The Mouths of Babes

I’ve never been of the camp that kids are smarter than us old-timers because they can navigate the new machines better and faster. Or that their opinions are automatically more relevant and interesting than what adults who have been a few times around the block have to offer. But their insights (and artwork and poetry and questions) can be fresh and intuitive and sometimes wise. Give them the relevant experience and ask the right question at the right time and their eloquence is often astounding.

And so I was delighted when a colleague of mine, Conway Chewning, teaching music at an international school in Budapest, had the thought to ask the kids what singing meant to them. These kids were 3^rd and 4^th graders, younger than my 8^th graders who I surveyed and shared in the post “Flavor in Food, Color in Nature.” But I couldn’t help but be struck by many similar observations, like the “peanut butter out of jelly” parallel to the title above and the “using a different part of the brain.” Makes me think about doing a book alternating kids quotes with my pedagogical/ philosophical/ scientific explanations of their right-on perceptions. (Feel free to survey your kids and send them to me! I’ll credit you, of course. And the kids if possible.)

Enjoy!

• When I sing I think, “This is myself, it is freedom.”

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• Music is important.  It’s candy for everyone’s ears. 

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·      • Music makes kids calm down, interact with each other and listen to other ways of communication.  Kids think with another part of their brain.  They enjoy it a lot.

·      • Music creates good imagination, calms the brain down and helps work at school.  Children enjoy it. It is a precious thing to them.  The world without music is nothing.

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       • Music doesn’t make people worry, it’s the only relaxing thing at school sometimes.  It’s fun to do and can make people happy.  It makes you feel good.

·      • Children love music and if music wouldn’t be then they would feel bad all day.

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• Music helps soothe a child’s active mind.

·       • Taking music out of school is like taking peanut butter out of the jelly.

• Imagine the world without music and no lovely music games.  The Earth dark and out of tune.

Hitchhiking Lessons

The generation above me had their war stories. Me, I got hitchhiking stories. I didn’t try to capture territory, I simply wanted to cross it, armed with nothing but our thumb. I didn’t want to conquer, but enjoy. I didn’t train to kill strangers, but to talk to them. It was a glorious way to travel. It promised the thrill of adventure and the constant encounter with the unknown. It was based on faith in the kindness of strangers, a faith that luckily held true for me. Some of its guiding mottoes:

• Be open to outcome, but not attached to outcome.

• The journey is not in the destination, but in the journey.

• Wherever you are, there you are.

• Be here now— and don’t worry about ‘getting there then.’  

Of course, it wasn’t all glorious. There were ten-hour waits for rides, standing out in rain or heat or snow, the constant roar of cars speeding by, getting dropped off in dubious neighborhoods, the ride who picked you up for company and conversation and all you wanted to do was sleep. But it was a memorable way to cross the country, which I did four times, to go north to Canada or south to San Diego, to get around England or France and see it with different eyes. And oh yeah— it was cheap!

Like any human activity, there was a certain art to it and one of my favorite tricks was to make eye contact with a driver and reel him or her in with my thumb, showing with my body language that they had started to pull over (they hadn’t) and starting to run for the ride as if they had. In that split nanosecond, the power of suggestion was sometimes enough to make them think that they had decided to pick me up when they hadn’t. And lo and behold, they pulled over!

I thought of this all as I prepared to call a bureaucratic agency that looked like it would refuse to offer a J-1 Visa to the five interns awaiting approval to be with our music department this Fall. I knew that ranting about the ignorance and stupidity of government bureaucracy was a dead end and that pleading for humanitarian gestures above and beyond the rules tended to close those closed hearts further. So I thought about the hitchhiking strategy. “It’s wonderful that you’re going to help us figure this out. I appreciate your enthusiasm about this program, so let’s put our heads together and see how we can do this.”

Fact is, you can be standing in the rain and someone with a spacious car who somehow knows you are no threat and in fact, a good person like a humble music teacher dedicated to bringing joy to the life of children, willing to even pay you good money for the ride and delight you with interesting conversation, that person in the spacious car not in a hurry to go anywhere, with ample room and no risk, can still pass you by without an ounce of remorse.

And so she did.

Perhaps my next Intern Program will be hitchhiking across the country with six music teachers, practicing recorder and body music and singing on the side of the road while we wait for our ride. No permits needed and a hella lot more fun.

My Life Flashed Before My Eyes

No, I didn’t have a near-death experience. I went to the Apple Store to solve a long-standing problem of getting all my digital photos from the last eight years on my computer. My guy was a pro at this and as he uncovered files deeply buried on an external hard drive and downloaded them to i-Photo, they flashed before my eyes in the process. Some 5,000 photos with a “Where’s Waldo?” theme. Spot the American in the photo with Orff teachers from Iceland, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Estonia, South Africa, India, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Philippines, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Canada and there, there and everywhere around the U.S. Spot the son, the husband, the father, the grandfather, the friend, the colleague. See a bit of what he saw— the flowers, the mountains, the sea, the streets, the houses, the neighborhoods, the churches, the temples, the Christs, the Buddhas, the musicians, the dancers, the Festivals. It was all flashing before me in a glorious panoply of the life I’ve lived since I bought a digital camera in 2006.

While I was waiting, I had my helper try to guess my work from the slides he was seeing. With a few hints from me, he arrived at traveler, teacher, musician. Fun! Fun silly game, fun that he guessed and fun that I’ve had the good fortune to live out and seamlessly combine those three identities. And a few more as well.

Seeing them all at the rate of four or five photos per second made me think of it as the modern hyper-slide show. No time to sit and ponder each image, just the combined effect of remembering your experience at high-speed, each photo releasing a hit of recognition and some hormone in the emotional system, but without the time to savor. Just as they say will happen in an accident— your life flashing before your eyes. With an extra bonus:

You get to close the computer and keep on living it!

Orff Detox Camp

For those who live in the SF Bay Area, run, don’t walk, to Dan Hoyle’s solo show at The

Marsh— Each and Every Thing. One doesn’t expect wisdom from a 33-year old, but because of the life Dan has lived, it radiates out from his center. He’s traveled around the world with the idea that everyone has a story worth hearing and he wants to hear it. Everyone. And so he hangs out with young Nigerian sniper assassins, Aryan Brotherhood survivalists in Nebraska, ghetto drug dealers in Chicago, amongst other characters and listens to the nightmares of their childhood and the dreams deferred or squashed down by a culture that doesn’t care. And then puts it together with his extraordinary skills in capturing their character with distinct physical postures and gestures, accent, phrasing, tempo of speech.

Without giving away too much, the show begins with the Nebraska and Chicago characters above and somewhere in the middle, takes a sharp left turn into the effects of electronic technologies on our lives. The whole culture of sensation addiction, falsely promised connection, robbing attention from the presence of God in “each and every thing.” And the weird need we’ve created that sent him to a “Digital Detox Camp” in Northern California. Apparently, it really exists and it’s a cross between the summer camps of my childhood and the way people have lived for some few hundred thousand years. You check in your appliances at the door, write in journals with a pen or pencil, read books made of paper, do art projects with three-dimensional objects, talk to your neighbors, sit and listen to birds and watch trees wave in the breeze, sing songs, cook meals— and you don’t get to take photos of any of it to send out on Instagram or share your art project on Facebook or discuss your Epiphanies on a blog.

So it made me think about retitling our summer Orff training and charging more money. Tucked away in the Hidden Valley Retreat Center in Carmel Valley, some 100 music teachers from around the world wake up to bird song, meander down to breakfast and sit and talk with each other. There is cell phone service, but without us banning them, people don’t tend to check their messages at meals. They sit and talk to the folks at the table and also sit at different tables each day. Then they go through a glorious day of singing, dancing and playing uninterrupted by beeping machines and because they share it with each other, no one seems to feel the need to Tweet it out there. And yes, in the evening folks will check e-mail or do their assignment on Sibelius instead of music manuscript paper and I’ll be writing my blog, but without being overly self-conscious about it, it does become a digital detox center of sorts.

Back in the turbulent late 60’s, with all the polarization between hippies, yippies, leftists, straight-arrowed American, I remember someone—perhaps Ken Kesey?—saying that the way to convert people to the cultural and political revolution was not through reasoned argument, but to show them that it was simply more fun to be “on the bus” then “off the bus.” (For those missing the cultural reference, see the book: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe). And so it's not enough to ban the machines (impossible anyway). We need to re-learn that it can be more interesting to talk to the person you just met at the café than to text your friends that you're at the café. And some cafés have become mini-Digi-Detox centers where cell phones and computers are prohibited. You walk in to a buzz of conversation and think, "Hey, this is more fun than the silent whir of machines!"

Much of our electronic addictions come from universal qualities of our psyche— that longing to belong, to be known, to share our pain and joy, to be “liked,” our old hunter’s brain kept alert by movement in the underbrush (read “flashing electronic images”). No one is immune from that, it’s too deeply wired (to borrow an electronic metaphor) in our system. But add to that a culture of isolation, a culture of fear, a culture of alienation from nature, an educational system turning out factory products instead of noting the particular genius of each student, and you got yourself an epidemic where folks walk the streets like zombies, heads-down buried in their machines. I note that Europeans have these devices as well, but in Spain, folks still talk around the table at three-hour dinners and more people walk the streets with their heads up. Off to Ghana in five days and I’ll be curious how this has affected folks there.

Dan suggests that a big part of “finding yourself” is “finding yourself in others” and that takes an effort to go beyond your like-minded folks stored on your phone or friended on Facebook. To this day, my most treasured experience was the three-months spent in Kerala, India hanging out with a Muslim woman, Catholic man and my Hindu drum teacher in a village unlike anyplace I had ever been before. That’s the real sorrow of our increasingly homogenized world. Walking into a Starbucks in Seoul, Sao Paolo, Salzburg or San Francisco, with everyone working on laptops or texting on cell phones, is a sure sign of the decline and fall of civility, connection and awakening to our promise.

I suspect a rise in Digital Detox Camps in the future— and someone making a lot of money off it! I just hope they hire me to be the Orff teacher there. 

RSVP to the Pity Party

How did Chopin and Rilke and other artists who were frequently ill do what they did?

One little muscle strain and I’m the host, guest and star attraction of my own pity party.

How quickly I pull out the “not fair!/ Why me?/ Gimme a break!” script and proclaim it over and over to me, myself and I. As a supposed Zen practitioner, I’m supposed to accept all that comes my way with equanimity, stop giving the world the screenplay for my happiness and be disappointed when it fails to deliver. But in truth I’m grouchy as hell, even as I know that this too, shall pass and yes, I realize how much worse it could have been.

Fact of the matter is, it’s healing well, but it’s weird being so conscious of how I walk, like I’m figuring it out for the first time and every step is tentative and pre-rehearsed. A lot of the whole thing is in the muscles of my left calf, but a lot is also in my head and I suspect I’ll just reach a point where I’ll announce, “Game over” and just walk confidently and boldly as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which it is supposed to be. And hope my leg will concur.

And yes, I know you couldn’t care less about reading about such things, except for a little gloating that “glad it’s you and not me!” But writing is one of the tools to try to put experience in a larger context, seek out wider meanings (or create them) and thus, move through life’s curve balls with a bit more grace, dignity and acceptance.

So note to self: Next time you give yourself an invitation to the Pity Party, just RSVP— “Sorry I can’t make it.” And after all, you have a good excuse— you’re lying in bed with ice!