Thirty Faces of Beauty

“You are going to speak about a graduating 8^th grader in front of 400 people and capture the essence of their character in two minutes. Go! (P.S. You can’t use the words ‘awesome, amazing or cool.’)”

This the task set to nine teachers at The San Francisco School and may I say they were awesome, amazing and cool! Oops, no I can’t say that. Okay, they did an impressive job trying to reduce the complexity of a human being to a two-minute snapshot without reducing the complexity of a human being. They tried to zero in on a central image and decorate it with stories, quotes, metaphors, images that helped illuminate what a student had shown of themselves so far. 14-year olds, like all of us, but perhaps a bit more, are a work-in-progress, enough life behind them to get some clues as to how they might contribute and which light they’ll bend toward, but just in the seedling stage of beginning to sprout.

I almost titled this “Mission Accomplished” to recognize that these thirty souls did indeed embody so much of what we hoped they would. Our school mission to “cultivate and celebrate the intellectual, imaginative and humanitarian promise of each child” was evident not only in the talks about the children, but in the performances they shared the day before. Our hope to promote “mutual respect and embrace diversity” came through all year in the way they cared for each other and let each other mostly be who they are (with the usual taunts and teases of the 13-year old). Our goal to inspire and keep alive “a passion for learning” also was clear in their work all year and their excitement about what lies ahead.

But what was most inspiring was the way the kids embodied and the speakers captured all the different ways one can be beautiful and successful in this world. I had four very different children to speak about—one who liked to contribute from the background, cleaning up after class, working quietly, efficiently and effectively, not seeking the spotlight. Another who loved to be on center stage and clearly belonged there. Another who had a trickster energy and was off to the side stirring things up in holy mischief. Another ready to shine her light whenever the occasion called for it and enchant us with song. In the narrow world where the adults demand all obedient workers or all prima donnas, all nose-to-the-grindstone habits or all thinking-out-of-the-box, all these styles become an either/or and children feel like they’ve fallen short.

While we have certain standards and clear aspirations for our students— we prefer speaking out about social justice over keeping silent, we encourage self-expression over self-repression, we value thinking over blind acceptance— we recognize that there are a thousand ways to embody these qualities in hundreds of different colors and shades and no two alike. So our challenge was to frame each child’s inevitably unique character in the light of them being precisely who they have to be at this moment and finding the beauty in it. And that’s exactly what we did.

Truly, school is so much wider than the narrow task of growing future workers who can read and write. It is the place to deeply observe the whole glory and catastrophe of the human being and equally the place to grow kids more to the glory side. It begins and ends with knowing the child, giving them opportunities to be known and begin to know themselves, let them know you see them and feel them and admire them and encourage them and begin every act of striving for self-betterment from the foundation of self-acceptance about how each one is put together.

The world should be happy knowing that we have released thirty smart, caring, talented and beautiful souls to begin their next four-years of evolving yet higher and deeper. May their next schools know them and value them and love them as much as we have.

Letter to the Interns

On the last day of school yesterday, I sat down and wrote a letter to the five Interns who were with us all Fall. It was hard to believe that that whole adventure happened in this same school year, but the calendar says it was so. Following my life path of living musically, connecting the theme at the end with the theme at the beginning, it felt right to write. Here’s the letter:

Hello my friends,

It is the last day of school. I’m sitting in the library. 8^th graders are outside signing yearbooks, Jeff and Jorge are putting out the carpet squares in the Community Center, Solveig is working on the flowers, Talia is touring her boyfriend (!) around the school— the usual hub-bub of a day in the life of school. But this is the last day. So as you can imagine, the ceremonial forces are gathering!

How I wish you could be here to witness it, to be part of the closing as you were at the opening! You’ll miss the hilarious “mud-pie” dessert—ice cream, crumbled oreo cookies, chocolate sauce and whipped cream. The kids have to sing (of course!) our special song (sung to the tune of “One Bottle of Pop”):

1)    1 Mud pie, 2 Mud pie, 3 Mud pie, 4 Mud pie,

5 Mud pie, 6 Mud pie, 7 Mud pie, Yum!

2)    Ice cream, sauce and oreos, oreos, oreos,

Ice cream, sauce and oreos, Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, Yum!

3)    Don’t take a bite of my mud pie, my mud pie, my mud pie

Don’t take a bit of my mud pie, my mud pie’s mine.

At the end of the song, they have to sit up straight, look down at their mud pie and be perfectly still for 30 seconds while looking at their mud pie. If they move or laugh or talk, we take their mud pie away. Really! (Then we have a way to earn it back—60 seconds of sitting still!). To make it harder, I try to make them laugh. By squeezing the rubber chicken. It’s the most delicious torture.

Then the big gathering in the Community Center and guess what song we open with? Side by Side, of course. Steve’s remarks, Simple Gifts  song, each teacher says something briefly about their class and then “gongs” them up to the next grade. (The kids literally move one row up). An acknowledgment of all the teachers leaving and then the song Que Sera, then the Graduation song for the 8^th graders, my new words to the tune of The Girl From Ipanema, then we sing again the song we sang at the beginning, Junkanoo. with new lyrics I made up a half hour ago:

We played a bell, we played a drum.

This school year is now done.

We felt that lively beat

Gathered here on Gaven Street.

Thanks to all, we want to say,

For this year of work and play.

Now it’s time for summer,

So come on, let’s go!

8^th grader Koji and 1^st grader Sofia come out to gong out the old year, all the staff go outside, we line up for the Hug Line— the kids coming through and hugging everyone goodbye one by one— and we’re done!!And then I go off to sing with Fran and Edie and Company at the Jewish Home for the Aged.

Everyone says that time goes so quickly, but thinking back to you all being here at the end of August last year for the opening ceremony really feels like several lifetimes ago! To you also? It’s amazing to think that this was part of the same year! But of course, a lot has happened in-between. I got to see three of you in your native lands, you’ve been back in the rhythm of your old (but renewed) lives, the kids have grown two feet. But still Dorian has his smile, Nate still hides from me at the beginning of each class, a group of 4^th grade girls won the Samba Contest! (the 6^th grade batteria was great!), the North class 5’s still run in to music squealing with delight and the preschool kids still greet me with their enthusiastic “Doug!!” when I walk into preschool singing.

Three days ago, Karen and I showed some slides at Elementary Singing Time to celebrate our 40^th and 41^st years with the kids there. Laura and James wrote a cute song to the tune of Love and Marriage:

                          

Art and Music, Doug and Karen,                                       Color wheels, glockenspiels

Over 40 years a school they’re sharin’                             Art and music show the way we feel

No-one could ever follow ya                                             Jazz and painting and weaving

(Except maybe your daughter Talia)                                Don’t you ever think of leaving!

Paper, painting, drawing, sculpture, yarn and ceramics

Songbooks, xylophones and Samba, rhythm, tempo (and don’t forget dynamics)

Doug and Karen, what a pairin’,

All the heart and soul that you’ve been sharin’

Hear our adulation, you’re at the heart of education

You’re at the heart, music and art, you’re at the heart of education!

Such a blessing this life that came to me. After 40 years, still wondering when I’ll choose to leave it for something else, but not next year, for sure. And the 5^th graders are such extraordinary musicians that I feel I should at least wait until I have them for 8^th grade. We’ll see what the world has in store for me. (If I was offered a tour with the Pentatonics, I’d take it in a second!)

Thanks for sharing a piece of it with me and Sofia and James and thanks for being such a big piece of it! We are forever connected by our shared experience and I’m grateful for that. Okay, James is doing a last-minute version of a play Momontaro with the 5’s, so I’m off to see it!

Love to you all,

Doug

Wondrous Love: The Legacy of Jean Ritchie

I was 22 years old living in a trailer in the North Carolina mountains. My emerging vision of alternative education, communal living and life “in the country” came together in one piece working at the Arthur Morgan School, a Quaker-inspired boarding school for Middle School kids. One day we drove to the library in the town of Spruce Pine and I came away with an album from a folk singer named Jean Ritchie. As the sun set behind the mountains on a crisp Fall day, I nestled into my cozy trailer with its Murphy bed and put this record on my little turntable and out came the voice of an angel, accompanied by the sweet tones of a dulcimer.

She sang old ballads, play-parties, lullabies and folk songs, none of which I recognized, but all of which I knew in some secret part of my soul. Murder, treachery, tragedy, love mostly unrequited, nightingales, cuckoos and the magic of twilight a’stealing— it wasn’t exactly the stories she told or the words she sang, but the feeling of it all that captivated me. Through her I could here the voice of a family, a people, a culture and a misty morning in a Kentucky holler, all of it given voice through this pure and untrammelled voice. I fell in love at once.

Some time later, I heard her again on an obscure record singing unaccompanied the hymn Wondrous Love. Many a time in the midst of the intensity of a Zen meditation retreat in Mt. Baldy overlooking L.A., I’d wander a bit at night amidst the star-filled sky and hear her singing that song, the soundtrack to my sense of renewed mystery and magic and wonder and deep connection to the ten thousand things in this world. As practiced meditation peeled away the layers of self and brought me back to my lost childlike-wonder, indeed it came as the grace of a wondrous love, the lyrics given body by the remembered voice of Jean Ritchie:

What wondrous love is this, oh my soul. (2x)

What wondrous love is this, that cause the Lord of bliss

To send such perfect peace to my soul. (2x)

(Was it she who changed the original Lutheran hymn’s last line from “to bear that dreadful curse?” to “To send such perfect peace?”)

In 1989, I had the great fortune to see Jean Ritchie in person at the AOSA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. She and the Georgia Sea Island Singers were the two guest performers, both perfect representatives of two powerful musical forces in American culture—the Anglo-American and the African-American strands of our folk music legacies. Both developing in relative isolation, one tucked away in the mountains and valleys of the Appalachian mountains drawing from, yet transforming, the traditions of Ireland, Scotland, England (Jean Ritchie took several trips to the British Isles researching song origins) and the other in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, retaining some Africanisms (a language called Gullah, for example). My mentor Avon Gillespie had just recently passed away and as these two different groups sang, they helped in different ways begin a long healing process from that loss.

In 2003, Jean came again to an Orff Conference. As she sang with photos of her childhood landscapes showing, a sterile hotel conference room was transformed and we all were transported to both the haunting beauty of growing up outdoors, the joy and craziness of being one of 14 (!) children, the difficulties of a rural life framed by an austere Christianity and the tragedies of the strip-mining that had invaded and spoiled the land and the culture.

I did overhear two young music teachers saying, “She sang some notes out of tune” and was so sorry for them, trapped in some notion of music as perfectly executing given notes and missing the point of letting your soul out. After the concert, my colleague Martha Crowell went up to Jean and thanked for her all she had given in her life. “”Well,” Jean quipped with a smile, “I guess I just couldn’t hep myself!” Indeed. You sing the songs you learning washing dishes with your family or sitting on the front porch and somehow the world needed it and started to pay attention and inspired people to thank you, but at the end of the matter, it wasn’t anything special. You just did what you had to do, what you loved to do.

After the Conference, I interviewed Jean by phone for the Orff Echo magazine (still looking for my interview on the computer— if I find it, I’ll share it). In 2005 (Jean was 83 then), I discovered that my wife’s aunt lived in the same town as Jean Ritchie, Port Washington, Long Island. (Jean moved to the New York area to pursue her folk singing career many years back and had a home there and also in Berea, Kentucky). She set up a luncheon at a nearby Country Club and we had a lovely meal and conversation together. At the end, we took Jean home, she invited us into her house and showed a room filled with the chaos of papers and cassette tapes and such. Jean apologized and said, “My children are after me to get this stuff organized. There’s a lot of old recordings and such.” My eyes lit up and I offered, “Well, if you want some help, I bet I could get five people to come here and help you do just that!” She seemed mildly interested, but neither she nor I pursued it and I regret that. I wonder what was become of it all.

So much more to say: her popularization of the dulcimer, her collaborations with Doc Watson, her shows with the California Revels (I went to that also!), her original songs,her Skin and Bones song that I sing every year to the kids at Halloween, the Nottamun Town tune that Bob Dylan borrowed for his Masters of War,  her fascinating autobiography Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Like Pete Seeger, she lived to a ripe age (93) and stayed true to her passion every minute of it. Such longevity is often used an excuse from grieving, but there is a hole left here and along with the celebration and the memory available in books, recordings and such, let’s keep her legacy alive. If you’re reading this and you have children or teach children, sit down and listen to some of her music together. You won’t regret it.

I’ll leave Jean with her own last verse of Wondrous Love.

When we’re from sorrow free, we’ll live on. (2x)

When we’re from sorrow free, all through eternity

We’ll sing on, we’ll sing on.

Sing on, Jean Ritchie.

Hide and Seek

“Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light…Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence.    – David Whyte: Consolations

Three days before the end of school, the 8^th grader who refused to sing all year long practiced a song for her graduation sharing and it was gorgeous. The boy who kept himself in some cocoon of non-communication spontaneously did a little rap and was smiling and outgoing. Another hiding his intellectual promise admitted to a teacher that he had an “inner geek.”

In my musical world, we encourage everyone to express themselves fully and in public, expect everyone to take a solo and have their moment when they stand out from the crowd.

It’s a worthy goal. After all, each of us without exception carries our unique form of light and our job is to generously shine it into the darkness and illuminate a corner of the world previously hidden. But there is a timing to it, there is a preparation for it, a long process of getting ready for it that is necessary and right and it can’t be forced. A little nudging is okay—like the girl who kept refusing to sing while clearly saying in subtle ways, “Please make me do it!” I did and she did and it was a breakthrough moment. But it’s a delicate matter, knowing when it’s the right time for revelation. In the fairy tale, Iron John, the hero hides his golden hair under a scarf and works in the kitchen, underground, as it were, until the moment comes to reveal his royal lineage. There is a wisdom to the waiting.

Back in the 60’s and ‘70’s, when the counter-culture was trying to break through the accumulated levels of repression, when hiding was lying (Nixon) and all were encouraged to “let it all hang out,” you could meet someone at a California party who would be telling you about their messy divorce within the first minute of conversation or “honestly” let you know that they had father issues and your mustache reminded them of their father so they couldn’t relate to you. In the name of honesty and immediate revelation of intimate details, much damage was done.

Hiding is also a developmental process, clearly a survival strategy in the confusing brutality of young adolescence, where an offhand comment from a peer or a purposeful public ridicule can send us looking for the knight’s armor that will cover our fragile vulnerability. That so many of the 8^th graders in our school are willing to speak in public and express their edgy thoughts and play that xylophone solo means that we have both helped prepare them to do so eloquently and created a safe environment of support. But still they are 13.

“Seek” is the other part of the old “hide and seek” game and is the necessary complement to the hiding. One of the jobs of the teacher is to help the students seek precisely what they’re prepared to reveal and when they’re ready to do it. And just how does one know when that is? There is an intuition to it all and I imagine it is almost never a conscious decision. It’s the hidden part of ourselves that knows deeper than we do when it’s fully cooked and ready. Like the snake shedding its skin, something tells us the time is ripe and we’re ready. Then comes the hibernation period for the next waiting revelation.

What part of you is waiting to step forth into the light?

Juno's June

The calendar page turned and it’s June. Most of us will go through 30 days not thinking about why it’s named June and not caring. But I always find it interesting to consider the source of words and the power they have to frame and define things. And so Juno, the Roman Goddess of love and marriage, which lines up nicely with the sought-after June weddings. Juno was Jupiter’s wife (and apparently, sister also. Hmm) and the equivalent of the Greek Hera. Her name shares an etymological root with “iuven,” related to youth, fertility and the vital force of the young. This also nicely parallels June as the end of Spring, a time of new life and the beginning of summer, a time we (well, especially schoolteachers) hope to be re-vitalized and recover our life force given to our work and/or the children in our classes.

New life is prophetic for my June to come, as I look forward to welcoming my grandson into this world. June 23^rd is the scheduled arrival time, but new life so rarely pays attention to that! It’s a big time for my eldest daughter giving birth to her second child and also for my youngest in the throes of a new love. (She announced it on Facebook, so I guess it’s public!)

In four days from now, I’ll complete my 40^th year teaching at The San Francisco School and my wife her 41^st. Before July arrives, I’ll perform again with my beloved Pentatonics Jazz Band at Stanford Jazz Festival (June 27^th—mark your calendar) and then take off for the Turkish countryside for a week of teaching in something called Circle Camp. While waiting around for Zadie’s brother to appear, I may get back to a book I worked on three Junes ago that has been patiently waiting.

So love and marriage is a good theme, all kinds of love and all kinds of marriage. Not only the acceptance of all sexual orientations, but, as David Whyte treats it in his book The Three Marriages, also the marriage with one’s work and the marriage with one’s own Soul. All three will be given ample exercise in the June that awaits me and I’m happy to greet them all.

Happy June!

PS to yesterday's blog: Today the sun came out, the sky was blue, the sea was sparkling, the grass was…well, brown. But still. San Francisco's the best city in the world! 

But still don't move here if you're rich.