 45 years, about the Men’s Group I’ve been in for 34 years, about my own family in its various incarnations starting 73 years ago. Two things are comforting and redeeming:

 

1)   I am not alone. This is a universal experience in families, workplaces, organizations and not my personal problem. Gather a random group of people together and go through that list again (misunderstood kid, rebellious teenager, etc.) and let the stories pour out! Again, it’s simply the way of the world.

 

2)   If the family/ organization/ community is authentic, has a heart, aims for belonging and connection and mutual celebration of life’s joys and sorrows, all the disappointment and betrayal can—and will— be forgiven. The mantra of “We’re in this together” applies to all of it. The fall from grace, the rising to our best selves, the muck and the mountaintop. 

 

That’s when genuine gratitude swallows any bitterness. Thanks to AOSA, The San Francisco School, the Men’s Group and my beautiful family, for all of it.