The Peanut Butter and Jelly of Western Harmony

Rice and ____. Burgers and ____. Bread and _____. Milk and _____. Fish and ____ . “You’ve got 40 seconds to gets kids’ attention” is the prevailing wisdom and so began my 6^th grade music lesson on harmony. The kids were immediately hooked as they filled in the blanks with “Beans! Fries! Chips! Butter! Cookies!” At least most of them did. Some said “Vegetables. Buns, Roses. Coffee, Bananas (a SF School joke—it's the way I teach kids to take off the F and B bars on the xylophones).” Trained to honor divergent thinking, these answers were also accepted.

I went on:  “Batman and _____. Lilo and ______. Simon and _______. Abbot and _______.” And that’s when I lost them,  “???? !!!” was the collective look they gave me, their way of saying “Dude, is that some geezer trivia? “I didn’t dare go on to Laurel and _______, Burns and _______, Gilbert and _______, Rodgers and ________ (two answers here), Fred and ________. Never mind dip into history with Lewis and _______, Antony and ______” Isis and _____. (And, dear readers, how are you doing? Feel free to send in your answers via the comment section. Or offer more pairings of your own.)

Having slipped through the back door into the main theme of the lesson, their attention now turned to the two xylophones I brought out. While I played a C drone on the bass, a volunteer played each note of the scale several times. The group had to rate with their “thumb-o-meter” the relative compatibility of each note with the bass. C and G turned out to be as natural a mix as Peanut Butter and Jelly and E was as good match as Batman and Robin. A and F were interesting, but D and B seemed like they should never sit together in class with C. Just too much tension.

The idea of comparing relationships between notes as if they were compatible food groups or duo teams of people is an intriguing way to discuss Western harmony— more playful, more relevant, more real for kids then the usual dry and abstract rules. After that little exercise, I sang the song we were to learn while playing C in the bass. Early on the melody lands squarely on a B. It was clear that it didn’t fit with the bass. What to do?

“Change the B” is one logical answer, but the song is the song. We don’t get to change it anymore that we get to kick out Barry from the class just because he doesn’t get along with Cathy. So what if the chemistry between Barry and Cathy is a bit tense? Can’t be helped. But it turns out that Barry and George hit it off famously. So when the B comes in the melody, the bass note needs to change from C to G. Welcome to Western harmonic theory! From here, the relationships get as complex as a Shakespeare farce or the characters in Downton Abbey, but the cornerstone are the notes that get along with the I chord and those that prefer the V chord. (And lest you think it’s simple, the fact is that put an E and G in-between the C and B and things are suddenly hunky-dory— a perfectly compatible Major 7^th chord.)

With notes, there are some scientific laws of acoustics that do a reasonable job of explaining consanances and dissonances. (Though, as often happens, science falls short of explaining why Bulgarians might consider the interval of the 2^nd pleasing to the ear and the Germans prefer the 3^rd.) But how to explain the attractions between people, the chemistry of groups, the way some things please us and others disgust us? And why even bother to explain? We walk through this world in a tangled web of relationships, leaning toward this person or thing that brings us alive and avoiding that which shuts us down. And to make matters more complex, the ones we pledge undying love to, certain we have found our soul-mate, are a moving target. They change, we change, the times change, our needs change and suddenly the once-consonant chord doesn’t please us like it used to.

Now the 6th graders and I have a new vocabulary. "Hey, Tom! You're being a bit B to my C right now. Can you come up to C or at least drop down to G?"As good a classroom management tip as any. 

The Vernal Egg-quinox

Happy Spring! I know you’re looking for the perfect way to celebrate the Vernal Equinox (yes, it's today). Summer Solstice has big bonfires and all-night revelry, Winter Solstice some light-returning rituals and dances involving swords and antlers, but the Equinoxes tend to be minor holidays in comparison. What to do?

Try this. Take a raw egg and see if you can balance it on its end (the thicker one) on a table or other flat surface. (No cheating with salt!!) According to some urban legend or ancient wisdom, the forces are aligned so that in the short window of the equinox, such a trick is possible. I did in the school kitchen today four times in a row and two other people did as well.

Being a 21^st century researcher, of course I had to cross-check with Google. Sure enough, plenty of commentary, mostly skeptical. One said: "Apparently this derives from the notion that due to the sun's equidistant position between the poles of the earth at the time of the equinox, special gravitational forces apply." But then went on to question why it wouldn’t work at the autumnal equinox and then claimed (with photo “proof”) to have balanced an egg three weeks before the Equinox. And why eggs? Some suspicious connection with the Easter bunny (eggs?) and the Ascension (eggs?) and the whole convoluted history of ancient fertility rites hidden beneath the Christian overlays (yes, eggs). Add to that the claim that the Chinese (not traditionally Christians) first noted the raw egg balancing act and that there’s no obvious reason while equal nights and days would affect gravitational pull and there’s every reason to be suspicious.

But why let mere facts spoil all the fun? Gather the friends or family around the table and get to work on the egg-balancing contest. In any event, it’s a challenge to balance it and a thrill to succeed. Just the kind of pointless activity that I love. Try it!

What's Your Problem?

What do you do with those problems that won’t go away? I’m not talking about that difficult kid in your class, your 30-year-old child still living with you or your proverbial mother-in-law. I mean those parts of yourself that you thought you would eventually fix through therapy, meditation, Pilates or general maturation. The things that keep popping up in your face and taunting you with, “Ha! Fat chance! I’m here to stay!”

And so they are. Carl Jung wrote:

“The serious problems in life, however, are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly…"

Wise words indeed and the rest of the essay (titled “The Stages of Life”) is well worth reading. Years later, James Hillman, for many years the director of the Jung Insitute in Zurich and then the naughty bad boy of psychology for daring to keep the thinking moving beyond the accepted dogma, tackles the same subject (p. 181 Inter Views):

“Problems are secret blessings, not so much problems as emblems, like Renaissance emblemata showing a terrible impossible group of intertwined images that don’t make sense and yet are the motto, the coat of arms, the basic family raised to the dignity of an emblem which sustains…Problems sustain us—maybe that’s why they don’t go away. What would a life be without them? Complete tranquilized and loveless, too. There is a secret love hiding in each problem…”

This is comforting news when hit over the head yet again with the same doubts/hurts/ confusions you had when you were ten, twenty or fifty. I liked the idea of a Coat of Arms and began to try to draw and name my own in my secret language: The Cazadero Syndrome, The Pole Vault Announcement, The Faker Musician, The Mr. Nice Guy, The I-Should- Be-on- TED, and more, that “terrible impossible group of interwined images” that keep driving me crazy and send me into a spin of self-doubt and low self-esteem. I can modify them, move them from foreground to background, briefly accept them, imagine I’ve moved beyond them, but invariably they come back to haunt me. Ain’t no escape. Jung and Hillman are suggesting that’s just the way it is. And maybe even a good thing.

When all is said and done, it does appear that our particular problems are necessary to everything that is of value in the way we’re put together. Not to get overly confessional, but I can give one example. The Cazadero Syndrome refers to Cazadero Music Camp where I worked with kids for six glorious summers back in the ‘80’s. I loved it, it used a lot of what I had to offer, I felt part of the community and my classes with kids were fun and engaging. But I noticed that at the end of each session, when the buses were idling and the kids saying goodbye to their teachers, that virtually no one came personally to me to say goodbye. It’s not that they disliked me, just that I had connected to the group as a whole, but not made any deep personal connection with individual kids. All these years later, I still feel the shadow of the Cazadero Syndrome steal over me when it’s the last day of school and the middle schoolers are running around getting kids and teachers to sign their yearbooks. Suddenly I’m the boy in the corner and no one is asking me to dance. Do you hear the violins playing here?

So I have to admit that I’m more of a forest than a trees kind-of-guy, that I have good skills with moving whole groups, but don’t tend to hang out with individual kids and just shoot the breeze. It’s not quite “I love humanity, it’s just people I can’t stand,” but I tend to focus on the larger issues, a more abstract love and appreciation than talking baseball averages with a fan. And yes, I can try to do better and modify it and I have, but it takes an effort. Why? I don’t really get to ask or answer. My job is just keep it in the conversation and enjoy the forest even as I try to notice each tree just a little bit more.

So next time your own recurring problems plans a sneak attack, place it on your Coat of Arms and welcome it back. “So nice to see you again. Can’t say I missed you, but hey, here you are on my family crest, so I know you belong. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we?”

Start with Love

In my recent workshop for teachers, the discussion turned to children’s crying need for clear boundaries and useful structures. One participant told of receiving hate mail from parents because she used the word “rules” with the kids. Now there’s all sorts of reasons kids have trouble with boundaries, but the worst is New Age parents who are worried about restricting their children’s freedom to express themselves and consciously choose to raise their children accordingly.

“Yes, my dear, you can decide when to go to bed even though you’re only three-years old. Your body is wise and will tell you. “

“Honey, if you don’t feel like doing homework, it’s probably because your genius lies elsewhere. You go ahead and follow your bliss.”

And so on. Follow the ‘no rules’ to it’s logical extreme and you arrive at:

“Are you feeling confined by your seat belt? Okay, you can take it off.”

“Dear, I see your need to express your frustration about losing the game by hitting your brother over the head with the tennis racket.”

So we spoke about the need for the kinds of rules and structures that help us grow socially, emotionally, artistically and the need for us as adults to offer a loving strictness, especially to the children crying out for some form and guidance in their young lives. And it was then that my friend and colleague Sarah Noll told how she disciplines a child by beginning, “First of all, I love you. We are having this discussion because I love you and want to do everything I can to help you.”

Brilliant! Because ultimately every act of transgression is a failure of love. A child not loved enough by the parents, not loved by the culture, not loved by the school. A child having trouble loving him or herself and the way they’re put together. And though strict adherence to rules can keep the social glue together and protect children from each other and their own worst habits, that’s just a holding pattern for the real transformation, the one that can only come about from genuine love. Bad behavior can be—and often must be—contained by rules and holding kids accountable, but the only solution for the failure of love is the presence of love. Since the end of the matter is love, why not start with love as well?

Sounds clear and seems simple enough, but it is no small matter to tell someone you love them and mean it. You can’t get by with a smiley-face-have-a-nice-day-love and you can’t just say it casually with your voice only. You have to really mean it and say it like you mean it. And that takes a lot of work.

Thanks, Sarah, for the reminder. 

Snake in the Grass

Put a perfectly reasonable person in a school full of children after five days of rain and you have yourself a ripe candidate for membership in any fascist group that promises control of human behavior. Cattle prods, stun guns, solitary confinement, drugs, brainwashing through hours of TV—whatever it takes will be fine with you. Anything to control the exuberance of children who have missed their outdoor recesses.

It has been a rough week at school. The office bench of kids-sent-to-the-principal was standing room only and they had to wait until the fist-fight kids (a rarity in our school) had cooled down. Sixteen 8^th graders entered the music room with post-play-production-let-down and find-out-that-afternoon-what-high-school-accepted-them-syndrome on top of the constant rain and I immediately knew it was a bad idea to arm them with xylophone mallets. So instead we made a circle and I had them beat their own body with patterns that released energy, focused energy, made coherence out of their chaotic emotions and connected them to each other. It worked. At least briefly.

On top of this all, a large hanging light in the art room decided it was tired of being attached to the ceiling and came crashing down on a table where children would have been working except for the exquisite timing of falling down during a recess. A pigeon flew into the library and got twenty kids screaming at the top of their lungs. TGIF never had so much meaning!

A couple of lifetimes ago at school when I used to have recess duty, rainy days meant kids coming into the music room to play Snake in the Grass. One kid who is “it” had to slither around trying to tag the kids running around. There was a bit of screaming involved, at a decibel level that made Heavy Metal concerts seem like Easy Listening. I probably could make a good case for retroactive Workman’s Comp for the damage to my hearing, never mind my sanity.  When I saw clouds in the sky on my recess duty day, I immediately summoned every prayer traditon I knew of to spare me this torture.

In the midst of all this, it struck me that the whole edifice of human society is held together by such a thin thread. You pass the Montessori classroom and see forty kids sitting in complete silence eating their lunch, so calm and civilized. But you know that if one kid got set off in the wrong direction—as in a pigeon flying in the room— the others could follow like a flock of birds and things could get ugly quick. Forty screaming kids versus three powerless teachers. And then there’s the 8^th grade with their large bodies, complicated emotions and a teenage power (and in some schools, heavily armed with real weapons) and you got yourself another potential time-bomb waiting to go off. Add to the mix the whims of weather, earthquakes, viruses, accidents and it’s a wonder that we survive each day with our health and sanity relatively intact. When all runs smoothly, we take it for granted, but when the lights start to fall and pigeons fly in, we realize how fragile the whole show is. 

And so we humans have evolved all sorts of structures to contain the chaos. Some go the repression route, some encourage expression within the boundaries of form, some lean toward the fear, some lean toward the trust. But they all have the same hope— to give some shape and meaning to a life of rampant unpredictability and potential disaster.

As a trusting lilies-of-the-field kind of guy, I love to cavort barefoot through the wildflowered meadows and exult in the goodness of this life and the bounty of nature. But every once in a while, I am reminded that there are real snakes lying in the grass who wish me harm. So, my friends, step carefully, pay attention, walk through this world grateful for every moment of gifted life and hope that the snakes are dozing peacefully on the boulders. 

Opening the Doors of Perception

 Driving to school today, I noticed something I had never seen before. It was a planted island of cacti in the middle of the road—O’Shaughnessy, to be exact, right by Glen Park Recreation— separating the lanes of direction. Not a big revelation, except for this startling fact. I have driven back and forth on this road most every day for 9 months a year for 30 years. And this was the first time I noticed it.

Now, it’s possible that it was put in yesterday and equally possible that it has been there for 30 years. How would I know? Why did I notice it today? Well, partly because the traffic was backed up and I was going slower. And partly just because.

Our brain’s filter system is a survival mechanism, picking and choosing from the torrential downpour of sensory input. We are hardwired for discrimination, programmed to notice this above that— what we can eat, what wants to eat us, for starters. And then on to who might befriend us, who might betray us, who might we mate with, who might we wish to mate with, but ain’t never gonna happen. So it’s no surprise that a little garden of cacti in the road is low on my list as I’m reviewing my class plans driving to school or anticipating the dinner I’ll cook coming home. But still it astounds me that I noticed these plants for the first time. What other marvels await me if only I stop long enough to pay attention?

Blake said centuries ago that “if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”  Aldous Huxley used this quote in his book about his experiences with LSD and this was a popular book with my college crowd. Not that I had any experience with it personally—ahem!— but I “heard” that people often felt that the narrow doors of perception had been blown open and the world was instantly more magical than it seemed to appear. From that revelation, many of us were drawn to meditation and discovered that indeed, our capacities for attention and wonder could be opened wider and without any outwardly-chemically-induced-help.

The bottom line is that whether it be a cactus garden on the way to work, the crab apple tree blooming in the Arboretum, the hillside bright yellow with mustard, the world is patiently awaiting our attention. I believe that it is refreshed when we notice it and so are we. Today, the narrow chinks of our cavern are found on our hand-held devices that rob the world of our attention, to the detriment of all parties.

Next time you drive or bike or bus or walk to work, play a little game with yourself and see if you can notice something new that you’ve passed before but never noticed. And extra credit if you write a little poem about it. And just to be clear, I’m not recommending that you take LSD to help you notice.

Follow Your Bliss

22 years ago, inspired by the work of Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman and a growing “men’s movement,” one of the school parents invited eight men to begin meeting once every two weeks to investigate what it means to be a man. Most of us were ardent supporters of the feminist movement, but found out, like so many men in the country, that it wasn’t enough to get in touch with our feminine side. We needed a positive masculinity larger and more life-affirming than mere sports, beer-drinking, fixing things and macho bravado. We felt mostly estranged from our fathers and reserved our intimate thoughts for women, rarely feeling deep friendships with other men.

And so we began. After a few sessions of telling our life stories, we talked about our fathers. Bly lamented that the loss of working side-by-side with the father, a common practice before the Industrial Revolution, was the beginning of men’s isolation. Dad went off each day to the factory or office and came home exhausted, eager to put his feet up and read the newspaper. He was generally emotionally unavailable, didn’t attend to the details of child-raising and often just worked to bring home the bacon, rarely in love with the work he did each day. If we were lucky, we might catch him with a hobby that brought him more alive— building something in his workshop, painting pictures or playing music, hiking or camping. But as was the case with my own father, who had painted and composed music and even wrote some Ogden Nash-like poetry in his younger days, the 50’s corporate culture did little to support such passions and they often trickled out and atrophied. Meanwhile, the Moms often felt trapped in their own confining roles, dignified in their bearing of life and raising of children, but often feeling less than whole giving up the larger range of their possibilities—their love for science or their pre-marriage singing career or the thousand and one other things that can inspire the human heart.

Our men’s group has met faithfully for over two decades and last weekend we went on a retreat to discuss retirement. Four of the nine of us are “officially retired,” three more cutting back the workload and all of us thinking about it. One of the exercises we did was to make a wheel showing the things important to us and rating them from 1 to 5 (5 being the highest) as to how much we are paying attention to them. We then did another one showing how much we’d like to be attending to them. What struck me so forcefully was how close the two wheels tended to be— 4’s moved down to 3’s or up to 5’s, but it was rare to see a big leap. By and large, we were living the lives we had imagined. That was impressive.

Of course, throughout the 21 years, we’ve all had our fair share of death, divorce, depression and disaster and it is hubris to think we’re in control. The world has had its say in the matter and as we’ve sailed the stormy seas of a typical life, there have been days when the waves swelled and threatened to swallow us, when the rains soaked us, when the hot still days parched our tongue, when the choppy seas sent us reeling sick to the edge, when the sharks circled the boat with their menacing presence. But throughout it all, we’ve kept our hand on the tiller and our eye on the compass and did all in our power to navigate to the land of our dreams.

I imagine in many of our parent’s cases, much of the life they led might have been in the 1’s and 2’s and the life they had wished up in the 4’s and 5’s. The shift in generations came less from the increased commitment of individuals and more from a collective agreement that work and passion might be combined. Joseph Campbell described it as “following your bliss.” Amidst so much that we failed to accomplish, I think my generation can claim this welcome shift in attitude. My own daughters certainly picked up on it, carving their own lives from their interests, talents and aptitudes in faith that the money will come—or at least enough for food and shelter. And it has.

And so retirement for the men in the group has been—or promises to be—less the cessation of the burden of work and a time to play golf in Florida and more an opportunity to re-balance the mix of interests and passions, spend more time in the garden or travel or read or return to music or consult and volunteer in one’s field of expertise. Keep the hand on the tiller and steer into the hidden coves or linger in the harbor where once the relentless schedule kept driving one forward. Hard work, by the way, to have so many choices where once a job decided the balance by default. But worthy work.

I have more to say, but I gotta go to work.