Slovenia, Sioux, Stef and Spring Rolls

Another deeply satisfying workshop with 40 Philadelphians (and some from New Jersey) giving up yet another Saturday to serve their student yet better. A day of deep thinking, deep feeling and deep listening and all rose—or should I say descended—to the call. One of the highlights for me was exploring the Slovenian song Marko Skace in six different modes. (I skipped the Locrian mode because it was too close to home—that’s what we’re living now, a weird scale with an unstable drone. Note to self: Future blog!) At the end, I commented on how Marko passed freely between the borders of Dorian and Phrygian and no one asked for his papers and everyone was refreshed by it.  

Over by 1:45, I had a lot more of the day to myself and thought about wandering down the strip mall in search of a movie theater. Had the good sense to ask first and the hotel clerk (bless her heart!) advised me to drive. Walking to my car in the 28 degree weather minus another 10 or 20 with wind chill, I was grateful for her advice. Found the mega-plex and randomly chose a movie with a good time and the credentials of Ben Kingsley in it. The Ottaman Lieutenant. Stunning scenery in western Turkey, attractive male and female leads, but an entirely forgettable movie. And then came the Herculean task of finding a restaurant.

Ruby Tuesdays, the most upscale of the lot, was entirely packed and that left McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts and Wendy’s and other fast-food affairs. So down I drove the four miles back to the hotel vainly searching for a one-of-a-kind restaurant with a dash of local character and once more, as has happened so often these past 25 years, I felt the chagrin of what we have become. A country that allows convenience to over-ride character, bright lights to overpower nuance, speed to overtake savoring and ugliness to reign over beauty. And somehow all of that is connected to what happened in November. Of course, this is not a critique of the Philadelphia suburbs, it is part of the nationwide epidemic of malls and franchises found everywhere that have lowered the aesthetic standard and the population has acclimated without noticing. Which makes me even more determined to keep the bar high in my workshops with material worthy of rising to the sublime view at the top and/or descending deeply down to its heart.

But lo and behold, I saw a Vietnamese-Thai restaurant on the other side of the street and did a quick U-turn. Oh, joy of all joys! Thai Tom Kha Gai soup and Vietnamese bun with a Thai iced tea to top it off. Heaven for this traveler! Décor not amazing, but the food was good and the folks who sat next to me in the booth commented to me how interesting it was that I was writing in a journal. With a pen! On paper!

From that opening, I found out that the fellow also wrote and had a blog about Native American issues, being of Sioux Heritage himself. How could we not talk about the pipeline and you-know-who and yet another broken treaty? And so the meal passed yet more pleasurably as strangers had live conversation about something of importance. Along with plenty of humor. That’s the way traveling used to feel before everyone buried themselves in the text messages to people they already know. A simple human exchange, strangers passing in the night. I liked it.

And so the Slovenian song and the Sioux and Spring Rolls. What would this country be without immigrants? One unbroken strip mall of Wendy’s and Dunkin Donuts without relief?

And now it’s me alone in the hotel room with the carrot of a Warrior’s game on TV, watching Stef and his many non-European teammates move the game up to the next level. People, can we just deport all the good old boys and have them rot in their own republic of Republican blandness, a place no tourist would ever want to visit? They can pat themselves on the back and laugh their ugly guffaws and flaunt their riches to each other and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

Meanwhile, go Warriors!

Awash in Overtones

I have been an advocate for Orff Schulwerk my whole life. But more and more lately, I’m feeling that the most important quality of an Orff Schulwerk teacher is already prepared before he or she has ever taken a workshop. When someone so prepared has the good fortune and karmic luck to cross paths with the right kind of Orff workshop at a ripe time, there is an instant marriage at work, a sense that a beloved whose face one has never seen, but always hoped existed suddenly appears in all her or his most radiant form. It’s love at first sight, but it’s not exactly a first sight because the vision had already been incubating. It’s just finally seeing in tangible three-dimensional form what one only vaguely dreamt of before.

And I will say this forever: since such a marriage is a matter of grace, it can never be pre-planned or forced or mandated. And as such, the Orff approach will never be and should never be expected to be a mass phenomena achieved through clever marketing or insistence that this is THE way to teach.

All this is on my mind after having the supreme good fortune to work with 9 beautiful souls at The New Jersey Performing Arts Center, some of whom I worked with back in November and some who were new to the venture. One kept making the most eloquent comments and I asked her at lunch half-joking to write them down. She did and gave it to me. This is what it’s like when someone already prepared by her life’s journey, her cultural background, her hard-earned soul-work, encounters the Orff work as I conceive and practice it:

This workshop amazes me, stimulating both sides of the brain at once. It raises the vibrations of the Spirit and fills the room with the primal connection of rhythm. Something bright and hopeful opens at the base of the Soul that calms the Ego and invites the Earth to preside.

Let me pause here. Do you feel the beauty of these words? Do you feel how I feel hearing and reading them, like someone actually understands what I’m trying to get at? Can you feel the contrast with some of the other comments I often get?

• What age do you do this with?

• Is this in the notes?

• How do you make sure this fits the National Standards?

She goes on:

My favorite part of the workshop was finding the Secret Song waiting inside each instrument. The Overtones surrounded the players, opening chakras and raising a new awareness. It made me eager to find the Secret Story hidden inside the elements of my own life—the possibilities are infinite.

After the energy released in that room coming back to me many times over, from ALL of the participants, I checked Facebook and read stories from friends talking about the purging of brown-skinned people that has begun, families ripped apart in full view. Then another post about artists being denied entrance from the list of “bad countries”( ie, where the President has no property or investments). It is not a coincidence that the people I worked with today were either people of color or people working with the artistic legacy created by people of color. It is not a coincidence that artists who could help build bridges between us all are being denied entrance. The contrast between 10 folks spending the day held in the loving embrace of color-blind Overtones and what’s happening when you step out of the workshop door is staggering.

The people prepared for the messages I perceive as central to the Orff approach to playing, singing, dancing, laughing, loving, living are the ones who have done the work to be honest, whole, authentic, open, hard-working, expressive, artistic and more, often struggling against a mainstream trying to wash them away. These are the folks I want to be with every day of my life, even if we have to go form our own republic somewhere. I’m willing to keep trying to entice those unprepared for these gifts, but it is the culture as a whole that has failed them and it is the culture that needs such massive healing. All I can do is one little class, one little workshop at a time. But when the divine marriages take place, I am happy to attend, witness and occasionally officiate. Thank you, Tanya, for you beautiful words and thank you to each and every one of today’s folks for the privilege of working with you. Let’s keep those powerful overtones echoing and resonating.

Fresh Air

No, Terry Gross did not invite me for an interview on her show. (Though in the interest of keeping education and the arts on the table of national discourse, I think she should.) Rather, this is about hotels and windows.

In Singapore, I had to fight with the air-conditioning. Always too cold and not user-friendly to control the temperature and no windows in the room that opened. Here in Newark it’s the heat. Too hot. This Goldilocks wants the room that’s just right, but again, no user-friendly occupant-controlled thermostat that was working for me. I assumed the windows wouldn’t open in this new world of centrally-controlled hermetically-sealed environments. But lo and behold, one did. Fresh air and the sounds of the city came in, but it helped.

Whether politics or hotel rooms, local control and decision-making is often the healthier choice. One-size-fits-all central control is not always the best. Like the time I gave an evening workshop in Canada in the dead of winter and the heat had been automatically turned off for the night and no one knew how to turn it on and we did clapping plays with gloves on and moved in thick winter coats. While I was coughing and sick. That was fun! ((Not!)

Hotel owners, at least keep the windows openable. That’s all I have to say on the matter.

The GPS of the Soul

Two days before one of the saddest days in our nation’s history, I drove from Atlantic City to Newark, New Jersey to give a workshop at The New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC). I stopped by my old home town of Roselle and then felt my way by some ancient navigator’s memory to downtown Newark and from there used signs, intuition and several wrong turns to get to the NJPAC building. After the workshop, I drove the rental car to the airport, first going the wrong direction and then figuring out that things didn’t feel right and turning around.

My wife and I, both of us who have entered kicking and screaming some aspects of the digital age (but not this blog), neither own an i-Phone nor use a GPS. Some of this is intentional, refusing to give our power over to machines and keeping our navigational skills active with sign-reading, paper maps, intuition and asking directions. We drove around Sicily this last summer without a single device and it all worked out just fine.

But despite my success last time in Newark, I remembered that just getting out of Newark Airport is quite complicated and then again around NJPAC and soon I would drive to a hotel in Philadelphia and then try to find my way to a friend’s house and so on. And so I gave in and rented one of the darn things along with the car. I made sure the person behind the desk programmed the first destination and helped me locate the on-off switch and off I went.

I believe I still will resist a full-out conversion, but darn, it sure was relaxing to have someone tell me what to do! I like for my mind to be actively engaged, but not always. Like taking those double-decker tour buses in strange cities, there’s something pleasurable about giving it over to someone or something else—you drive and point out the sights, I’ll just take the photos. The ten-minute trip to the hotel was filled with some 22 turns and in the end, I was very grateful to have this woman command me. Though sometimes I thought she could have let me know a few seconds earlier (“Turn right at the next intersection. NOW!”) and I can’t say I loved her tone of voice. But still, she got the job done and there was something pleasant about having company, even if a disembodied recorded voice.

Free to think and not look at maps, I couldn’t help but wonder about whether we humans would appreciate a GPS of the Soul. Forget all this choice and all the proverbial wisdom of making necessary mistakes and learning from experience and becoming stronger through our failures. If, as some since the Ancient Greek times have suggested, we have a companion Daimon or Muse or Angel who knows our soul’s destiny and is mysteriously guiding us, why the heck can’t it just say things outright! “No, do not marry that woman!! Absolutely do not accept this job! Are you out of your mind? Do not spend your inheritance on a new sports car!”

Meanwhile, our inner voices are so confused and there are so many and they rarely agree with each other and they keep changing their accent and tone so we can’t tell who’s who. It’s as if there were two or more GPS Guides:

Voice 1: “Turn left in a thousand feet.”

Voice 2: “Really? I think it would be much better to turn right in a 100 feet.”

Voice 1: “Well, that wouldn’t work, would it? He’s trying to get to Newark, not New York!”

Voice 2: “Well, maybe, but I sense that a better adventure awaits him in Manhattan.”

Me: “Well, which is it fellas?”

Voice 3: “LOOK OUT! YOU’RE GOING DOWN A ONE-WAY STREET!”

Guess we’ll just have to stick with the old-fashioned inner guides and let the GPS just figure out how to get us to our hotel in Philadelphia.

Born for Glory

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we gathered in the Community Center after lunch and after a brief statement, the women teachers in our school walked out. They had decided, with full support of their male colleagues and administration, to join their sisters worldwide to make a symbolic gesture. After they left, the remaining men teachers were left with about 200 children and time to kill before recess. So I stepped forward and said this:

“I keep coming back to Martin Luther King’s simple but profound words: That we be judged by one thing and one thing only—the content of our character. That’s what we get to choose, what we develop by the choices we make, what we decide to dream about and aim for. Mostly we don’t get to choose who we are when we’re born. We don’t choose our parents, our race, our gender, our country. We don’t get to immediately decide whether we’re poor or rich or what religion will be thrust upon us or what kind of person we’ll love.

But for some strange reason, people often from long ago and still today decided that they would judge others based on things that aren’t their choice. They have some weird notion that this race is better than that one, this face is better than that one, this country is better, this religion is better and so on and so on. And in just about every place in this world, people also decided that this gender was better than that one, even though every man who believed that owed his very life to his mother. What kind of gratitude is that?

By better I mean that just being born one way—say straight white rich Christian male—automatically makes you better without you doing anything to earn it, confers you with certain privileges and rights and opportunities that will be denied the others. And that is the history of our struggles for human rights— people of color, gays, disabled folks, pagans and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, and others victimized by all the isms simply asking for respect, dignity and equal opportunity. And that has indeed been true of women as well.

We are all, each and every one of us, born for glory. We have thousands of stories of people who were shut down, shut out and shut up who kept soldiering through all the obstacles others put in their path and came to flower in spite of it all, driven forward by their valiant effort. But there are thousands of other stories of those who didn’t have the strength, courage or circumstance to withstand the hatred and gave up, walked through life wounded, had their dreams dry up and disappear.

So let’s renew our vows here, with a special accent on young girls and women, to open the full palette of possibility to all, to give each the dignity, respect and support they deserve. The world needs people with dreams and the capacity to realize dreams. Who knows if the girl you insist can’t be a scientist might have discovered the cure for cancer or the young woman told she can’t play saxophone might have been the one to move Charlie Parker’s legacy forward?

We need all of us to help heal this troubled world. Let’s do this!”