Juggling

At a recent school parent meeting, an alum was interviewed and asked the following:

“What was the most important thing you learned at the school?”

“I would say juggling.”

“You mean learning to multi-task and handle several things going on at once?”

“No, I mean juggling. First with scarves and then with balls.”

It has been quite a week in the Lake Wobegon of my little world. Preparing 46 Middle School kids for a concert at the Orff Convention in San Diego while rehearsing with the adults performing after while teaching the usual load while grading report cards for Middle School while hosting three visitors while teaching an SF Jazz Saturday workshop while working on getting the Summer Orff Course Website back up and running while… well, you get the idea. Lots of balls up in the air and each one with its own crazy spin. But somehow they’re not falling down on my head and by Saturday morning, they will all have come to a well-earned rest.

Juggling the complexities of our lives is indeed a worthy metaphorical skill, but it’s also a pretty fun— and according to our alum survey of one—important and memorable physical skill as well. I should be packing for my trip tomorrow, but I think I’ll take some time off and juggle for a while. Care to join me? 

Illicit Love

Time for a big confession. I’m in love. With two women. One is 4 years old and the other is 94 years old. Now before you call Child Protective Services or Senior Abuse, hear me out.

Love knows no boundaries. There are mysterious forces and attractions out there in the universe and sometimes they reach inside and pull at the strings of our heart. Look what happened to Dante! He was struck down by an 8-year old girl named Beatrice and out poured one of the world’s greatest epics, The Divine Comedy. Today he might be psychoanalyzed as a deeply troubled man or imprisoned as a pedophile and what a loss that would have been to Western civilization.

Of course, there is the awakening of the heart and then there is the acting out of the feelings and trust me, no inappropriate boundaries have been crossed other than a vague longing that I was 30 years older or 60 years younger. You all know what I’m talking about, the way you can connect so deeply with someone far out of your peer group and even have high school crushes. And there is a spiritual component to this, illuminated so brilliantly by Joseph Campbell many years back. He talks about a Hindu notion of five degrees of love, each one higher than the previous.

The first is the love of the servant to master. God is supreme and I am nothing. God commands, I obey without questioning. Think of the story of Abraham, chastised for doubting his Master who commanded him to kill his son.

The second degree is from friend to friend. Think of Jesus and his disciples hanging around together, breaking bread, discussing great matters. In the Hindu world, Arjuna and Krishna had such a relationship.

The third is the love of parent for child. Christianity in the Dark Ages was not particularly memorable until the Virgin Mary ascended in status and the image of the Mother with Jesus as the Divine baby in the crib captured the imagination of the people and helped create the cultural explosion of the Middle Ages. “Notre Dame”—our mother. Christmas overtaking Easter, with all the paintings of Mother and Child, the Three Wise Men traveling to pay tribute to the Divine in the form of a baby. In the Hindu world, all the stories of baby Krishna, the mischievous butter thief.

The fourth is husband and wife. Catholic nuns are ordained as “brides of Christ.” Here God is not so much feared as the stern father, nor a casual acquaintance, nor an adorable infant, but a life partner with troubled times and times of feeling the two have become one.

But the highest order in the Indian cosmology is illicit lover. Marriage still has its practical side, but illicit love means one has been entirely swept away and often outside the boundaries of conventional morality. This is the sense from the great mystic poets Rumi and Hafiz and Mirabai,the experience of the Gnostics in the West, the sense that there is no line between the mortal and divine, that we are the Spirit made flesh. Since the three monotheistic religions lean heavily toward the first stage (with all the disastrous political, cultural and emotionally regressed consequences), it is often intolerable to claim identity with the Divine, it is blasphemy and the consequence for many was jail or death.  

Well, I’ve come a long way from confessing my love for a 4-year old and a 94-year old. But hope it has made you stop and think. What’s your relationship with the Divine?

Blend In. Stand Out.

A colleague wrote to me asking me about something she had heard me say that she wanted to quote. I looked around on the desktop and in my mammoth blog file to see if indeed I had written such a thing. I've talked about it a lot in workshops, but apparently never quite wrote it down. So I set off trying to explain to her how I talked about it and lo and behold, I wrote it down! And here it is:

I often tell the kids that I just want them to do two things in my class. 

"Blend in. Stand out."

They look rightfully confused and then I add, "And know when each is called for."

The "blend in" is to release yourself to the music or dance, become part of something bigger than yourself, a grand swirl of motion or body of sounds of which you are a small contributing cell, the amazing feeling of not being able to tell where you leave off and your neighbor begins. Your voice joins in the grand choir and you are lifted up higher than you can fly with your own wings.

Indeed, all of music and much of dance requires this kind of blending. If we sing Twinkle Little Star and I sing out of tune, out of time, too loud, with the wrong words, the wrong quality of voice (all of which I demonstrate to the kids), the whole edifice collapses. There can be 20 of you singing perfectly and one person off can bring it down. Likewise with group drumming or a set folk dance with precise steps and style. When you can learn to move in unison, to sing in unison, to play in unison, you have the possibility of forgetting yourself as a separate individual and feeling part of something larger, more grand and more wondrous. Not unlike a feeling you might get lying down at night looking into a skyful of stars. You're small and insignificant, but beautifully so. 

The "stand out" part is to show how you can express yourself in the fullness of your character, in the way you understand the world, experience the world, perceive the world. Over a blended background, you can have a moment to soar across the sky like a magnificent shooting star and light up the world with your unique presence. Every artist works on the same basic techniques and disciplines and concepts and compositional rules, but every artist learns how to break the rules in her or his own way or to fill the technique with their own style or touch. The uniqueness is not a self-conscious urge to be different, it's the inescapable force of our character that shows itself young, but takes a lifetime to fully grow into. Here's a quote from Martha Graham to encourage that sense of apprenticing yourself to your own uniqueness:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”    

There is a kind of blending in that political parties, religious fanatics, peer groups, corporations and gangs ask for, demands that you give up your identity and thoughts to tow the party line, to conform. But that's not what art is asking for. In fact, the opposite. 

There is a kind of standing out that is the "I am a rock, I am an island" kind of bravado, the rugged individualist that don't need nobody nohow, the eccentric performer who aims to be different just to be different. That's not what I mean here.

I'm looking for a conversation between the blending in and the standing out, each singing back and forth to each other. When it comes to practical classes with real live children, this is a frame to re-direct kids who are standing out when it's time to blend in—we all know that that's like— and equally kids who are hiding when it's time to stand out. We're often more comfortable with the latter because the kids are not in our face actively disrupting our program, but in my book, they need as much help as the others. One needs to learn how to cool down and give more to the group, the other how to heat up and show the group what they're made of. 

The beauty of talking to kids like this is that it's not a simplistic good or bad, it's a realistic assessment about what's helping the music sing more beautifully and the dance move more gracefully. The kids off-task are invited to learn how to direct and re-direct their energy to make the class more beautiful, more satisfying, more happy. Less blame and shame, more "here's how you can help yourself be a better student."

Try it and see.

Buddha's Blues

Life is suffering. —Buddha’s first precept

Buddha was the first great blues musician. He didn’t play guitar and there was no electricity to send out those wailing blue notes, but he was on to something. When he gathered together his experience into a coherent curriculum, suffering was first on the list of his mission statement. Why did he have to be such a negative Nancy? He could have said “Life is joy” and given us some comfort that we’re here to have fun and be happy. His logo could have been a smiley face and his sermons all end with “Have a nice day.” What’s with the suffering?

It all has to do with impermanence. Yes, we will have joy and we will love and be loved, but all is subject to the ravages of time and there will be loss, a loss sometimes so unbearable we don’t know how we will carry it. Whatever we enjoy, whatever we love, will leave us sometime or betray us or disappoint us and after we’ve taken the daring step of opening our heart fully, it will break. No wonder so many lock it away deep in the well of the church on an island in a faraway lake (see my Giant with No Heart blog).

But there’s more. If we open our heart to our own capacity to love, be it a person, a passion or a porcupine, then we join a community of fellow beings likewise open to and worthy of joy and love. We are united together “with passion” and nurture our capacity for “com-passion.” So now it’s not enough to negotiate the pitfalls and dangers and terrors of our own heart’s territory. We also hurt when our fellow beings hurt. There is no limit to our capacity for suffering.

Someone I love is suffering now and so I am too. Just as I was negotiating a tricky corner in my own catastrophes and rising up singing, I feel the weight of shared grief. Here we are talking about developing empathy and fellow feeling and compassion in the children we teach, but no one dares to mention the price. It’s a tricky thing to agree to share the weight so no one of us has to carry it alone without falling down ourselves, but that’s the deal. And when we agree to share the pain, we also get to share the joy.

It’s raining outside this morning and it is grey and cold and rainy in my loved one’s heart as well. But rain and tears are deeply necessary to life and new growth and a future bloom awaits. 

November

It’s November. Clocks turned back, Halloween costumes stored away, leftover candy tempting the turn-of-the-month resolve to eat better. In San Francisco, leaves, such as we have, just beginning to turn and theoretically the end of our two-month sunny and warm paradise. Few things match the beauty of this city with warm air and bright light. But yesterday a summer fog rolled in and we are all awaiting the promised rains.

November. Literally, “9^th month” even though it’s the 11.^th (You know where to look that up.) A big birthday month in my family. In the generation above, the 18^th for my wife’s father, the 19^th for mine. In the generation below, the 25^th for my sister’s son, the 26^th for my daughter. And now the next generation, first grandchild Zadie born on her great grandfather’s birthday, the 18^th again. We just got our plane tickets to organize her 4^th birthday party—songs, stories, artwork and a dash of fear and trembling that our fabulous plans will be at the mercy of volatile and unpredictable 4-year olds like our birthday girl.

November. Since 1984, an unbroken string of Orff National Conferences to mark the year, reunite with colleagues far away, explore with friends a slice of American culture. My own little ritual every year to name by memory the site of each conference and recall some of the stories that go with each one. Might as well practice here, on my honor with no external help:

Las Vegas, Kansas City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Dallas, Memphis, Seattle, Tampa, Phoenix, Rochester, Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Louisville, Long Beach, Birmingham, Omaha, San Jose, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Spokane, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Denver, Nashville. (And for the record, also attended the Conference in L.A. in 1976 and Portland 1982.)

So this year back in San Diego and with 46 middle school kids to perform. With a dash of pride, may I say I believe that The San Francisco School has performed at these conferences more than any other single school— San Diego 1991, Las Vegas 2002, Long Beach 2004, San Jose 2007 and now San Diego again 2015. My Orff performing group Xephyr also performed in Dallas 1995, Seattle 1997, Phoenix 1999, Long Beach 2004 and my group The Pentatonics in St. Louis 2012. I’ve given workshops at some 24 of those 33 conferences. A big part of my life in so many ways and it will be a big deal when the day comes that I miss one. Hopefully not soon.

November. The horror and euphoria of presidential elections, five times as a voting adult beaten down and feeling like I was forced into exile in Mordor, darkness and evil abounding. Five times feeling like I could exhale and enjoy some peace and contentment in the Shire. I don’t look forward to this time next year, to put it mildly. So much at stake, so much tension, so little confidence in the intelligence of the average voter, but always willing to be amazed and surprised and affirmed that people will not be brainwashed into voting against their own—and all of ours— best interest.

And finally, November as the time of turkey and the World Series and football and encroaching darkness and beginning the school plays and daring to sing the first Winter Holiday songs. I turn the calendar page and renew my resolve to make each day count, to step my one inch further toward beauty and justice and convivial communion. May it be so.