Life and Lists

Sometimes it feels like there’s living and then there’s ticking off lists so you have time to live. And when you finally get to the end of the list (which will then regenerate five seconds after you completed the last task), sometimes it feels like you’ve forgotten how to live. 

It has been a busy, busy time these past couple of weeks. Every time I teach a class to kids, it feels like the real deal. Life in all its splendor and difficulty. But when the classes come relentlessly at the same time as report cards at the same time as packing for the next round of teaching in Salzburg at the same time as answering the needed e-mails to clear the deck at the same time as paying bills at the same time as… well, you get the picture. I’m still some 10 e-mails short of “finished” and my suitcase is not quite packed with my flight taking off within four hours, but I’m getting close to that feeling of relief that I got through it all and am ready to live again. 

Lists are inevitable and so is life and it’s best when the two are joined at the hip so that the item on the list IS part of the life, no matter how mundane. It’s all about how much and when and with what deadlines and with what kind of attention you can bring to each thing. Sometimes the lists overwhelm the living and sometimes the living allows you to drop the list and fully feel the coming of Spring. The calendar announced it, but to wholly know it means to sit amongst the flowers with a bit of warm sun on your face. 

I’m taking a step backward into Winter with this trip to Salzburg, but that means I can feel all over again Winter give way to Spring. I hope. Meanwhile, off to pack thick sweaters and medium-weight shirts. And whether Winter or Spring prevail, the Salzburg hills will be alive with the sound of music—well, at least inside the Orff Institut—and I’m ready to wholly sing in the choir. 

The Tree in the Forest

Noticed the other day that my TEDx talk from 6 years ago hit 40,000 views. Following the “Famous” post, this is equivalent to buttonhole fame in the big picture of fame and fortune, but still I’m grateful to be in the mix of public discourse. Gary Snyder’s Zen teacher once told him:

Sweep the garden.

Any size.

That this quote stays with me is prophetic of feeling how small my garden is next to the thousand-acre mega-farms. But no matter. And in some ways, more real and certainly more intimate to be sweeping every inch of a space I’ve come to know so well.

Meanwhile, noticing that the Blogpost views these past weeks are way down. Not that I compulsively check numbers, but I do notice. And sometimes it feels like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. But maybe the bugs and birds do and that’s enough. 

12 kids are about to enter my music classroom for some serious fun and frivolity and I’m not the least bit disappointed that there are not 12,000 or 12 million of them. It would be challenging to play a name game with that number.

On it goes. 

Famous

                                         “ The river is famous to the fish…

                                           The boot is famous to the earth, 

                                           more famous than the dress shoe,

                                          which is famous only to floors…

                                          I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

                                         or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, 

                                         but because it never forgot what it did.”

                                                     Excerpts from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Famous

Fame and fortune. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to crave? How lucky I am that I seem to have just enough of both. Enough fortune to live in an expensive city, buy my groceries, have an occasional dinner out and miraculously, to have put both my children through college. And enough fame that I still get invited to places far and wide to teach, my books steadily sell and people show up at my workshops. 

In short, fame and fortune of modest proportions, enough to keep me fed, clothed and working, but not so much that I need sunglasses in public places and have to follow the stock market every day and worry about investments. Truly, the greatest perk of fame, any size, is the opportunity to get to keep doing what you love, to keep sharing skills, ideas and materials you’ve spent a lifetime crafting with those who seem to need it. To have the constantly renewing pleasure of offering some tasty food to satiate people’s hunger and please their palate and enjoy their convivial company around the dinner table of your calling. I would add to Ms Nye’s poem— to be useful, like a pulley or buttonhole, easing the weight of someone’s unknowing and hauling it efficiently from the unknown to the known, closing the shirt of one’s confusion so you can go out in public without your belly showing. 

This Saturday, I will fly to the Orff Institut in Salzburg to work intensively for two weeks with 16 people from some 11 different countries come to feast on 9 months of Orff Schulwerk. This will be the 9^thsuch group I’ve worked with since 2003 and always a delight to work with such committed and motivated people who are immersed from head-to-toe in the full range of Orff’s far-reaching vision. My fame in the international Orff world is just right for my hope to keep getting to share what I know and keep exploring together with the students what I yet don’t know. The fortune is modest, but enough to get me to Austria, Italy, Turkey for free and with extra United miles to boot! Help pay for a few Belgian cherry beers at the Merkur (market) and come home with a few Euros in my pocket. 

Meanwhile, one more week at school with children who are impressed by rock star and movie star fame (it’s their patriotic duty), but singularly unimpressed that their teacher is in international high demand and published 8 books. As they should be. We just go about our work with a mallet that’s famous to a xylophone, a hand famous to the ukele and lips famous to the recorder. It’s enough.

The Wisdom of Flowers

 This the view from my back deck. The cala lilies opening to the heavens and the trumpet flowers looking down at the earth. Two different perspectives and each necessary to help us remember something beyond our list to buy dish soap and find out when the Warriors play next. 

How often do we stand outside in the night and look up into the heavens? Lie on our backs during the day and gaze up at the clouds? How else can we remember how infinitesimally small we are in this vast universe? One microscopic dot in an enormous web of life. And that’s okay. Isn’t it grand just to be included in the majesty of the stars? Whenever we’re overinflated with our own self-importance, it’s a good idea to look up and open our arms to the heavens. The cala lilies recommend it.

And then let’s not forget the ground under our feet. It’s delicious to feel our spirit flying up, but also good to dig down into the soil where soul awaits, get our hands dirty in the garden. Spend some time with the ants and lie down in the grasses. Plenty of time—an eternity?—to float disembodied in the ether when we’re done here. So while we’re on this earth, let’s enjoy the earthiness of our corporeal existence. Follow the gaze of the trumpet flowers. 

Heaven and earth. Today’s lessons from the flowers. 

Just Right

Homeostasis is the state of steady internal conditions maintained by living things. This dynamic state of equilibrium is the condition of optimal functioning for the organism and includes many variables, such as body temperature and fluid balance, being kept within certain pre-set limits.   (Wikipedia)

Yesterday I sat in the park to read a book. I chose a bench in full sunlight and after two minutes, thought “Too hot!” So I moved to the shade. “Too cold!!” I was searching for “Just right!” but never found it. Direct sun with the ever-thinning ozone layer is simply too intense, but the March air in San Francisco still carries a chill. 

It strikes me how much time we spend each day searching for “just right.” Not too hungry, not too full. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too sleepy, not too buzzed. Our day revolves around the body’s cycles and its quest for equilibrium. And so we eat periodically, snack occasionally, try to be a 21^stcentury 7 glasses of water person, dutifully exercise, rest and so on in search of an elusive homeostatic equilibrium that can only last so long before tipping one way or the other. 

What’s impressive is how clearly we know when something is too much, too little or just right. Not that we always act on it. We may eat to excess or diet to excess because the brain can over-ride the body, but our homeostatic intelligence is functioning nonetheless.

And I believe that intuitive, often unspoken wisdom exists in other areas as well. We know we should like this person, but we don’t. Or we shouldn’t and we do. We get talked into doing this job or joining this church or buying this product often against our sensed feeling that something is rotten in this state of Denmark. If only we could trust our innate sense of wisdom, whether or not we find the words to illuminate and clarify the felt intuition. Time and again we don’t and later wish that we had.

If we build our life choices—small ones like when to eat and how much and when to get up and move and when to lie down for a bit and big ones like choosing life careers or partners—around our awareness of homeostatic bliss and what’s needed for the “optimal functioning of our organism,” why, I believe we would be one inch closer to happiness.

More to say, but I need a snack!

$10 Tea

I just finished the book The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. I like her books a lot and this was particularly interesting in terms of finding out more about tea, particularly Pu’er tea, an aged tea formed into cakes and high on the list of tea connoisseurs. So it has entered into various conversations lately and in the course of these talks, the Lovejoy Tea House came up. 

So when I got off of the J-Church streetcar yesterday and it started to rain and I notice there was Lovejoy’s Tea House, it seemed like the perfect time to try it out. At 3 in the afternoon, it was full, but the British hostess graciously fit me into one seat in the corner. They didn’t have any Pu’er tea, so I settled for an herbal mix (called a tisane—don’t know anyone who actually uses this word!). 

But there was a catch. You couldn’t order a single cup of tea. You had to order a pot. For $10. Priciest cup of tea I ever had! 

But then I had a second cup and realized it was now down to $5 per cup. My next cup brought it down to $3.33, my 4^thcup to $2.50 and my 5^thto $2.00. I was beating the system! Each cup I drank was cheaper! There was still a little left in the pot and I should have had one more, because with tip and tax, the price was rising again. But I let it go at that.

By the time I left, the rain had let up, so that worked out as well. I went from there to a play and had to go to the bathroom five times during the performance, so there were other hidden expenses. 

This my lesson on the economy of tea drinking.

Progress

I don’t think I could name a single person that doesn’t feel we’re living in terrible times. As Michael Meade says, “nature is rattling and culture is unraveling” and the most honest and frequent reaction to the daily news is “WTF?!!!!!!” The constant shadow of climate change, of too many people and too little resources, of everything we thought we knew and could count on— like a President who at least pretends to tell the truth and public that at least pretends to care if he lies—is up for grabs. The solid ground beneath our feet is like a daily earthquake—unreliable, scary and damaging. 

And yet. 

A mere century ago, World War I just ended, Mussolini began his Fascist Party and Hitler gave his first speech to the German Worker’s party. Women in the U.S. couldn’t vote, Prohibition was signed into law, 38 black men were lynched, as was the white leader of the International Workers of the World organization. My father at one-years-old would grow up in a world that might call him a dirty Jew. That year, Cole Porter married Linda Lee Thomas to hide his homosexuality. And so on. 

I’m thoroughly enjoying the Australian mini-series “A Place to Call Home” which takes place in the 1950’s. By that time, homosexuality was still considered a disease and a perversion to be “cured” by electro-shock therapy, it was scandalous for a Protestant to marry a Jew or even a Catholic and growing up in New Jersey, just about all my friends and relatives used the “n” word without apology as well as all the familiar epithets for Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, gays, etc. 

Looking back it all from the people I spend time with now and knowing what I know, I can’t help but think, “What the heck is wrong with you people?!!!!” And yes, I know that there are far too many of them amongst us still and they all have the power to vote, but in the public conscious, the ideas and attitudes about all the ways you can limit people and put them down and publicly insult them and unabashedly hate them have changed dramatically and I wouldn’t trade one second of it for “the good old days.” Caning and corporeal punishment of children is mostly a thing of the past, the last person lynched was in 1981 (!!!!) and nobody is training for trench warfare. 

Believe me, none of this is an excuse to relax. I think the horror of our time is we know so much about what care of the environment, raising of healthy and happy children, tolerance, acceptance, compassion and celebration of “the other,”, the gifts of diversity look like and could be and are in small pockets (like the school where I work), and yet, we’re still stuck in the old ways that cause so much suffering, still having to deal with ignorance and the purposeful marketing of ignorance so the rich and powerful can have their way. That’s our version of trench-warfare.

But let’s not lose sight of the extraordinary progress humanity is making in enlarging their hearts, minds and attitudes. Not fast enough, not wide enough, not deep enough, but it’s happening and it makes it a good time to be living. Not to mention an extra 25 years in life-expectancy since 1919 and affordable dark chocolate bars at Trader Joes. 

That’s progress.