Blogger's Block

Richard Wagner once said he composed music like a cow giving milk. Effortless. Not to compare myself to the composer of “Tristan and Isolde,” but generally I don’t have to search very hard for a daily blog theme. A catchy title appears, an insight surfaces, a weird perception jumps out from around the corner and I’m off. Almost all of the 750 + entries are first-drafts with a check for typos, written anywhere between ten and twenty minutes.

So now it’s been four days since I last wrote and nothing has appeared. I’ve had three days of long-distance biking (is the exercise draining the imagination?), made an interesting black rice/ black bean tortilla, loved the 5^th graders singing “When You’re Smilin’” with motions. Any could have inspired an entry. None did.

Today could have merited a “revolt of the machines” rant— my i-Pod battery dying, the printer suddenly not printing, the sound system at school failing. But another entry whining about technology promising us heaven and then changing its address every five minutes? I don’t think so.

Tomorrow is my Mom’s Memorial Service that begins with picking up daughter Kerala and granddaughter Zadie from the airport. Hoping to take them to school and having them join my three-year old music class, though I know full well it will both melt my heart to have Zadie there and break my heart that she will not be in my three-year old class next year! Portland’s just a bit too much of commute. Well, I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about another goodbye to Mom and Zadie is food for an entire winter of written reflections. So no need to begin now.

Then there’s the comedy of errors in that maddening world of bureaucracy. Set to work on Visas for the incoming Interns and suddenly, our sponsor from last year ran out of Visas and said the government is cutting back in general and re-vamping their Intern/ Trainee programs. If I was trying to invite some gun-runners into the U.S., well, no prob! But to sponsor a cultural and educational venture that brings intelligence and understanding to the world? Well, let’s throw up as many roadblocks as possible!!! We can’t let THAT happen!! Found an alternate sponsor in New York that looks promising, but now the tension of timing.

Need more material, Doug? How about trying to figure out the complicated Fox-Chicken-Corn transportation of getting Kerala and Zadie back home for a nap before the service with our one car and daughter Talia’s car. Had a plan and then Talia just called and said she went to her parked car to find the windshield smashed. Good timing! Oh, and I have to call Jury Duty. Everything was pointing to, “Tomorrow you must come in” but the gods in the heavens were probably laughing so hard they missed that opportunity and I got another day pass. Well, all this surely would be a blogworthy tale!

But mostly I’m trying to see if I can write something about having nothing to say. And lo and behold, I think I did it! 

Mother's Day

Okay, Hallmark, you win. On this occasion of my first Mother's Day without my mother's hand to hold and cheek to kiss, I'll mark the occasion with remembrance. Below is a poem I wrote three years ago and now that "soon we must" has come to pass. As I knew it someday would. If I was more techno-savvy, I'd include a recording of me playing this most beautiful jazz ballad. If you want the multi-media experience, find the tune yourself and play it while you read.

In the garden where you live, there is a statue

A mother leaning back with a baby boy up on her knee.

Such love between them, immortalized in shining metal.

And so do we feel sitting in the sunshine, pigeons pecking at our feet,

Your eyes closed letting the sun warm your bones.

Your hand in mine, blood still flowing in its 90-year old veins.

You are my loving mother and I am your Golden boy

You praise me and shower me with blessings that I don’t wholly deserve

but who can refuse such love?

Your words are for me as the sunlight for you

after so many days indoors.

Today, like so many days, I come to soothe you with music.

You sit by my side, eyes closed in a beatific smile,

your beautiful blue-veined hands singing what your voice cannot,

while out ring the notes from the old jazz standard

“Never Let Me Go.”

And now it’s the song we silently sing as we sit side-by-side in the sunlit garden

gazing out at the statue of a mother and her boy.

“Never Let Me Go”

knowing that soon we must.

Soon we must.

Background Check

I have seen the light. Yes, I admit I resisted the notion that all visitors of more than one day who entered our school community needed to get fingerprinted for a FBI background check. I was appalled by the notion that if the idea was the safety of the children in a crazed gun-toting world (where ironically, gun buyers don’t need a background check), then all visitors should be checked regardless of how long they will stay. And that would include prospective parents, UPS deliverers and your visiting grandma. There’s no sensible place to draw a line once you’re a card-carrying member of the Culture of Fear.

But now I’ve changed my mind. I think we can let the one-day visitors alone, but anyone who is going to be around the kids for a while and certainly any one who is an officially hired staff member of our school community must be fingerprinted. Because the kind of people we want to be around kids are those who recognize, pay heed to, converse with and purposefully nurture their native genius. For each of us is stamped with a unique genius that has never existed before and will never exist again. The fingerprint is a symbolic reminder of that unique individuality.

Only these people who are in conversation with their genius are capable of seeing the same in the children. And since education means to “draw forth and lead out,” the old understanding is that it is precisely this hidden genius that we are seeking to draw out. And that means that we should surround the children with people committed to living out their destiny, to being worthy of their fingerprints.

And then the background check. That means seeing what’s behind each person’s eccentricities and strange behavior and how it will be inextricably connected with their gifts. They may drive us crazy occasionally, but we want these people in our community. We want to check on the genius in their background and recognize its face. And though there may be strange aberrations, mostly genius is life-affirming and adding to the Soul of the World. It’s only dangerous to people and institutions that don’t like truth spoken— like the FBI, for example. So in my FBI check, anyone who doesn’t have an FBI record is under suspicion of being too timid and agreeing to damp down their voice so they don’t get in trouble. The Soul is always looking for trouble.

Mass culture wants obedience and ideological conformity and acceptance of dogma. All of which flies in the face of our unique individualities. So the “good citizen” is the one who sacrifices their possibility at the altar of comfort and conformity, while someone who follows their thread is dangerous because their consent can’t be easily manufactured and their consumer loyalty is not guaranteed. If they can think for themselves, they’re maddenly difficult to control and the whole game goes down.

In this last blog, I excerpted some phrases from a Rumi poem. Now I need some of those missing passages to make this clear:

The Power of Love came into me,

And I became fierce life a lion,

Then tender like the evening star.

He said, “You’re not mad enough.

You don’t belong in this house.”

I went wild and had to be tied up.

He said, “Still not wild enough

To stay with us!”

I broke through another layer

Into joyfulness.

He said, “It’s not enough.”

 Now that’s the kind of person I want as my boss! That's the kind of community I want to belong to!

Amazing!

Sometimes when I wheeled my Mom outside for fresh air, she would just look out at the world and exclaim, “Amazing!” Sometimes there’s simply nothing more to say. For no apparent reason whatsoever, I woke up this morning with that word on my lips. Grateful to have another chance to walk my way through whatever the day offered, to slog through my perpetual doubts, my disappointments, my skewed relationships, my failures— the whole catastrophe!— happy just to have the chance to do it all a bit better.

“I thank You God for most this amazing

day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes…”

So wrote the first poet (after Mother Goose) who captured my imagination, e. e. cummings, that lover of life (and women) who tried to diminish his ego and enlarge his participation by writing himself in small rather than capital letters. His next line was:

 “i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

  day of life and of love and of wings…”

Some 700 years earlier, the poet Rumi wrote:

“I was dead, then alive.

Weeping, then laughing.

The power of Love came into me…

He said, “You already have wings.

I cannot give you wings…

That I am part of the ploys

Of this game makes me

amazingly happy.”

“Dead, then alive,” “love,” “wings” and again, “amazing.” Was e.e.cummings a re-incarnation of Rumi? Did some buried part of him think as he wrote the above poem, “Hmm. I think I said this some time before.”

Amazing. I wonder if the word is connected with “maze,” the sense of being lost inside a confusing labyrinth of false paths and dead ends and then unexpectedly arriving at the prize in the center— or the doorway back out into the world. “Amazing grace… I once was lost, but now am found.”

It’s an auspicious beginning to the day here. On to school to clean up from last night’s elementary Spring Concert (an amazing event!), greet the Grandparents visiting today and prepare the songs for them to sing with their grandchildren (“These kids know 'The Sunnyside of the Street?' Amazing!”), watch a ballet dance performance from three alums, go sing with my friends at the Jewish Home and treat myself to a Friday night movie. The obvious choice?

The Amazing Spiderman 2, of course!!!

Over the Bar

“I gotta get tickets to this show! Do you think they’re sold out?” the first grader asked his teacher breathlessly after seeing the Middle School Spring Concert Rehearsal. He got it! Felt that unnamed energy in the air that speaks directly to the Soul— “This is something you need more of. “

And he was right. The show that evening was spectacular. A combination of practiced virtuosity, complex forms made to look simple, simple forms appearing complex and spontaneous moments of inspiration in front of 300 people.

It opened with our Thursday morning band playing in tune and with the musicianship built from years of body and voice first flowing out onto the instrument. 6^th grade followed with a sonic tour of the world, carrying the audience in musical vehicles from the Philippines to Iceland to Trinidad to Zimbabwe to Spain, leaving them in Celiz Cruz’s house in Cuba.

Out came the 7^th grade and now we’re riding up and down the musical staircases of Vivaldi’s exquisite architecture. Remarkable to see these kids who began playing two-note melodies seven years earlier playing with impressive technique steady runs of 8^th and 16^th notes, not a single note processed through reading symbols, but through direct sound and motion. And so these complicated shifting forms are not memorized from the eye, but remembered through the ear and as a result, there is a markedly different quality of musical presence and in-the-bones understanding. Note-reading, valuable as it is in certain contexts, is a sonic cheating that takes its toll when the written music is missing. Music learned and stored aurally in the nerve pathways, muscle memories and firing circuits of the brain makes for a kind of independent and listening musician impressive to behold—and be-hear! And so 7^th grade continued with Beethoven, a Venezuelan piece (with special guest Jackie Rago), a composition by Paco de Lucia and an impressive a capella arrangement by five girls. All expertly played by the kids and enthusiastically received by the audience.

And then came the large 8^th graders dressed in black. Opened with a hot Cannonball Adderly blues, on to George Shearing’s Lullaby of Birdland  and then a vocal duet that brought the house down— Baby It’s Cold Outside. The first group ended with a Brazilian choro piece, the second group began with an old composition of mine, a jazz calypso in 7/4. A slow Ornette Coleman blues featuring an opening stand-up bass solo, a dramatic Sunnyside of the Street  with inspired vocals and tap dancing and then a closing hot Latin number  Listen Here.  The kids were burnin’! And the audience felt it, astounded by what happens when a school commits to dynamic music education for every single child without exception from three years told to fourteen.

Some of these kids have been with me and my two colleagues for eleven years. We remember their first tentative exploration on an Orff instrument and witnessed their amazing jazz solo all those years later on the marimba (or saxophone or piano or flute or drum set or voice). Some began with music filling their whole bodies and souls from the beginning, some had to be slowly coaxed into the language of tones and motions. Some started with a good raw feeling, but needed years to connect it with practiced mastery. Some began with ease in pattern recognition and moved towards opening their hearts to the full body of tones. No matter what door they walked through to arrive in the house of music or which room they chose to decorate— everyone without exception can put the House of Music as a permanent address on their resumé.

Sadly, for some 8^th graders, that concert may be the last time they experience the joy of playing in a musical ensemble. From now on, it will not be granted to them as a matter of course from a high school committed to keeping musicality growing in each and every student. Now they will have to choose and hope that they can find a choice offered by the school that matches their way of loving and speaking music.

But if it was to be their last concert, they went out on the proverbial high note. They soared high over the bar of their collective musicianship, with the audience on both sides of the runway to witness and cheer them on as the planted the pole and cleared the bar, landing in the soft pillows of earned accomplishment.

Kudos to all!