Ten Trains to Tranquility

It seemed like a simple plan. I had a day free and discovered that the famous Buddha statue in Kamakura was a hop, skip and jump from Yokohama where I was staying. I remember photos of this giant Buddha from the World Atlas of my childhood—time to get out of the workshop mode and put on the tourist hat.

So I got the step-by-step directions— hop on this train, then skip to that train, then jump on this train and there you are. Down in the hotel lobby, I met an American teacher from Maui/Massachusetts who had come to the workshop in Japan with her Sri Lankan husband who she met in Dubai and they now worked together at a school in Hanoi, Vietnam. (Are you following this? The modern couple of today’s world!) Nervous about negotiating the directions alone, I enticed them to join me and off we went, confident in our ability to decipher the greater Tokyo area subway system. Need I report that we were wrong?

But thanks to this incredible culture of politeness and sincere interest in helping I’m finding in Japan, we survived the wrong-stop exit (at Kita-Kamakura, delicious words to say fast) and other minor confusions to finally arrive, quite a bit later than the promised “oh, it’s just twenty minutes away…” We paid the admission fee, entered through the gate and stepped around the corner and there he was, the same Buddha statue as the one that keeps me company in my San Francisco morning zazen. Only a few hundred times larger.

Truth be told, not quite as large as I imagined. But still impressive. And, by the way, upon closer inspection, sporting a mustache. (Really? I’m going to look more closely at my SF Buddha when I get home.) We walked around to view him from all angles and also went inside of him. (Some future poem “In the Body of the Buddha” is begging to be written here.) While my friends checked out the store, I sat off to the side in the garden savoring a cool green tea ice cream and feeling the tranquility of a summer’s day amplified by Buddha’s blessing. Life was sweet.

But Buddha forbid that I have the time to savor it! I had arranged to meet my Tokyo host at 3:00 pm at the Shibuya Station in Tokyo— without (gasp!) a cell phone!!! Which meant aiming for the 2:15 train near my hotel back in Yokohama. So at 12:30, I bid goodbye to my friends and my ten minutes of tranquility to begin the return trip, once again falsely confident that it would be easy to retrace my steps.

I don’t know where I went wrong. Well, yes, I got off one stop too early one time and lost ten minutes waiting for the next train to get back on again, but still something weird happened down the line and I ended up in a new neighborhood of Yokohama. At 2:20. Stressing with each ticking minute and coming up with Plans B, C, D, ending with emigrating to Japan. A tourist office directed me to a bus and I finally got to my hotel to pick up my bags. Rushed to the train, miraculously found the right one and got off at the right stop only fifteen minutes late and miraculously again, amidst the thousands of streaming travelers, found her waiting at the end of the platform.

So my free day in Japan found me a troubled tense tourist buying ten train tickets to take a trip to ten minutes of tranquility before traveling to Tokyo. (Say that five times fast). On that last train ride, I couldn’t help but wish that Buddha was sitting next to me. I just wanted to see how he would have handled it. It’s all well and good to recommend non-attachment and sink into the blissful oneness of the cosmos when you’re living in the forest in ancient India, but not so easy when you’re late for appointments in a confusing, fast-paced modern world. Would Buddha have been stressed? How would he do in rush hour on the freeway on his way to sign a deal publishing his memoirs?

And then that got me thinking how I’d like to hang out with Jesus on Wall Street to see how he would deal with that. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Moses is arguing with the fire marshall about fining him for not being up to code in the burning bush incident. I wonder if Krishna in today’s modern world would still be dancing around with the milkmaids playing his flute or working in some cramped IT office in Bangalore. Let’s face it—the modern world is not set up for tranquil meditation, ecstatic revelation or carefree dancing with milkmaids.

And yet, that’s exactly my main job. Only I have to take all these trains to get there. Tomorrow, in fact. 

What to Expect from Music

It has been said often and more eloquently than I can manage: “Music washes away the dust of this world.” It brings us to a place where every tone gifts us with meaning and brings the chaos of the world into order. When well-rendered, music stops the clock and puts us into soul-time, where life and death are points on the same line that rise and fall and move inexorably to an at once regretful and welcomed cadence. For as long as the music is playing, we are lifted out of our small selves and brought into the grand circle of Creation. We each may have our private corner of the imagination where the rhythms and tones lead us to steal a secret kiss, but we also are connected to our neighbors in ways closed to us stuck in freeway traffic. All the tired words of love, peace, harmony shine brightly again as fresh as when they were first conceived on our tongues. The burdens we wearily shoulder each day are set down and for as long as the horn is blowing, the violin bowing and the music is flowing, we are free.

And then the music ends and the lights come up. We head toward the aisles in the afterglow of it all, the sounds echoing in our ears as we merge into the contented hum of the crowd, different people than when we walked in. Refreshed. Transformed. Ready to renew our vows to be better people, to be kinder to each other, to spend more time with beauty. But the maddening fact is that those echoes fade, the transformation doesn’t stick and by the time we’re in the parking garage, we’re already cursing at the guy who cut in front of us. Like other inspired moments when the borders of skin and self dissolve—a deep Zen meditation, good lovemaking, a sunset over the lake—we can only take a short dip in the pond of immortality. As much as we’d love to linger in the soothing waters, the world is set up to push us out onto land, out of the bliss of the womb into the messy, bloody world. Time and time again, expelled from the Garden and tasting anew the knowledge of good and evil, self and other, joy and grief, belonging and exile.

I just finished, for the second time, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, an extraordinary tale of music’s power to transform in the most trying of times. The entire book is the shifting conversation between beauty and terror and for most of the story, music and the love it awakens keeps gaining ground. As a music teacher, I of course love this and constantly speak my hope that music has the capacity to overcome our ignorance, violence and greed. But in the battle between our gods and our devils, the latter have the machinery and the guns. Ms. Patchett's story and the daily news suggest that I’ve been a trifle naïve, time and again overestimating music’s power. 

Or to re-phrase it. Why put all of the world’s woes on music’s shoulders, however large they may appear to be? Why expect it to reach into every corner of human possibility and weirdness and solve everything? Isn’t it enough that it speaks our joy when we’re happy and consoles us in our grief? Maybe I need to lower the bar a bit, be grateful for what we know music can do instead of be disappointed that it can’t do yet more. Years back, in the middle of a six-month grieving process for my dying father, I wrote a poem about this very theme. And so to end, I include it here.

LISTENING TO THE BARCAROLLE FROM THE TALES OF HOFFMAN

Driving home from the Marin hospital.

Another day of coaxing my father back to life after heart surgery,

worrying about my too-young friend edging closer to her death.

My back in pain and a three-week sickness that won’t let go.

My mind is fixed on the great matters of birth and death when the city

comes into view, shining in full resplendence in the light of dusk.

On the car speakers, two repeated notes tentatively announce the beginning

of something worth attending to,

answered by the strings, who charge that little bird song with confidence.

Flutes and oboes and more strings join the chorus, swelling

and then settling for just a breath,

when the first voice enters,

rising over it all with the majesty of a lone eagle over a twilight sea.

my spine begins to tingle.

When the second voice joins,

I am lifted out of my mortal body, released from all the persistent pain, the gravity of

grief and the soul’s sorrow.

I am soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge,

weightless,

free.

The music  lasts for four minutes and one second.

And I think:

This is all the immortality we will ever get.

And all we will ever need.

44 More Years

I sat zazen in Japan this morning. For you handful of non-Buddhist out there, zazen is the Japanese word for Zen meditation, a practice that began in India a couple of millennia ago, traveled to China and came to Japan to develop into the form of Buddhism I’ve been practicing in one form or another for almost 40 years. So there was a satisfying kind of looped circle to be sitting half-lotus following my breath here in Yokohama and doing what I can to manifest my teacher’s question: “How can I disappear in love?”

My teacher is Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who left his monastery near Kyoto when he was my age—61— to travel to a new country whose language he didn’t speak (and still doesn’t) to help water the seed of Buddhism in Los Angeles, California. His first Zen meditation hall was in someone’s garage with a handful of students and five or so years later, they bought an old Boy Scout Camp atop Mt. Baldy overlooking Claremont, the place I went when I did my first Zen retreat in 1973. It’s still going on, with satellite centers in L.A., New Mexico, Sonoma County and other places. Up until recently when he was taken ill, the Roshi was still teaching—at 105 years old!

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” There’s another kind of Zen question and mirrors aside, I feel healthier, more fit and more accomplished than I ever have before, truly at the top of my game when it comes to Orff workshops (and also jazz piano). But more times than is healthy for me, I find myself counting the years left of doing this work and don’t like the math. I don’t know any Orff teachers in their 80’s still teaching workshops and summer courses, only a handful in their 70’s, perhaps ten to twenty in their 60’s. If I think I just have ten or fifteen years left to live this kind of life, it feels too short. When I accept work for 2014, I start calculating my age. Aargh!

But if I think of my Roshi, I feel a lot better. Following his model, I have 44 more years of chanting “Criss cross applesauce” with grown adults, bringing the room alive with motion with some hot Steppin’ body percussion patterns or bringing it to a hush with “Rain Rain Go Away” sung and played on Orff instruments. That feels better.

And so after a hearty zazen, I pack up my recorder and set off for the first day of the rest of my life giving Orff workshops, taking the next step in my own strange path to disappearing in love.

Back in the Armchair

If I were reading my own travel blog, I might be a little miffed. The title has lured me to settle in the easy chair and vicariously see a bit of the world without the hassle of delayed planes and missing hotel reservations and slow elevators and failed Internet connections and instead I’m reading about yet another music class of joyous interplay that surely will bring World Peace where all else has failed. Who cares? I want to hear about whether the Great Wall is really so great (it is) and is it really true that a small plate of cold buckwheat noodles and a few shrimp tempura in Japan can cost $25? (It can, but great news in Japan—no tip!!!).

I want a photo of a thousand bicycles on the Beijing Streets (sorry! 10 year too late—the government pushed for cars and cars it is). Did you really have noodles and vegetables for breakfast each morning at the hotel? (I did). Did you learn any Chinese? (I worked on a short poem and watched my brain do an intensive internal Google search for any sound that was close to the one I just heard and come up empty—and that’s why everyone laughed at what came out of my mouth.). Do you really believe your theory that laughing hysterically with friends at people you know in common who aren’t in the room helps alleviate jet lag? (Still testing this one, but it seemed to.)

What’s the most interesting part of the Temple of Heaven? (Got there close to closing, but was able to test out the Echo Wall, a kind of St. Paul’s Cathedral circular outdoor wall where you can say something on end of the circle and your friend can hear your voice emerge from the wall on the other side. Actually, with everyone shouting, it was hard to hear, but it worked better when we played recorders.) Did you go to the Forbidden City? (Wasn’t allowed. Ha ha! No, I went six years ago and the scale and grandeur of it all was quite remarkable.)

I heard a rumor about Japanese toilets with knobs on the side for spray and bidet. (Yep. Got one in my hotel, but damn if I’m going to test it out.) Why was the background music Mozart piano in a traditional sushi restaurant? (See my Julia Roberts blog). Is it true that some idiot in the newspaper the flight attendant handed you thinks Romney won the debate? (Sigh.) Is it true that if you keep writing to make me happier in my armchair that you’ll run out of time to prepare tomorrow’s class?

Yes.

Bye!

Julia Roberts and Chinese Opera

I’m walking through the fancy Olympic-built Beijing airport and Julia Roberts is smiling at me, enticing me to buy some fancy French perfume. Heading to the gate, Tchaikovsky is serenading me with The Nutcracker Suite. I can’t help but wonder why I don’t hear Chinese Opera playing in Chicago airport as I pass photos of Diana Xu, the current Ms. Universe contestant from China, selling me ginseng.

Of course, I don’t really wonder. I know enough of the ways of the world to know how those with the big shoulders of power and money take up more than their share of room. And interestingly enough, so much of it comes down to alphabetic literacy.

A decade or so ago, I had a private festival of reading about the advent of literacy in general and the Western phonetic alphabet in particular. Preface to Plato, Orality and Literacy, The Singer of Tales, A Is for Ox, The Spell of the Sensuous, The Gutenberg Galaxy are just some of the books I can recall without looking them up. The latter, written by Marshall McCluhan a half-century or so ago, touches directly on this matter:

•"The phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste… it creates  a sudden breach between the auditory and visual experience of man. Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word and magic and the web of kinship."

•"...from the invention of the alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses, of functions, of operations, of states emotional and political, as well as of tasks..."

• "Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike."

• "The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures...any society possesing the alphabet can translate any adjacent culture into its alphabetic mode. But this is a one-way process. No non-alphabetic culture can take over an alphabetic one; because the alphabet cannot be assimilated; it can only liquidate or reduce.”

Because my daily bread is buttered with “resonate words and tones and magic and forming a web of kinship,” these insights are of great interest to me. I work with—and take delight in— oral learners called preschoolers, get newspaper-reading screen-addicted adults to slap their bodies, vocalize grunts and make eye contact with their neighbors while dancing in body-beating bliss. I see how my music teacher tribe members are fighting, and often losing, a battle with the t-crossers and i-dotters who insist that we deal only in the coin of uniform units producing predictable results that can be measured by machines. The lineal sequences of efficient factories still dominate school cultures, the breaking up of every kind of experience into the fiction of school subjects run by clocks and timetables transforms the freedoms and freewheeling imaginations of childhood to the humdrum world of class schedules. I know—and have to accept as a trade-off for hotel reservations, running water and terrorism protection—that a man in a uniform in Passport Control has the power to make my life miserable if a single paper is missing, but I have no power or invitation to make his life joyful by teaching him some music.

Not that I entirely object to linear organization. (This particular blog entry certainly could use some.)
I think I’m finally over my naivete about local tribal culture steeped in oral tradition as the model par excellence for human culture. I still find much to recommend it, but when conservative traditions from clitorectomies to widow-burning continue unopposed because no one has encountered the kind of alternative viewpoints that reading can provide, it reveals that not only is the return to tribal culture impossible once Starbucks has moved in, but not wholly desirable. What is desirable, and what I aim for in my teaching and educational vision, is the personal and collective re-balancing of the senses, the kind of thing I touched on in a long-ago blog titled “Dance, Sing and Read.”

So I hoped this has helped the patient reader understand why they’re unlikely to encounter Chinese opera over the loudspeakers in Chicago Airport and why Julia Roberts is following me everywhere. 

Beyond Chop Suey

I came to Beijing once before in February of 2006. As expected, the Great Wall and Imperial Palace and other big tourist draws were indeed impressive, but the highlight was the food. It simply was extraordinary. Of course, living in San Francisco, I had moved far beyond the chop suey and chow mein of my 1950’s family dinners out at The Golden Lantern Restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But I never encountered food like this before and frankly, haven’t found it since. Until last night.

San Francisco venture capitalists, take note! If someone could open a restaurant serving anything close to what seems to be standard fare here, you could make your fortune. The first surprise is that vegetables or meat heaped on top of rice or noodles is rare. Instead, there are about 10 to 20 small plates of twenty different kinds of mushrooms each prepared differently, vegetables, tofu, tofu made to look like shrimp or chicken, actually shrimp, chicken, pork, etc. No rice, no noodles, just a Lazy Susan filled with these goodies and germaphobes, don’t be squeamish that your fellow diners reach for their little portions with the same chopsticks they eat with. Each dish distinct and each flavorful beyond a foodie’s wildest dreams.

I remember writing back in ’06 that I missed certain complexities in my amateur hearing of Chinese music, neither the thrilling polyrhythms of Africa nor the intricate polyphony of Bach. I concluded that each culture chooses where to place its genius and that having eaten in Ghana and visited my share of German restaurants, with all due respect, their cuisines are low on the side of complexity, nuance and variety. But these meals in Beijing—oh, my!

My suggestion? Go to a West African dance class, then on to rehearsal with the Bach choir and top it off with dinner at an authentic Chinese restauarant. That would be your entry into The Temple of Heaven. But until some SF entrepeneur figures it out, you’ll have to go to Beijing to do it. 

Be Your Longing

(Note to reader: I wrote this on October 1st and then four subsequent blogs, but due to internet blockage in China, they lay dormant on my computer. Now newly arrived in Tokyo, I send the first out into the world, to be followed soon by others. Did you miss me?)

Where do I belong? Perhaps everyone finds this question rising to the top of their daily doubts, but then again, perhaps not. Those born into a particular culture and ethnic identity and place where they will live their whole life, those who are assigned a particular niche in their society that they accept without question, those who inherit a craft or profession that has awaited them since childhood, may find this question puzzling. But for this world-traveling New Jerseyian transplanted to California, this Russian Jew by blood, Unitarian by upbringing, Buddhist by choice, this fickle fellow leaping back and forth between musician, writer, teacher, this musician drifting from Baroque organ to classical piano to jazz piano to Bulgarian bagpipe to Appalachian fake-banjo to xylophone traditions of the world and beyond, well, thatís a very real question. I once went to a day workshop with poet David Whyte about the theme of belonging and asked where such a person as myself might belong. "Perhaps at the crossroads of all those identities and disciplines," he answered, affirming exactly what I suspected.

So as I returned from a satisfying Calgary workshop last night and then went back to the airport the next morning for the 12-hour flight to China, I once again found myself a bit puzzled that I could feel at home in such strange circumstances, that getting back into the airplane seat felt like returning to my monkís cell to continue my devotions. Or at least bring me to the workshop site where the real prayers are sung. And grabbing a book to keep me company, I reached for John O'Donohu's Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom and found yet another affirmation. He writes:

"People frequently need to belong to an external system because they are afraid to belong to their own lives. If you soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging. If you hyphenate 'belonging', it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth: Be-Your-Longing."

Dang! Wish I had turned that etymological trick first! Just up my alley. But profound truth, at least for me. Belonging indeed means being your longing, finding the place where your soul can stretch its legs. And thatís exactly what itís doing, here in my Economy Plus seat that affords it ample room. When it comes to being true to my diverse longings, I have flown the requisite miles and earned the Gold Premium Card. And itís great! I get to check in faster, go through the quick security line and even hang out in the lounge with free snacks! Not to mention store up some points for a few free trips.

So here I am again, winging to China and Japan a year and a half after I flew to Korea and Japan and began this Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher blog. With no effort on my part, Iíve managed to stay true to the teaching, the traveling, the longingóand the blog itself. And what awaits me at the airport? Not the old exotic excitement of being thrown into an entirely different world, stepping out into the air to the buzz of taxis and rickshaws and hustlers surrounding me, driving past folks out on the street cooking around open fires or playing street music or leading their camels or elephants or what-have-you through a bustling marketplace. I know what Iím in for and itís a waste of energy to even complain. The familiar faces of some friends, everyone checking their cell-phones, the drive on the freeway past huge billboards of Julia Roberts selling perfume, into town with the big buildings and requisite McDonalds, KFCís, Starbucks, signs in both Chinese and English. Familiar all, with a slight twist and that certainly makes things easier for me on some levels.

The age of the foreign exotic is passing, homogenized by media and technology and maybe thatís not all bad. Now the excitement is joining hands in the workshop circle and find out what old things will be preserved, what new things will be created from the genuine needs of each place and time. Find out what happens when each of us reaches beyond our inherited ethnic identity to become our longing. For the people who come to the Orff workshop have been tapped by a particular desire and when we gather together, that individual journey of each soul joins into a collective force, not only to further our private journey, but to publicly pass it on to the children and help them start growing their dreams. Thatís about as close to the real purpose of this traveling music teacher as this blog has touched. May it continue!