Skype Abuse

Today I had a Skype visit with my granddaughter Zadie. At 12-weeks old, she is markedly different from the precious 5-week old I got to hold and cuddle over Winter Break. More alert, smiling, babbling— though not much of it when I call. Camera shy? But still I’m so grateful to get to see her from 3,000 miles away. And for free! And legal! (We’ve come a long way from the fake credit card calls I made in Europe back in 1973!)

But as wonderful as it is to see her, I always hang up the call feeling depressed. How can you see a baby without holding her? Without lifting her in the air, bouncing her on your knee, tickling her, rubbing noses, giving raspberries on her belly, dancing with her, walking with her outside tucked in the front snuggly. It’s frustrating!! So close but so far. When it comes to grandchildren, there’s something cruel about the Skype call.

So instead of sitting and moping, I started thinking about that urge to hold and touch. Touch, along with movement and song, is one of the three languages we start speaking and responding to when we begin our time here on the planet. Up until recently (in human history), we intuitively knew all this, but things got weird when Descartes proclaimed the brain as separate from the body and the Puritans decided that the body was an evil trap for Spirit to be patiently endured until we were set free in heaven. A few centuries later, the necktie came in to cut off circulation to everything below the throat, talking heads appeared on the news programs and other bizarre aberrations of our capacity to think strangely—and wrongly—appeared. Especially when it came to child-raising and babies were left alone in cribs at night and other devices during the day away from the body of mother (or sibling, grandparent, neighbor, etc.). Then the experts came in to justify this practice.

Case in point. John B. Watson, one of the early behaviorist scientists, wrote a book in 1928 titled Psychological Care of Infant and Child in which he advised young mothers to be careful about giving their baby too much love and affection. “Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap, “ he cautioned and then in a moment of weakness added, “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight.” Someone who steals a candy bar can get thrown in jail, but someone who, however innocently, helped rob a generation of children from the touch and love they needed and deserved gets off scot free. I’m not whining here, but let’s face it, there is no justice.

Another such “innocent” disaster took place in the 1940’s when the germ theory of human contact causing disease convinced workers at an orphanage to feed and clothe their babies, but not to touch, play with, hold or handle them. The result? The infants grew sickly and weak and many died of the same diseases the policy was trying to protect them from. A psychologist sent to investigate concluded that failing to hold, stroke, sing and coo to, touch and play with babies, is fatal to infants. The most ignorant villager in the most backward village could have told us that, but we civilized folks are so clever that we were sure that science would teach us the proper way to raise children.

And ironically, now it can help as neuroscientists are investigating the necessity of touch and speech and song and play. The above stories came from a sleeper of a book written by three doctors titled A General Theory of Love. I gave it to my daughter as a Christmas present and she didn’t seem thrilled, but if she ever has the leisure to read it, will find it not only beautifully written and rich with stories mixed with essential and understandable facts, but ultimately an affirmation of what I hope she knows from her own upbringing— that love is not the luxury of poets, but the necessity of us all to reach the full promise our enlarged brains hold. The punch line—we need a culture attuned to the ways of the heart— is certainly a subject that I hold dear to the heart and have struggled in my own modest way to contribute to in my school and workshops.

And speaking of school, you know I can’t resist a constructively critical whine here. My second daughter went through a relatively enlightened teacher credential program here in San Francisco, but while she had just one hour of music training in two years of classes, she was required to attend a three-hour session by a specialist who advised these young teachers against touching children to avoid legal action.

If you read the bent stick metaphor in my last posting, you can’t find a better example of two disastrously bent sticks than the story of touching children in school. First was corporal punishment (remember my blog a year ago? Caning banned in Korea—last year!) and stories of sexual abuse hidden in a cloak of secrecy. Not only in the school, but in the home and culture as well. Nothing could be more damaging than a child publicly shamed with physical punishment and privately shamed with sexual abuse in a wider culture that refused to talk about and acknowledge it. And so the law stepped in and created Child Protective Services with a worthy aim in mind— no more secrecy and those who are abusive must face consequences and treatment. All well and good.

But then the stick bent in the other direction to the point where young teachers are advised to never touch children of any age. So instead of isolated incidents of abuse perpetrated on the few, now there is an institutional abuse of all by depriving children of the need for touch. One might argue that they still can be lovingly touched at home and I hope that is true, but a climate of fear of touch permeates everywhere and an education without loving touch is barely an education at all. It’s fine for these young teachers to know the law and the wiggle-room it allows ( in reality, most teachers still do hug children and pat them on their back), but after the 10-minute legal talk, they should spend the next few hours in company with grandmothers and neuroscientists to study how vitally important touch is.

And if touch (and movement and song) is vital at the beginning of life, it becomes an urgent necessity again at the end of life. So many visits with my mother these days are just sitting in silence holding hands in the garden, interrupted by occasional outbursts of kisses. Along with some songs, this is just what the doctor ordered.

And by the way, it’s pretty important in the middle of life as well! So after reading this, go over to the nearest person and give them a hug. With their permission, of course.

PS A word about that grandmother/neuroscientist training class. It shouldn’t be on Skype.

Dead White Guys

We humans rarely get it right. We set in motion weird notions of relationship where some have the power and privilege and the rest are subservient to it with few choices beyond obey or resist. When enough resist and those with power are overthrown, the new folks take over and anything good that grew in that former swamp of relationship is thrown out as well. As the philosopher Montaigne said, “To straighten a bent stick, we first have to bend it the other way.” Maybe. But if you don’t release it, it will just stay bent in the other direction. (And even when it is straight, what’s so great about a straight stick? Montaigne needed to work on his metaphor a little more.) And so back and forth we go.

Dead White Males, the holders of so much privilege  (well, at least while they were alive. Is their hierarchy in Heaven?) have been held in low esteem in the past few decades. Universities have revised their syllabi and for young hip intellectuals and advocates for social justice, anything that comes from the pen of the DWM is suspect, dismissed, re-interpreted in the light of revisionist and deconstructionist theory.

And I myself have participated in this, shouting “Amen” to Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over, Beethoven,” loving to tell the stories of Horowitz and Rubinstein coming to hear Art Tatum play jazz piano, habitually including Zora Neale Hurston, Emily Dickinson, Basho, in any list I make of writers, Thornton Dial and Gee’s Bend quilters in lists of artists, Charlie Parker, Tito Puente and Ravi Shankar in lists of musicians and always putting the Nicholas Brothers before Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in my list of tap dancers to help enlarge our notions of the playing field. (I showed my 8^th graders Fred and Gene dancing in the song The Babbit and the Bromide and then a clip of the Nicholas Brothers from the film Down Argentine Way. The kids were outspoken as to who were the more vibrant dancers and outraged that the former were more well known. Two more dead white males shot down and I helped load the pistol!)

There is no question that so many have suffered—and continue to suffer— from a culture of selective inclusion. And not just the people excluded. The whole culture misses out on the possibility of being refreshed by extraordinary people who were denied a leg up to share their gifts more widely. Wouldn’t the world have enjoyed two Mozarts, both Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl? Could it have encouraged Clara Schumann a bit more than it did without taking a single note away from Robert? Wouldn’t we be uplifted to hear music from the countless remarkable musicians in cultures worldwide whose names we will never know? Wouldn’t it have been fantastic if the Nicholas Brothers had made as many films as Fred Astaire? Well, we don’t get to re-write history and instead of whining (still February, after all!), we can be grateful for those we do know and remember to keep the choices and opportunities open so that the next genius of any class, race or gender can refresh us with her or his work.

But yesterday I spent in company with a bunch of dead white guys named Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Ravel and got up from the piano with my mind clearer, body refreshed and heart more open than when I sat down. I couldn’t help but think “Damn! Those guys could write!” And again, in a world dominated by the notion of music history beginning with Palestrina when Western harmony began to develop, I’ve done my part to celebrate the beauties of a musical world so much larger than Europe between 1600 and 1900—the vast repertoire of music in the pentatonic scale, modes with drones, African polyrhythms, gamelan forms, the complexity of Indian rhymes and melodies and so much more. West Africa drum choirs put Bach in rhythmic kindergarten, Indian ragas put Schubert in melodic preschool and the Balinese gamelan angklung shows Western composers that they can do much more with 4-notes than they ever dreamed possible.

But none of it negates the Western genius of functional harmony—it just puts it in balance with the particular genius of other musical cultures. But genius it is to create a system of harmonic tensions and releases that pluck the strings of our hearts with so many subtle shades and gradations of feeling. And to take musical ideas through so many variations of harmonic accompaniment, different textures, related themes reveals a mind at the height of intelligence. Western classical music may seem so-two-hundred-years-ago, but its intricate structures and harmonic variations will help build a sophisticated mind and nuanced heart in any player or listener willing to do the work.

So friends, while opening the doors to the riches of all artists and thinkers, let’s not slam the door in the face of Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe, Brahms, Dickens, Whitman, Bill Evans and others. We needn’t exclude Dead White Males in order to widen the circle of inclusion. Of course, I have a vested interest in this since, worthy of remembrance or not, I myself will be a DWM some day. Please don't hold it against me. 

High Anxiety and Button-Up Pants

Like everyone in San Francisco, I can tell you where I was when the earthquake of ’89 struck. On the couch, to be exact, reading a magazine and then out the back door as fast as I could. My kids were outside and were starting to run upstairs toward the house when I shooed them back into the yard. My youngest (5 at the time) was crying and I was trying to soothe her and then realized she was upset because I had knocked her rice cake out of her hand. We slept in the more solid back of the house that night, woken up several times by the after-shocks.

Though mild compared to other natural disasters—we had little physical damage and none of us were hurt— I felt a profound psychological shift. The idiomatic expression “it really shook me up ” was an apt description. The solid ground I had walked on so dependably for years suddenly was undependable and unpredictable, a precariously balanced tectonic plate that could open up under my feet without a moment’s notice. I had begun studying the Bulgarian bagpipe at the time, a powerful instrument with a repertoire of quirky, uneven rhythms that shakes me out of complacency when things get too dull or comfortable. But after the earthquake, I couldn’t play it for some six months. I needed calm, quiet, soothing music in a square 4/4 time that would lead me back to trust and predictability, more harps and glockenspiels than bagpipes and screaming jazz horns.

Cultural shifts sometimes have that quality of earthquakes, with changes happening faster than we can assimilate them. “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?” sang Bob Dylan decades ago and it was part of his role as an artist to be the antennae of the culture and announce not only that “The Times They Are A-Changing,” but give some hints as to precisely how they were changing and needed to change. That’s often the role of the artists in the culture, to open up the conversations needed in this particular time and this particular place and invite Mr. Jones into the conversation.

What is the conversation we need here and now, not only in the U.S., but worldwide as well? That could be quite a list, with climate change, population and the end to ethnic rivalry near the top. But I would suggest that in addition to noting how the times they are a-changing, we need to pay attention to the rate of change itself. For if one thing sets us apart from all other times in human history, it is the ever-increasing rate of change spurred by technologic shifts. Human history is like a ball bouncing that decreases its height with each successive bounce, getting smaller and smaller and faster and faster.

Anthropology talks about Neanderthals as developing over a couple of million years. Homo sapiens came in around 200,000 years ago and not much changed for at least 165,000 years. Then some 35,000 years ago comes the first evidence of cave paintings, that major leap in evolution when the artists appeared in the culture. Now change is measured in blocks of 10,000 years at a time until writing begins to appear and now the accelerating rate of change is measures in thousand year chunks. During the Dark Ages, ain’t much happening of note for a few hundred years at a time and then comes the explosion of culture in the Middle Ages, led by—guess who?—the artists and writers and composers and cultural shifts is measured in centuries. By the time of the next big technological explosion, the printing press in the 15^th century, it’s reduced to some 50-year blocks. And so it continues until the next series of explosions—photographs, recordings, radio,  films, TV and now the 20^th century (in the U.S.) is parceled out in decades—the Roarin’ 20’s the Depression 30’s, the War Years, the conservative 50’s, the turbulent 60’s and so on.

Can you feel that ball bounce getting smaller? By 2000, the personal computer, cell phone, I-Pod, I-Tunes, Facebook, YouTube and beyond accelerated the rate of change yet again. A computer two-years old is virtually obsolete—or at least needs some serious upgrading.

And then the coup-de-grace. Some three months ago, I bought a pair of new jeans at the Gap. After losing weight (see The Doug Diet), I needed a new pair with a smaller waist. Back I went and was so thrilled to see the exact same pair one size smaller. But with one change—instead of a zipper, it had buttons for the fly. What?!!! Buttons?!!! So I went to one of the 20-something saleswomen and pleaded with her to find a pair with zippers. She looked it up and of course, they only came now with buttons. She suggested I wait a couple of months until the zippers came back.

Now according to Wikipedia, zippers trounced buttons on pants starting in the 1930’s. To quote: “In the 1930s, a sales campaign began for children's clothing featuring zippers. The campaign praised zippers for promoting self-reliance in young children by making it possible for them to dress in self-help clothing. The zipper beat the button in 1937 in the "Battle of the Fly", and designers raved over zippers in men's trousers. declaring the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men." Among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray."

So why this nostalgic return to the 30’s? And whatever happened to choice? And is the rate of dependable predictability now down to months?

And so the challenge of our times. With the rate of change faster than it has ever been, we need to pay attention to its impact on the psyche. High predictability, the state of most cultures over a few hundred thousand years, means low stress and anxiety. Kids growing up in a fishing villages or farm lands pretty much know they’re going to fish and farm. The parents are relaxed about their upbringing and add arranged marriages to the mix and everybody is more or less secure in the feeling that all will be well. But low predictability because of rapid changes creates high stress and anxiety. Parents are wondering, “Will my kid find a job? Find a life partner? Will I myself keep my job or be outsourced to Asia or replaced by a robot?”

I first heard of this formula from Rob Evans, the author of “Family Matters,” explaining why parents were more anxious about their children than ever before and how that creates a new dynamic in schools. Parents who feel powerless in the rapidly shifting ground under their feet, the constant tremors and minor earthquakes that characterize the rate of change we’re all experiencing, will try to find some corner of control and power and teachers are feeling that today. It helps to understand why and re-direct the conversation. This formula—High Predicability, Low Anxiety. Low Predictability, High Anxiety— also helps to understand the epidemic return to Fundamentalism, the nostalgia for former times, the fantasies of the Tea Party and more. It times of great change and low predictably, we naturally want to cling to something that appears solid, no matter how false that perception is.

And here’s the good news. If we can meet the challenge of the unknown, we will have stumbled into the Buddhist truth of impermanence and have the possibility of re-arranging our lives to meet it. Alan Watts wrote a while back about “The Wisdom of Insecurity,” advising us from a Zen perspective to go with the flow of the unknown by being more wholly in the present and training ourselves to respond intelligently and compassionately with each new situation. “Low predictability” is actually the state of mind of the artist at the mercy of the Muse—all creative acts carry a quality of unpredictability. But ironically, the best way to meet that is a habitual practice routine that is dependable and ritual-like in its predictable practice.

As always, an interesting conversation that’s just beginning with no time to finish. I have to go pee and it’s going to take me a while to deal with these buttons.

I Won!

“I don’t like winning,” said the 5-year old at the end of my class. If the U.S. was a religion, that would be blasphemy. As it stands, it could be grounds for treason and I kept my eyes peeled for a visit from Homeland Security. Despite the plea from Jimmy Stewart in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” to put neighborhood, community and fellow feeling above all, let’s face it—it’s a sentiment that lasts a couple of days around Christmas and then it’s back to the cutthroat game of winners and losers.

I keep score in basketball, play volleyball with a net and get an annual thrill from the Super Bowl or World Series. I play to win in Boggle, Hearts and Solitaire and to this day, feel a childlike (or is it childish?) excitement in shooting the moon or shooting a winning basket. And a comparable annoyance when I lose. Winning and losing in sports and games is indelibly stamped on my character and I accept that. (Though even here, things can shift—my new definition of winning the Staff-8^th grade basketball game is that I can walk away when it’s over!)

But now everything seems to be a competition with winners and losers. The joyful communal experiences of singing, dancing, cooking and learning in school together is reduced to American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, Race to the Top. Politics has never been more about the winning team and never been less about how to work side-by-side to create a working democracy and healthy culture. Schools have always leaned too heavily to the honor roll and not considered enough as to how each child can learn and contribute, but now whole schools can lose funds if their students fail the tests based on the lie of “no child left behind.” The pressure on children to achieve, the stress to not be called a loser, the anxiety of measuring up to someone else’s standard, has never been more present and never more harmful. It’s a toxic culture that infects everything it touches.

So when my 5-year old students wanted to know if it was a winning game we were playing and a few commented as the little boy above did, they were mirroring a parent culture trying to counter-balance our obsession with winning. “If winning and losing causes harm, “ the reasoning goes, “let’s eliminate games and structures that have winners and losers.”

But I have another point of view. In-between “winning is everything” and “let’s take the net down” there is a third alternative. The little game I was playing is one of several models for it, as follows:

Kids in partners held hands facing each other and walked away to the beat while reciting “Roses are red. Violets are blue. Sugar is sweet…” On the final phrase—“and so are you!” they had to run back together, hold hands and freeze. The point was to arrive on time and feel the relationship between time, space and energy.

The second level was starting back to back and not looking to see where their partner was until the last phrase— a bit more challenging. Then to add just the right dose of “volleyball with a net” tension, the new rule was that those who didn’t get back in time were “out.”

Pay attention here, because this is my punch line. It’s good to have winning and losing games to heighten attention, increase motivation (for some) and add just the right dose of excitement. But the question we must ask is, “What becomes of the losers?” In the deadly serious and poorly thought-out game of so much in the culture, the answer is often “Prison.” California, a state that for years now has spent more money on prisons than schools, is an experienced player of that game. But in the new thinking, we offer another choice for the “losers” (or better stated, “those who get out”)— to play part of the poem on some instruments off to the side.

The moment I explain that, you can see the wheels turning in the kids’ minds. “Hmm. Should I get out on purpose so I can play that big drum first?” This is Shakespearean drama! In my experience, kids mostly want to “win” the movement game, but immediately are quite happy to get to play the instruments. And of course, we then play again to give everyone another chance and see if they've developed their strategies better.

So when another child asked me at the end of class, “Who won?” I replied: “If you got to play an instrument, you won. If you were the last one out, you won. If you enjoyed the class, you won.” And I might have gone on. “If you learned something in class, if you made a nice contact with a partner, if you improved your triangle technique, if you were happy when the class was over, etc.” And he looked at me and smiled, "I won!" 

It’s a big topic and I have 20 more pages of comments, but right now I need to go kick some major butt in Solitaire.

The Culture-Makers

I’ve been going to Orff workshops for some 35 years now. You would think I would have finally learned what it takes to be an Orff teacher. But it’s not just because I’m a slow learner. The fact is, I’ve chosen a path with no final destination, simply increased awareness and a growing ability to respond to whatever I may encounter in the next step. In this Pedagogy of the Imagination, there is no recognizable border to cross to let you know you’ve arrived.

And so I gather with some 50 to 80 colleagues three times a year for the local Orff chapter’s Saturday workshop. Most teachers are motivated to come and gather material for Monday’s class, some are looking for the next dynamic idea of how to teach well, a few hope to improve their skill or technique in a particular aspect of musicianship and there are a few diehard enthusiasts who have retired or moved on to other things, but enjoy attending just to reaffirm community and remember the profound pleasure of playing, singing and dancing with fellow folks who have become friends.

As joyful as these trainings tend to be, there inevitably comes the moment when you chat with a participant and hear the old story, “Well, it’s great to be here, but I don’t know if I’ll have a job next Fall.” Ever since Proposition 13 all those decades back, music jobs in California have been on the chopping block and the steady schedule of beheadings makes the French Revolution seem tame. Music education is one of the few jobs where your job description includes “Be prepared to defend your chosen field and advocate tirelessly.” I don’t believe dentists feel compelled to convince, “It really is a good idea to take care of your cavities!” or doctors to plead, “Please let me help you with your life-threatening illness!” or first-grade teachers inquire, “Do you mind if I teach your child to read? Can I keep my job long enough to do so?” But somehow music teachers are constantly on the defensive, if not for their own survival, then also for the possibility that the bureaucrats might have an inkling of an understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish here.

Earlier this week, my wife went to a talk by Lois Hetland on Arts-Advocacy. She reported that Ms. Hetland spoke about how the old way for arts advocacy was to show how it boosted “academic” performance (as if the arts were another beast entirely from academics). The problem, she noted, was that no research had actually been done to support this. So current arts advocacy tends to downplay that angle.

I say Hooray. Never a big fan of the Mozart Effect, I felt demeaned that my professions existed merely to boost someone else’s chosen field. In New South Wales, Australia, music teachers are called RFF’s—Relief from Face-to-Face. In effect, instead of carriers of one of humanity’s most inspiring traditions, they are glorified babysitters, relieving the classroom teacher from face-to-face contact with students. Imagine having your profession defined so negatively. Even baby-sitters have a description of an actual activity.

The new tack that Ms. Hetland suggested was simply that students unexposed to the arts and merely checking off boxes on someone else’s multiple-choice test grow up to be deadly boring adults. The culture needs more. The culture deserves more. And as Daniel Pink often points out, the corporations demand more as well. And that last point has certainly attracted attention in our monied and achievement-oriented society.

My thought that has been hatching for decades but is in its infancy of clear articulation is that what really makes a school tick is its culture. Not its rules or test-scores or trophies or faculty with initials after their names. When I walk into a school, I can feel in five minutes what kind of culture is afoot. Is there student art work on the walls? Student poetry or stories on the bulletin board? Music coming out of classrooms? Children happily playing inside and out? An atmosphere of ease and excitement and fervor? A  buzz and a bubbly feeling? Kids with dirty hands? Might a group of teachers, after 20 minutes of a spirited Spanish singing time, spontaneously get in a circle after the kids leave and keep singing and playing drums and bells and calling each other into the middle of the dancing ring with the kids looking in at the window? (This happened at my school last Friday.)

When it comes to achievement and results measured by computers and children catalogued as numbers and ranked by letters, it’s no wonder that art and arts teachers are low on the list and easily expendable by a vote at the School Board meeting. But when it comes to culture, the thing that makes both kids and teachers eager to get up in the morning and travel to the edge of their imagination and find out just how wide the heart can open without bursting from joy, we arts teachers are at the forefront.

We artists are the culture-makers. Every institution is by-default a culture, which can be defined as the sum total of the daily small and big decisions a group of people make that reveals what they value. But to be a conscious culture, “celebrating and nurturing the imaginative, intellectual and humanitarian promise of each student within the circle of community” (a version of my school’s mission statement) is another achievement altogether. The arts give body to the lip-service, give muscle and bone and breath and through ritual, celebration, scientific inquiry and experimentation, poetry, stories, music, dance, art, drama, gardening, children’s games and more, make each day at school a wondrous participation in the mystery and magic that the world offers us.

How can we endure a single day of anything less?

The Peanut-Table Legacy

Last night, I felt deep nostalgia for the 70’s. The catalyst was the excellent play, Humor Abuse, the story of a boy growing up in the San Francisco Pickle Family Circus. (Local folks, get your tickets fast—ends Feb. 5^th!) The Pickle Family Circus was one-of-a-kind, a departure from the Barnum & Bailey variety that paved the way for future “alternative” circuses (most notably Cirque du Soleil). It featured a great band (at one time including Body Musician Keith Terry) and clowns Geoff Hoyle, Bill Irwin and founder Larry Pisoni (the subject of the above play) who took clowning to a high exalted level of physical comedy far beyond (but not excluding) squirting flowers. It was run as a collective and often raised money for other causes (day care centers, health clinics).

That got me thinking about other similar ventures in the SF Bay Area of the 70’s, artistic and otherwise. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Center for World Music, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, the Oberlin Dance Collective, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Art Lande’s Rubisa Patrol and La Bomba Jazz School, Cazadero Music Camp, the SF Zen Center, the Community Food Stores. All shared in common the spirit of some form of collective leadership, some on-the-edge thinking seeking to break through the too-narrow boundaries of mainstream American culture, permission to imagine and create in a culture of collaboration. Nobody made much money and nobody needed much money to survive—this was the time of affordable rents (like my ocean-view upper Haight place that I shared with my sister and husband for $45 each per month), food stamps, CETA and California Arts Council grants. They were glorious times. We lived on vision, on possibility, on brown rice and vegetables.

Another place that grew to adulthood in the 70’s was The San Francisco School where I started working in 1975. With an administration consisting of two people and a parent at the front desk, we built a culture that served the inmost needs of children—and the teachers as well. Who wouldn’t want to work in a place where you were entrusted to follow your passion within the boundaries of making sure kids could read, write and do simple arithmetic? A place where we could bring our dog to work, play Sardines at staff retreats, have an evening brandy at the camping trip after we had sung the kids to sleep? A place where we dodged the health-inspectors, ignored the standardized tests, kept the gates unlocked, but closed to anything that ran contrary to our stated and unstated (but deeply felt) values. Most importantly, a place where we gathered weekly around the homemade peanut-shaped table for the staff meeting and collectively made the decisions that would shape the school as we came to know it.

Now that world, both in the school, San Francisco and the world at large, has changed enormously, as change it must. And some for the better. Heck, we children of the 60’s and 70’s were kids, sure that we could do better than our parents and in many ways we did— changed prevailing notions about race, gender, war, diet, exercise and beyond. But we were kids making it up as we went along and with the freedom and exhilaration of that vision came all the dead-ends, weird notions, naiveté, as well as the usual squabbles and conflicts that are part and parcel of any human gatherings.

But now at my school and in institutions of all sorts, the gates are locked with video cameras and yet the toxic ideas of mainstream culture are coming through, sometimes even invited and welcomed in by a new generation of leaders who seem short on vision and long on law. The culture of litigation has its stranglehold on us all, skyrocketing rents and mortgages has cut out the young folks’ period of experimentation and market research is replacing innermost conviction that we’re on the right path.

"I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows, superior for doors," wrote Emily Dickinson and I’m grateful to have lived through that 70’s world of possibility. And I can’t help but feel a touch of sadness for my young teacher colleagues at school. They are bright, imaginative and ripe to stamp the school with their own imprint and character the way my generation did. And left alone in their classrooms, I believe they are doing that with the children they teach.

But what’s missing for them is the peanut-table. They are mostly having to respond to directives from an administration that has grown 10 times larger and is gathering ideas from Conferences or corporate structures far away from the children. What’s missing for them is the glorious—and yes, at times tedious and agonizing— gathering around the table each week to build a living, breathing culture collectively.

But I am ever hopeful, for them and for us all. The halls are starting to buzz with long-needed conversation and some of these young teachers are on the front lines. And outside the gates, there are other kinds of Renaissance signs, some descendants of our work in the 70’s, some new directions—community gardens, farmer’s markets, a burgeoning world music culture, a more inclusive and responsible hip-hop culture, full zendos at the SF Zen Center, corporations loosening up the old hierarchies (like Google) and beyond.

And when someone builds a new peanut-table at our school, then I can rest easy that all will be well. 

No Whining!

There is an old Zen story about a woman who had suffered a loss and went to the Buddha for help. “Please relieve me of my suffering.” “Easily done,” said the Buddha. “Just bring me a person who hasn’t suffered a loss.” The woman went from door to door but couldn’t find anyone who hadn’t had a similar experience. She returned to the Buddha ready to hear the first Buddhist precept, “Life is suffering.”

I think the same could be said of people who have been disappointed or betrayed. We all have our stories. We’ve been treated unfairly in our work. Or spoken out in an unjust situation with the backing of our colleagues at the water-cooler only to find ourselves alone on the front lines in the meeting. Or suffered the barbs of a narrow-minded newspaper critic. Or were at the wrong end of a smear campaign. Or generally felt that the world missed the opportunity to recognize our genius. All the myriad ways we expect life to be fair and people to be kind and just and all the ways they disappoint us, misunderstand us, reject us. And no matter how strong and clear we feel in our inner core, all the ways we begin to wonder if they were right. As Yeats so brilliantly puts it in A Dialogue of Self and Soul:

“How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?”

I found myself telling my old war stories to my host in New York this weekend and though each story was at least mildly entertaining and had a larger point and punch line, it seems that other people’s stories are interesting only up to a point. And after I had gone through my list of the Institutions who had failed me (leaving out my high school pole vaulting story), I couldn’t help but wonder if I had passed that point with my host and started to come off as one of those angry, bitter old people. For no matter how detached or removed I think I am, telling the story to shed light on the workings of political power, the glory and necessity of resistance, the grist that betrayal provides the mill of growing one’s Soul, I’m sure there is an element of whining that creeps in. Our emotional memory is such that each re-telling of the story kicks in the same visceral physical reactions, brain patterns and heart responses that were present at the event itself. We literally hurt ourselves all over again when we call up those patterns in each re-telling. The whine creeps in. And nobody likes to hear someone whine, whether you’re 2, 42, or 82.

So I’m making a public vow by proclaiming February my personal “no whining” month. (It was timely that this thought came when it did, at the beginning of the shortest month!) And I in no way want to imply anything for Black History Month, though perhaps that is timely also. Along with Native Americans, ain’t no group of people in this country more entitled to whine than black folks. But whether a person or a group, whining only goes so far and then, as a friend of mine always quips, “build a bridge”—ie, get over it. Well, that can be too simplistic. More like go through it and come out the other end with dignity intact, love increased, determination renewed and the story re-told in a new frame.

No matter how much we hate to think it at the time of betrayal, we ultimately must thank everyone who did us wrong. A quick look back at our life often reveals that the door they slammed in our face turned us towards another necessary opening in our life that proved essential. On some level, such people in our life are appointed by our invisible helpers to see just how serious we are. They’re the gatekeepers of the Soul, providing the resistance that gives us strength if we accept the trial. Constant praise, affirmation, loving pats on the back can make us lazy and flabby from too much comfort.

I remember that old Greek myth from my childhood, where Hercules wrestles Antaeus, the son of Gaia (Mother Earth). Everytime he threw Antaeus to the ground, he sprung up stronger, renewed by contact with his Mother Earth. Hercules eventually won by holding him up in the air, something akin to a life of constant praise to the adoring crowds. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

 So my February challenge is to tell the story as needed without a whining me in the center. Wish me luck. Pleeeeeeaaassse?