In Living Fully

Two weeks ago, 100 people from 28 countries gathered and we sang in and rang in on gongs the beginning of a grand adventure. Now it’s over. Near the end, the intensity of the two weeks was beginning to show, the beauty and the terror of feeling vulnerable. Emotions were at a high pitch— little spats and melt-downs and no surprise, it’s just the way this work is. But the container of music and ritual brought it all together into a beautiful sharing of each Level’s work on Thursday night and the closing circles on Friday morning ending with the grand spiral with voices echoing to the heaven’s with Avon Gillespie’s farewell text set to a Beethoven canon. The drought was over for the brief 15 minutes the tears flowed. A final cadence, turn to your neighbor and hug and more tears. 

And then it was time for lunch.

The fever pitch of deep emotion necessarily cooling down to the practical details of packing and the final hugs and goodbyes and getting ready for the difficult, but necessary transition, of re-entering the workaday world. The lobster shell was back on, but higher and larger than it was before.

Sadly, there is no ritual greeting at the other end. Hopefully, loving partners, family members, friends happy to see the initiates again and ready to sit down and listen to as many stories as they can before their eyes glaze over and they leap up and say, “Great! Glad you had a good time. Now can you take out the garbage?” Again, as it should be.

I don’t want to claim too much for this remarkable two-week community we’ve been crafting for over 33 years, but the fact is that I believe it as as spiritually invigorating and filled with epiphanies as any yoga/ Zen Center/ Christian/ Sufi/ Jewish or New Age pagan retreat. And without any expectation that you are there for spiritual renewal or else you get your money back. The only claim we make is that we can help you be a better music or dance teacher or teacher in general and the rest is gravy. But indeed, what is more spiritual than working with children and what more refreshing than scores of beautiful songs, dances and musical pieces held together in ensemble, each designed to unlock another faculty of soul?

As for me, it’s time for grandkids, books on the beach and sunsets over Lake Michigan. But the echoes of Avon’s words sung with wet eyes will be with me:

“In living fully, one finds peace…”

Let's Do This: An Open Letter to All Teachers

The Facebook photos of 5:30 am alarm clocks and teacher meetings have begun. Far too early for my taste, the forces are re-gathering to begin again the school year. The beach chairs are being put away, the planning books ordered, the last few barbecues with fresh corn and tomatoes from the garden enjoyed as teachers everywhere seek to savor the last sweet taste of summer while preparing for the return to work. I’ll join them soon in a couple of weeks, mostly with excitement sprinkled with a bit of sadness that this miraculous and marvelous summer is soon to be over.

One of the Facebook photos was a staff meeting with computers open about the latest in digital assessment. It made me worried that we might once again squander this incredible opportunity to create a future worthy of our children by attending to the wrong things. It reminded me that here at the cusp of a new school year, with millions of children required to spend the good part of their days the next nine months in the schools we have created for them, we are given a chance to start fresh and get it right this time. Now is the time to re-configure everything to fit the actual needs of children, to let them play and explore and follow their overflowing curiosity right up to the doorway of discovery and understanding. To guide them as needed, to help them when they’re reached the end of their own resources and capacity to figure something out. To investigate the mysteries and magic of this world side-by-side, companions at different points on the same path, yet sometimes walking together.

My friends, business as usual is not working. I don’t believe it has ever worked as well as it could or should, but these days, the stakes are so much higher. As H.G. Wells said, “We are in a race between education and catastrophe” and according to the daily news, catastrophe is winning hands down. How else to explain people preparing to vote on the basis of ignorance, incapable of looking a fact in the face or engaging in anything approaching rational discourse? How else to account for an emotional intelligence that never rose higher than cruelty and bigotry and prejudice and hatred? How else to understand what happened to people that never had adults—parents, teachers, neighbors—discover that seed of beauty we all carry within, notice it, praise it, celebrate it, cultivate it? Empty inside, unable to locate their own glory, they can only create an identity that needs the illusion of people below them in order to feel worthy. How else to shed light on a national discourse that has fallen so low that someone vying for the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth is publicly suggesting that some among his followers consider murdering his rival?

And so I say to my fellow educators, we have failed. We have not worked hard enough or deep enough or high enough or broad enough. We’ve allowed the bulk of our energy to be wasted on technological upgrades, the next pedagogical system, the obsession with tests and numbers and all the things that block our view of the most important people—the children. We have not talked enough amongst ourselves about how to love the children, how to comfort and protect them in a culture of trauma, how to nurture and water their unique genius and possibility, how to challenge them and motivate them with contagious passion instead of threats or rewards, how to inspire them, how to see them, how to discover their secret jewel, help them discover it and publicly praise and shine it. I know it’s not as easy or sexy as learning to use the coolest new edu-ap, but it is ten thousand times more vital and lasting and important.

So this year when we return to school meetings, let’s stand up amidst the next agenda of nonsense and distraction and say, “Stop! Where are the children in this discussion? Where is the present in this discussion, our urgent need to reveal beauty and compassion and moral uprightness? Where is the future we hope for? How will this help our country in future elections?” I fervently believe that as soon as we agree what not to talk about, that the needed discussions will finally arise. And not just talk, but the active doing in training us as teachers to enlarge our own humanity, to finally uncover our own hidden jewel that lay neglected in our childhood. It’s never too late.

I know this is possible because it’s exactly what we are doing here in our Orff training. No one ever asks us how we do what we do, but we are here and ready to answer. Take off your shoes, turn off your device, open your mind and heart and step into the circle. And then return to your school with renewed determination to get it right. Not someday, but now.

The kids will soon walk in the door. Let’s do this.

Be Yourself

                                    Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

Why do we care so much about making everyone the same? Why do we work so hard to make sure everyone believes the same thing, worships the same god, buys the same product? Why do we want children to all get the same answers on the same tests? The 100 trillion possible connections between brain cells is nature’s way of telling us that no two brains will ever be close to being the same. 100 trillion—an unfathomable number, but one that drives the point home that we are designed to think differently in at least some ways than any of the other 7 billion people we share the planet with. Five minutes sitting in the airport watching people walk by will remind us that no two human faces or bodies are the same, no two walk the same or move the same. Nature gives us a mandate to be different and we squander it by pretending that we all could be and should be the same.

This is on my mind today as I watch 27 teachers teach a lesson in their Level III Orff Schulwerk practicum. Do I have certain guidelines and criteria I’m looking for in a “good lesson?” Yes I do and they know it because I’ve modeled it for them all week and their previous Level I and II teachers did also the last two years. They’re designed to stimulate thought and imagination, to create a musical flow in class, to fully engage the students at their highest level of thinking, doing and feeling. Are there hard and fast rules, mandatory key words and a scripted order of events? No there are not, because that would make these teachers mere mechanical imitators instead of living, breathing and creating beings. Do the teachers have enough guidelines to understand how to structure their lesson, but not so much that they feel confined? Yes, they do and the proof is in the pudding.

And the pudding was delicious indeed. Every single lesson was engaging, imaginative, alive with humor and energy, musical, coherent and served to bring the group together. Each taught with the full force of their character because they had permission to and could stop worrying about being a pawn in someone else’s game called “The Perfect Lesson.” Almost every lesson included something that I never would have thought of myself  in spite of my 41 years of experience. But now I will think of it and will try to adapt to my own way of thinking and doing.

The imagination has no boundaries and when we invite it into the lesson, into the school, into the national discourse, into our lives, we all emerge refreshed. People rise to their own horizon and often push it yet just a little bit further. e.e. cummings, the poet who refused to capitalize his name to claim an identity, said it well:

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you into everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”

Today, 27 teachers fought that battle and we all won.

PS Oh helpful blog readers, have you notice the type face being different these last few blogs. I don't like it and can't figure out why it changed. And then today, the paragraph starting "The imagination has no boundaries…" is exactly the way I like it and how it has been. But nothing I do will make the whole blog look like this. Any suggestions?

Back to Work

It was a glorious weekend of good meals, good company, a good movie, good music and even got to swim in the pool. Now it’s Monday and it’s back to the grind.

But how glorious is it that “the grind” means I get to sing Gregorian Chant with 27 music teachers, flirt publicly singing Medieval troubadour songs, be upright churchgoers mixed with naughty children in our Feast of Fools drama and end the morning with breathtaking four-part polyphony in a one-page Palestrina Kyrie. And along the way discuss the flowering of the feminine in the Middle Ages, the role of art in providing the just-right container for all of our complex selves, the logic behind the development from pentatonic scales to modal scales to the European major-minor harmonic system and the alternative views of other cultures to stay pentatonic or modal with more attention to complexity of rhythm, melody and structure than harmonic sophistication.

This is not your typical Orff course, diving much deeper than “here’s a cool thing to do with kids” or “pentatonic is cool because all the notes sound good together” and looking at the history, culture, physics, neuroscience, philosophy, religion and more that stands behind each choice we make in making lesson plans for the young ones. It’s also not your typical history or language arts or math course, because any point we strive to make understood in the mind is also experienced in the body, passed through the heart and brought out into the world as glorious music shared together at the vibrational level. We don’t just experience things, we reflect deeply on the thinking behind them. We don’t just learn about things, but experience in the muscles, breath, nervous system and more the things themselves.

When “back to work” on Monday also means back to play and laughter and comradery and revelation, it turns out to be a pretty good deal. I can’t wait to go to work again tomorrow!

The Music of Strangers: The Carmel Valley Road Ensemble

Just saw the movie, The Music of Strangers about Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Besides almost jumping out of my chair when I saw brief appearances by two San Francisco School alum parents (Niels Swinkels and Bobby McFerrin, and then appearances by the Korean drummer Don Won who our kids played with in the World Music Festival), the movie itself was so moving. The message was exactly in line with everything we are doing here at the International Orff Course on Carmel Valley Road—bringing strangers of various nations to come together in music and bringing it back out into world, Yo Yo with performances and occasional workshops, us with teaching kids, workshops and occasional performances. The Silk Road group reaches some two million people, the Carmel Valley Road group some 50,000 kids, but the numbers don’t matter as much as the shared vision—music bringing healing, meaning, comfort and happiness to anyone and everyone who has the good fortune to cross its path.

I’m so sorry I don’t have Yo Yo Ma’s talent, connections and leadership skills to take this vision out further into the world, but hey, I’m doing the best with what I’ve got. 280 kids at The San Francisco School, 100 teachers each year at this Orff Course, another 100 at the Jazz, Intro and Master Course, more in the Orff-Afrique Course and then hundreds more in workshops and courses around the globe. And then some of these folks going on to train teachers themselves and isn’t that a pleasure, that sense of continuity, of moving it forward.

Indeed, that was the major theme of the film, both the joy of passing it on and the grief of witnessing the line broken and shattered by the horror of war and dictatorship. So many of the musicians in exile, suffering even beyond what music can heal seeing their country torn apart by hatred, ignorance, fanaticism. Or tradition endangered by economics, as the Chinese shadow-puppeteer lamented the lack of interest from the young in his art form because of the intensive labor needed to make the puppets and the low economic return of keeping the culture’s big stories alive through theater. A similar feeling to music teachers coming here from all corners of the globe to refresh themselves at the fountain of deep Orff pedagogy, only to return home to find their programs cut or their music school closed. The perpetual war between those who would limit, narrow and shut us down and those who work to open, expand and bring us more fully alive.

Well, Mr. Yo Yo Ma, thank you for using your gifts on behalf of humanity and please know that many more are doing the same in tiny corners of the world where the TV cameras never come. Maybe we could collaborate someday?