School Dreams

Like clockwork, the school dreams began last night. Every year as we swim and sun and hike our way to a last Summer hurrah on Lake Michigan’s shores, the subconscious’s alarm clock goes off and visits me at night with those teacher disaster dreams— naked in front of the class, unprepared, the kids not paying me any mind. It’s the way to announce the summer’s bliss has come to its cadence and its time to prepare for the Fall ahead.

Why disaster dreams? Has anyone done a study? Is it just our shared intuition that we’re not worthy to lead children to a glorious future—or at least a decent day in school? Is it the way we act out the disaster in its ephemeral form so we’ll be spared it in real life? Is it our clever Subconscious getting its revenge on the bully Conscious who constantly pushes it down? Who knows? But the important thing is the signal— it’s time.

I’ve been having these dreams year after year and having piled up to a simply astonishing number of 40, here they are again. Do my retired colleagues still have them? Will I miss them some year (coming soon) when September rolls around and Summer’s welcome mat of freedom rolls into the Fall? Will there be new seasonal dreams to take their place?

Time will tell. But meanwhile, summer is on its way out, also signaled by a chill in the Michigan air these past two days. Now on our last day, when we hoped for one last languish in the sun or splash in the refreshing waters, it’s raining. Makes it easier to leave, but we’re all a little disappointed.

When someone says, “You teachers have it so easy, a whole summer off,” my usual response is to throttle them. Or suggest that we switch jobs for a day and throw them to the lions of the 3-year olds followed by 8^th grade and watch them run screaming from the building and back to their cubicle plunking around on the computer. But it’s true that the 10-week summer is a sweet deal, well-earned, but gratifying, a chance to live another sort of life and return with renewed energy.

And don’t get me wrong— the 3-year olds and 8^th graders can be like wild lions, but years in the circus together and we all have it down. We have an understanding with each other and I don’t even need a whip anymore! But all that is in a couple of weeks. For now, one final wave to the lake and a fond farewell to a remarkable summer.

See ya next year!

Fragile

We train ourselves to hold the newspaper headlines at bay—all those senseless deaths, natural disasters, wars, murders and beyond are always over there, somewhere else, far away. But the news of Robin Williams, the story my daughter tells of a friend’s roommate killed by an auto while innocently unlocking his bicycle, is reason enough to pause, to feel the abyss loom nearer and life’s fragility loom larger. Really, it is a miracle that we wake up as many mornings as we do, some of us day after day for 90 plus years and though no one walks through all those years without the grief of others falling around them, some of us miraculously step in the right place day after day, out of the path of the swerving auto or the deadly cancer cell.

In the midst of a love fest with my granddaughter Zadie, somehow I feel it all yet deeper. Approaching three years old, she is life’s miracle amplified, filled with such vitality, hilarity, intensity, such unbridled love for life unleashing the love of all those around her. If this be life, why should death exist? Why can’t we all be guaranteed an allotted time to work out our destiny? Why does it all seem so random and sometimes downright unfair and sometimes tragically beyond human explanation? Religions do what they can, but fall pitifully short of the big questions that haunt us when confronted with the delicate threads of life’s promise.

I turn to the trees in the woods and feel some comfort from their calm and steady solidity, trees that have weathered so many storms and seen so much of the ebb and flow of life and yet still green their leaves each Spring and give way to death’s cycle each Fall. I plunge into the waters of the small back lake and receive yet more comfort there, some cellular memory of the watery womb from whence we all sprang, snug and secure and protected from life’s terrors. I swim my way into some warm pockets that are so welcome, only to be jarred by a cold spot— back and forth between being soothed and jarred and isn’t that just the way it is?

I find myself longing for my mother’s warm embrace and assurance, but she is gone and now it is I who must offer comfort to my granddaughter’s scraped knees, assure her that “the big bad wolf” won’t get her and anyway, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, tra-la-la-la-la.” We sing our way into our brave posturing, but let’s face it, when the inexplicable deaths and destructions creep closer and jackhammer through our carefully constructed bricked walls, when the big bad wolves of depression and drugs and drunk drivers come knocking at our door, our little chinny-chin-chins start to tremble, as well they should. We are all afraid of the big bad wolf and those bricked houses won’t keep him out, no, indeed, they won’t.

Life is so fragile, my friend. We can love deeper and let our loved ones know it— or turn away from it all and brick ourselves into distraction, keep out the terror with brightly lit malls and bright screens or join the screaming evangelists who promise answers in return for non-thinking obedience or stock up with the survivalists and keep our guns loaded. So many choices! But the trees and the back lake advise me to keep breathing, to look further than loss and deeper than gain and glimpse an exquisite order and plan that may just be waiting around the corner.

Or not. Maybe I won’t know until my fragile thread begins to fray or break. Or maybe I will never know. Nothing to do but accept the grace of another morning gifted and move forward into the day with as much love and faith as I can muster. To mark today, and each day, with “Fragile; Handle with care.”

Stormy Seas

After two tranquil days of summer sun and the still waters of Lake Michigan, the storms have come. Whitecaps on the waters, trees branches swaying, the steady pound of rain. Deeply disturbing news last night of Robin Williams’ suicide, an American icon of mirth and lighting-quick intelligence victim to the downward spiral of addictions and depressions. Must this always be the price? Must the gods always be haunted by demons?

As I write, granddaughter Zadie roars her Big Bad Wolf roar and then delights us with her infectious smile. Maybe monsters and heroes will always walk side-by-side and the best we can do it minimize the mayhem. Maybe depression accompanies high-flying ecstasy, that the addictive personality is also a creative one, that the intensity of Charlie Parker’s saxophone solos matched his insatiable appetite for life lived at a high pitch. Orson Welles in The Third Man:

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Well, perhaps the cuckoo clock over the Mona Lisa is a good trade for peace and harmony over murder and bloodshed. But why even discuss it? We don’t get to choose. The storms come and the best we can do is close the windows, cozy in, make some soup—or go out into the blustery winds and let the storm’s power course through our veins.

And so a week with the family at the summer retreat at Lake Michigan. The cadence to the extraordinary Orff Course delivered its promise, swelling to a thunderous Beethoven climax. The music of transformation ended with a full orchestral finish, reflected in the applause of the evaluations. “Was this a valuable course?” answered by “YES!!!!!!! LIFE-CHANGING!!!!” (Should we enter the Personal Growth venues and charge triple?)

But now it’s Zadie-time and it’s every bit as delightful as I anticipated— and perhaps more so. Two years and nine months into life’s grand adventure, she’s a bonafide talker and now our days are filled with storytelling, singing, dancing, painting, piano-playing, sandcastle building (well, more destroying) and some splashing in the water. She made a driftwood sculpture with Grandma “Mima” using a power drill. Later, with no one watching, she drilled a hole in the carpet. Power tools and two-year olds are not the best combination.

Around the corner awaits the Sisyphusian stone of school starting, 40^th time around, its own blend of tranquil lakes and stormy seas. All this amidst the ever-growing family of dreams that have found their feet, but need help walking— the books waiting to be written, the books written that need accounting, the Intern program still battling with Homeland Security, the Pentatonics Jazz Group awaiting the world’s invitations, the workshop schedule, the paper-filing and organization (aaargh!!!!). I throw the fishing lines into the waters and see which one gets a nibble.

The wind still blows outside on a late summer morning, Zadie plays with Legos, my wife knits, my brother-in-law’s dog curls up on the rug, my daughter sips her morning coffee. It’s a domestic morning within, a stormy day without. R.I.P, Robin Williams, wishing you some tranquil summer lakes in that other world. 

E + R = W2: The Mathematics of Wisdom

Is wisdom still a viable concept in contemporary culture? Flip through 500 channels, listen to talk radio, eavesdrop on conversations in Walmart and you’re not likely to hear much. Cleverness is a’plenty and occasionally intelligence, but wisdom is a different animal altogether. Intelligence is figuring out what to do, wisdom asks whether it should be done or considers how to do it so that no one gets hurt.

If you make it to 50, 70, 90-years old and beyond, you get some wisdom for free: “Watch out for the used car salesman. Distrust promises made in the midst of lust. Don’t max out your credit card.” No effort necessary.

But mostly, wisdom does not come from age alone. There needs to be an accompanying practice of reflection, a mirror held up to the daily experience, a habit of sorting through the mail of what happens and put the junk mail, bills and personal letters in different piles. There is a kind of a 3R’s of cultivating wisdom—reflecting, reading and ‘riting. The reflecting part asks what happened, why, how and what it might mean. The reading gives a context for considering it, ideas larger than each thing that occurs. The ‘riting is finding your own way to sift through it all and put it in your own words.

Poets, masters of such 3R practice, often seem wise beyond— or rather before— their years. Shakespeare, Yeats, Rimbaud and countless others have written some extraordinarily wise thoughts before they were 30 years old. But some things you simply can’t know until your arrive there— you need to put in the years.

And so my mathematical formula: Experience plus Reflection = Wisdom squared.

PS Intelligence says “find a way to express these thoughts cogently and coherently.” Wisdom says, “Shut up and go take a walk on the beach.”

I’m going with wisdom. 

By the Way…

One of the pleasures of growing older is the possibility of finally coming to peace with the way you’re pieced together. In my case, I have a tangential mind. I start down the straight and narrow path of a single focused idea, but a few steps down, I see a side road that connects to a related idea. And so I follow it, confident that the side-trip will help illuminate the main road with an enlarged perspective. And mostly I believe it does.

That’s why in my Level III Orff Course, I have one student each class scribe for the lesson instead of participate. This is their chance to observe the details of how the lesson unfolds from an objective perspective impossible when you are participating. But it’s also the chance to jot down the comments that rise up in the midst of the trip, those unexpected treasures that lie on the side of the lesson plan’s main road.

In the midst of the recent Orff course, one person at dinner remarked that she noticed all the little phrases that each faculty member tends to say over and over again, those quirky little personal clichés that become our trademark. Turns out mine was “by the way…” at the beginning of the sentence and suddenly I noticed that I say this all the time! Once I became aware of it, I started to drive myself crazy!

But then I realized that this was the signal that I noticed an intriguing little side trip, a little treasure lying “by the wayside” that tripped the brain into thinking yet harder and deeper about the main topic at hand. Or invited the listener to go back to that side road and go further down that path, read the book I mentioned or follow that idea further. So maybe I don’t need to apologize for it.

And by the way, many others… oops! There it is again. Oh well.