The Legacy of James Oglethorpe

So I was doing my daily acrostic puzzle and one of the clues was “Founder of Georgia.” And in the line of miracles I’ve been experiencing lately, some name appeared from the deep recesses of my mind: “Oglethorpe.” And the letters fit.

Where did that come from? Really. I have no conscious recollection whatsoever of having studied anything about the founder of Georgia and I knew absolutely nothing about the person behind that name. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Why would it be buried somewhere in my mind and how did it escape at the needed moment? I will never know. 

But the advantage of our modern age, where a trip to the catacombs of the library was unlikely and I’ve never had a set of encyclopedias, the simplicity of a click to Wikipedia gave me no excuse not to look him up. So I did and here’s what I found: 

James Edward Oglethorpe, founder of the colony of Georgia, was born on December 22, 1696, in Yorkshire, England. After graduating from Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Oglethorpe began a military career in 1717, fighting against the Turks under Prince Eugene of Savoy.

From 1722 to 1743, Oglethorpe served in the British House of Commons, gaining a reputation as the champion of the oppressed. He pressed for the elimination of English prison abuses and, in 1732, defended the North American colonies’ right to trade freely with Britain and the other colonies.

The prison reforms Oglethorpe had championed soon inspired him to propose a charity colony in America. On June 9, 1732, the crown granted a charter to the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe himself led the first group of 114 colonists on the frigate Anne, landing at the site of today’s Savannah on February 1, 1733. The original charter banned slavery and granted religious freedom, leading to the foundation of a Jewish community in Savannah. Throughout his life, Oglethorpe remained an outspoken opponent of slavery in the colonies.

Well, wasn’t that a surprise! My kind of guy! And an auspicious beginning to the state that can honorably claim itself as the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Ray Charles, Gladys Knight, Otis Redding, Fletcher Henderson, Alice Walker, Ossie Davis, Lawrence Fishburne, and Jessye Norman from one side of the tracks and Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell, Ty Cobb, Oliver Hardy, Harry James, Johnny Mercer from the other. Yet Georgia also still has Stone Mountain intact, with Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis. the terrorist defenders of slavery, carved into the rock Mt. Rushmore style (and, I’m sorry to report, begun by Gutzon Borglum, the same carver of Mt. Rushmore). Some call it “the largest monument to White Supremacy in the country.” And it is.

But now there’s Stacey Abrams and the upcoming Senate race that will decide a lot about the next four years. Maybe it was an auspicious sign that the Crostic puzzle led me to Georgia’s more kindly beginnings and that the state can return to its more promising humanitarian foundation. On behalf of James Edward Oglethrope, I certainly hope so. 

Winning the Lottery

 

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me…

 

I do not know it— it is without name—it is a word unsaid.

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. 

 

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on.

To it the creation is a friend whose embracing awakes me.

 

Do you see, O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan— it is eternal life.

It is Happiness.

-      Walt Whitman: Song of Myself

 

Yesterday we visited the goddess Fortuna spinning the Wheel of Fortune. But that wasn’t her whole story. When the souls gathered to be re-born on earth, she had a basket filled with wood chips from the Tree of Life. Each chip was called a “lot” and from this comes the word “lottery” and the phrase “our lot in life.” Like at a raffle, each soul stepped up and she mixed up the lots and randomly chose one to hand out. On one side, it was blank and that was where family and friends and culture wrote their mark on you in life, telling you that you were one thing or another, sometimes trying to direct your dreams, letting you know which part of you they wanted to see and which they didn’t. The other side was inscribed with a Divine word that was your deeper self, your accompanying Genius/ Daimon/ Soul’s purpose. It was in the conversation and tension between the two, between what society imprints on you and what your Soul requires, that the human drama begins. Happy incarnation!

 

The mark of a healthy culture is first and foremost that it acknowledges the existence of a soulful purpose, of the need to discover how you’re put together, the determination to feed and water it, the looking into what gifts you’re meant to offer up. And secondly, that the culture organize itself around helping you to that realization, through initiation ceremonies, community song, dance and ritual, meditation practices, the disciplines of time spent in the natural world. 

 

With the loss of these practices in the growth of organized religion, the nation-state, “civilization,” such help comes through a second tier of spiritual guidance— books that carry the stories, ideas, poems you need to hear to awaken to your purpose, the art and music that speaks through images and sounds, the backpacks into the wilderness, the schools with teachers who work to see you and hear you and know who you are and might become. 

 

And now with the loss of whole segments of culture that don’t read beyond the newspaper, don’t listen beyond the latest Pop pablum, go to schools without art and music programs, that addict you to the wasteland on the screen and pull you away from attending to trees and bees and flowers and flowing rivers, with schools that care only about the superficial right answers and leave no time for the essential right questions, we come to a nation in trouble. “The center cannot hold (Yeats)” because whole populations can’t locate their own center of being. They just move from one fleeting sensation to another in a world that seems random, chaotic, meaningless. Without being able to read the inscription on our given lot, we have lost the lottery and try to fill that hole by wasting our hard-earned money on buying the corner store’s lottery tickets. 

 

But from “hole” to “whole” is just a journey of one letter. For all our impatience with and difficulty with our current Pandemic, it is a rare opportunity to step off the wheel of our often superficial busyness and dig down into those unlit corners of ourselves to remember what’s there. A time to read, to write, to lie down on the floor and listen with our whole being to Bach’s Mass in B Minor,Coltrane’s A Love Supremeor any other work that goes far beyond mere toe-tapping and booty-shaking and sound-byte riffs into the deeper layers of the Soul. A time to pick up that neglected instrument or paint brush or poet’s pen, a time to connect with old friends not just with chatty Zoom calls, but with some sense of their felt presence in your life even as you’re apart. Certainly a time to get out into the open air and if you can’t hug people, well, you still can hug trees. A time to notice all the things we usually speed past— the fluttering birds and the gurgling stream and the sun streaming through the leaves. A time to turn our lot over from the blank side now filled with the scrawl of people who don’t really know us to the divine word on the other side. We’ve been pushed to the edge of our previously known world and if we venture to that unreached horizon and pull our true lot back to the center, both personally and collectively, we can re-weave the unravelling world. 

 

And that’s how we win the lottery.  

O Fortuna

Fortuna is most widely known as the Goddess of fortune, the Goddess of luck and Carl Orff’s favorite deity, both the opening words to his Carmina Burana and the punchline of a really bad pun (“How did Carl Orff get cats to sing his composition?” “Oh, for tuna.”). She is often depicted with a Wheel of Fortune, both a deep metaphorical symbol for the apparent capriciousness of destiny and a TV game show. 

 

I once had the honor of playing the piano on which Orff composed Carmina Burana in his home in Diesen—this is true!—and improvised a Wheel of Fortune blues: 

 

“Oh sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down.

The Wheel of Fortune spins round and round,

Gets you cryin’ in the corner or dancin’ in your shoes,

What happens ain’t up to us to choose,

 

I got the Wheel of Fortune Blues, yes the Wheel of Fortune blues, 

What happens just happens, ain’t up to us to choose.”

 

After I finished, I looked up at his widow Frau Orff and asked, “Was it okay for me to play that?” worried I had trespassed on the sacred piano. “Carl would have loved it!” she burst out and that made my day—or year. 

 

At the age when I get to go in early to shop at Trader Joe’s, I’m working hard on not just being older, but deserving the title of an elder. We have data and information and knowledge, we have fantasies and dreams and hopes, but when all of that joins together with lived experience and a lifetime habit of reflection, something approaching wisdom begins to surface. And that’s the role of the elder in any culture, to offer as needed some slice of wisdom to the young people who find that door closed simply because they haven’t lived long enough yet. 

 

So the image of the Wheel of Fortune is helpful—though not the whole story. The elder will have lived through enough cycles of collapse and renewal to begin to understand that “this too, shall pass.” What appears as disaster contains some hidden seeds of renewal that the elder’s eyes can clearly see. 

 

Take politics. In my lifetime, the Presidencies have been Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. Six of one, six of another. In terms of years, that’s 40 years of Republicans and 28 (plus 4 more to come) of Democrats, but f we take Eisenhauer out of the loop (as a Republican that was much closer to Democrat policy) and include Biden’s 4 years to come, that’s 32 years each. Back and forth, up and down, the Wheel of Fortune spun by American voters keeps turning. 

 

Note that last sentence. The political wheel doesn’t spin on its own as a destiny out of our hands. We not only get to actively spin it but we can determine where it lands through our efforts to be informed, understand issues, value character, consider the future for our children. So yes, there clearly is an element of a fortune out of our hands, things that appear to happen because they’re in the right place at the right time, have found themselves at some tipping point. (Or the wrong place at the wrong time and yes, bad things can happen to good people.) Part of any wisdom is understanding and accepting that we are in dialogue with the Other World where unseen hands are spinning our fate, never to excuse us from doing our work, but also to humble ourselves to understand that efforts alone are often not enough. 

 

Orff’s life—indeed, all our lives—can certainly be read as a ride on the Wheel of Fortune. He meets the right person at the right time in 1924 and begins his visionary work as a composer and an educator at a school where he is hired to teach music to young modern dancers. That sense of being in the right place at the right time meeting the right person stayed with him his whole life, as precisely the needed person for his vision to unfold shows up at his side time and time again. He himself couldn’t write a better script at the seeming chance meetings and apparent coincidences that allowed each step of his work to unfold. 

 

And yet, this also was during the Nazi regime in his homeland, plenty of times when it felt like the Wheel of Fortune was stuck at the bottom and might never rise again. But it did. Both personally in his life and collectively in German life. 

 

And here in the U.S., we’ve spent four years astounded that what we thought was bottom kept getting lower, evoking nostalgia for people like Bush and Nixon. And then lower yet. And then the pandemic, things briefly looking better and now everything closing yet again. O Fortuna!

 

But wisdom says, with the help of our daily choices and fervent prayers in any style, the Wheel will rise again (even as the literal Ferris Wheel just installed in the Golden Gate Concourse had to close again as we re-entered the Covid Purple Zone.). Though there seems to be so much evidence to support the notion of life as random and all of us subject to the caprices of Fate, I keep my vision set on the larger cycle of destruction and creation, death and renewed life, collapse and new growth. It’s a good way to see us through the end of so much that we thought was solid and dependable in the world we’ve known—from the simple acts of being able to shake hands with someone, sit in a restaurant together, sing and dance with people to leaders who hide their lies suddenly flaunting them and trying to bring down every foundation stone of democracy we depend on—suddenly feeling undependable, not something we can count on. 

So we are indeed in the zone between the old world dying and the new world yet to be born. It is the world Yeats felt over a hundred years ago in his poem The Second Coming,with lines like: things fall apart, the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

 

But a new center was formed from the chaos and wisdom tells us that’s where we are now. Though we appear to be stuck, the Wheel of Fortune is turning and from where I sit, it is on the upswing. With our help, of course. 

How Much Longer?

Unlike your bad back, the fight with your boss, the drama with your phone company, no one can complain about the pandemic. First off, because we’re all in it together. What can you say that is new for someone else or that they haven’t already felt or experienced? Secondly, because if you find yourself whining about the extra 5-minute line at Trader Joes while it’s drizzling outside, you’re insensitively ignoring the hundreds of thousands who have died, the thousands more who couldn’t say goodbye to a loved one dying or grieve properly, the thousands more who are struggling because they can’t do their job. Really, you’re going to complain about the line at the store? And finally, there’s no space to brainstorm a solution unless you’re a scientist on the brink of perfecting the vaccine. What’s the point if you can’t do anything about it?

 

But like the weather, we do talk about it anyway. And so I’ll chime in with my miniscule thoughts, probably of interest to no one but me and even I’m not that fascinated. But here it is:

 

I think I’m perfectly content to stay in my house, in my neighborhood, in my city, but I’ve had an awful lot of dreams about being at airports and missing my flight. Consciously, I really don’t miss flying and traveling, but my subconscious is suggesting otherwise. 

 

And then there’s the reflection on the 60,000 hours spent giving music classes and Orff workshops. I’ve both accommodated to and genuinely enjoyed some aspects of the Zoom alternative, but buried beneath that is the simple fact that I miss holding hands in a circle with strangers who become friends of sorts within five minutes. I miss throwing out musical pings and receiving back their responsive pongs. I miss the palpable vibrations of voices raised together in song (not on muted mics) and the swirl and motion of circle-dancing together. I miss the laughter and the buzz and the bubbly chatter before, during and after the activities. I miss the thoughtful silence as the words tumble out from me describing the importance of this work we’re doing, taking flight and finding poetic utterance on the wings of the group energy. I miss the closing circle, the group exhale and sense of returning to the everyday word having tasted a bit of heaven, fortified, inspired, warmed and touched. 

 

The echoes of this all come through on Zoom as within five minutes with total strangers in gridded screens, I feel the sensation of us all already old friends, so relaxed and joking and having fun with little gestures of response. But it ain’t nearly the same.

 

And so while I’ve accepted, adapted to, found gifts in the previously-unimaginable world of the pandemic (who ever would have guessed this would happen a mere 10 months ago?), I am also growing weary of it. I don’t want to return to the normal of taking everything for granted and distracting ourselves with endless sensation and the hyper-speed of useless busyness and unneeded consumption. But I do want it to end (vaccines, we’re waiting!) so I can shake hands with strangers, hug friends, sit in a the bustle of a crowded restaurant, watch a Warriors game in a bar and most importantly, stand in a circle with kids or adults about to make some magic happen with song, dance and instruments. Yes I do.  

10,000 Hours

Jazz musician Charlie Parker practiced his saxophone some ten hours a day for four years as a teenager. Mythologist Joseph Campbell read nine hours a day for five years. The Beatles played together every night in Hamburg for two years. These are the kind of details the romantic bios don’t show and most of us are left the impression that God-given talent is enough— you either have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, be content to read their books, go to their concerts and buy their records. But what about practice?

 

The given wisdom is that it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of focused practice to achieve mastery in any field. Even in the spiritual world, enlightened Zen masters are not tapped with a wand from Buddha, but commit to a Zen practice (the word Buddhist use) of rigorous and disciplined meditation to break through to their Original Nature. Divine inspiration is a convenient fiction, but as Michelangelo once remarked, “If you knew how hard I worked, you wouldn’t say ‘Wonderful!’”

 

In my own little field of music education, I’ve put in some 40,000 hours over 45 years teaching kids, another 10,000 teaching adults in workshops and summer courses and at least another 10,000 planning classes, preparing classes, practicing music for classes, reflecting on classes, reading and writing about the ideas behind the practice. That’s at least 60,000 hours invested in my craft. If I’m pretty good at it, it’s no mystery why.

 

And yet I don’t want to entirely dismiss God-given talent alongside painstakingly crafted talent, divine inspiration alongside the perspiration. Because if it was a simple as putting in the hours, we might surmise that anyone could randomly pick a field, put in the allotted time and emerge a genius. Not so. I’ve put in countless hours on piano practice, but you will never hear my name next to Vladimir Horowitz or Hazel Scott. There is some mystery as to what we choose to practice and why and how long we stick with it. There are small and big signals that let you know that this is the practice for you, signs of notable progress, affirmation from the world, pleasure in the undertaking even when working through the hard spots. Scientifically speaking, you could say that we each have a unique neurological wiring that steers us to this sport over that one, this field of study instead of the other, the first road diverged in a yellow wood over the second one. 

 

And it can get very specific. The extraordinary virtuoso pianist Art Tatum studied violin for two years, switched to piano and played better after two weeks than in the two years of violin. And more specific yet. John Coltrane started out on alto sax, but felt he only found his true voice when he switched to tenor sax. 

 

If you telescope out to a larger mythological perspective, we each are endowed with a particular genius that needs us to bring it out into the world. It doesn’t particularly matter if things come easily for us or are difficult, if the notes are dictated from beyond as they seemed to be by Mozart or painstakingly tried out, crossed out and re-composed as they did for Beethoven or Ravel. The point is simply that we commit ourselves fully and put in the time, even when our friends invite us out to the party or there’s a good movie on TV.

 

It also doesn’t matter if it’s a sexy talent like acting in movies or playing ball in the NBA that brings fame, fortune and the need to wear sunglasses in public or a hidden gift to the world like teaching music to kids. It demands to be brought forth and the hours of practice await you.

 

And what have you spent your time doing?

 

Flowers for Princess Di

Princess Diana died on August 31, 1997 and Mother Teresa on Sept. 5, 1997. Guess which one got the most media coverage?

 

And so I never followed the Diana story, not interested in playing into the rich and privileged star celebrity culture. But having just watched Season 4 of The Crown and Diana: In Her Own Words, I’m fascinated by her story. It really was a fairy tale life, not in the superficial sense the media means it, but in a deeper mythological vein. 

 

Consider: She was the youngest daughter in the Spencer family. In the fairy tales, it is the youngest one who is set apart, who accomplishes the needed tasks the older ones often fail to carry out. She recounts that she always felt herself apart, with some intuitive sense of a great destiny awaiting her. 

 

Meeting Prince Charles was a bit like Cinderella at the ball. Of course, the Spencers were royalty and she was not shoveling ashes, but she was living with roommates and working in various low-paying jobs (like teaching!). 

 

After the marriage, the place where most fairy tales end, is the moment where hers begins. She is like Rapunzel locked in the tower of Buckingham Palace, the Queen and the Royal Family not intentionally mean to her, but unpracticed in offering welcome, love and support. Including her emotionally-arrested privileged husband Charles, more interested in polo than exploring a deeper humanity. She is like the neglected step-daughter, thrust by circumstance into a new life that becomes unbearable. In the midst of riches and fame and fortune, she feels yet more isolated, more lonely. Like Cinderella weeping at the hearth, she sits at the toilet vomiting, her unhappiness manifesting as and driven home deeper by bulemia.  

 

Each day she is attacked, not by monsters shooting arrows, but paparazzi shooting photos. Each and every flash of a camera bulb sends a wound to a soul that only craves a human-size privacy. Alone and unloved inside the palace, assaulted by cameras and cheers outside the palace, there is nowhere for her to be, to fully breathe her authentic self. 

She soon discovers that breaking through the wall of adoration, connecting in short bursts of person-to-person humanity with the screaming, adoring throngs brings some comfort. Simple acts like taking someone’s camera and taking a picture of them or hugging a boy sick with Aids moves her out of the Ice Queen role the public expected and allows her to feel a bit more of who she is and could be.

 

But then the backlash. Now she is even more excessively adored and the cameras and crowds multiply. And inside the palace, her husband is jealous that she gets more attention and turns his own to his long-standing mistress. Having two children has its healing moments—she genuinely loves and adores them and hugs them and tells them so. But now post-partum depression is added to the bulemia, isolation and media assault. Kids, be careful what you wish for—being a princess is no fun!

 

Back a few posts ago, I wrote: All wisdom traditions agree that the light shines through the cracks in our armor, that our wounds are the entry points to our larger selves. Betrayals in the human world are often necessary to the soul’s awakening. 

 

And so it was with Diana. Prince Charles seemed stuck in his small world (though to be fair, would be interesting to hear his side of the story), but in the midst of this relentless and deep suffering, the woundings from being unloved by the immediate family and overloved by the media-soaked crowds let some light into her soul’s calling. She throws herself into working with those wounded literally by land mines and Aids viruses, especially the children, and uses her fame and privilege on behalf of them. She becomes a sexier, more glamorous, but possible equally important and effective Mother Theresa, not in spite of her fairy tale life, but because of it. 

 

Then from the fairy tale to the Greek/ Shakespeare tragedy. She became affectionately known as Princess Di and add an e to that and you can see that it was not going to end well. That the very thing that haunted and stalked her her whole life long was following her through that tunnel with cameras poised to shoot and that the driver’s careless mistake trying to flee them became the tragic flaw that led to her death. (Interesting enough, she was buried with a rosary in her hand that Mother Theresa had gifted her. Yet more proof that this was a story that had to be.)

 

The thousands of flowers placed in front of Buckingham Palace by her mourners at her funeral were testimony to an impact that began from superficial star worship and moved in the course of her life to soulful human appreciation. 

 

This little piece is my own offering, a small bouquet of flowers to a fellow human being who suffered greatly and worked with her wounds to bring some light and healing to the world. 

R.I.P. Princess Di.

Divine Rights

The jazz pianist Art Tatum. The British royalty Prince Charles and Princess Diana. The German philosopher/poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Today’s assignment—make a connection between them. 

 

• Art Tatum was a virtuosic jazz pianist who astounded everyone—including other virtuoso pianists like Vladimir Horowitz— with his impeccable technique, clear tone and dazzling imagination as he improvised instant re-compositions of jazz popular songs. Thanks to Norman Granz, he was sufficiently recorded to leave behind an aural legacy of his genius. Yet he never performed in Carnegie Hall, there is barely any film footage of him and he spent most of his professional life performing in nightclubs with audience members talking while he played. When he died in 1956, his savings amounted to $6000. Every jazz musician knows his work, but it is unlikely that more than 2% of the American population knows who he was. 

 

• Prince Charles is the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth who married (and later divorced) Diana Spencer, known later to the world as Princess Di. When they married, tens of thousands of people lined the streets cheering in festive revelry as if the Golden State Warriors had won another NBA Championship or Joe Biden had won the election. When they traveled to Australia, the streets were again lined with thousands and thousands of adoring British subjects. While watching those scenes recently in The Crown and later Princess Diana: In Her Own Words, I couldn’t help but think: “All that attention—for what? What had they done other than be born into a royal family and played polo or put on a nice hat? Without having had to accomplish a single noteworthy thing (as Art Tatum did), they simply rode on “The Divine Rights of Kings” that convinced whole populations that what the royal couple ate for breakfast was worthy of front page stories.” (This was well before Diana actually had done some good works and revealed a humanity that touched people). 

 

• And Goethe? When I turned my calendar page to December, this was the quote:

 

“So divinely is the world organized that everyone of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.”   

 

So Art Tatum is graced with a divine spark of genius that he meets head-on and cultivates through hours and hours of disciplined practice and then generously shares with the world. Prince Charles inherits a human-fabricated mythology of the divinity of royalty and does little to meet it beyond showing up for the newspaper photo. 100 people in a club pay scattered attention to Art Tatum, 10,000 people in the street cheer for Prince Charles just because. What’s wrong with this picture?

 

But Goethe suggests we all have the possibility of participating in the divinity of the world, that it is not enough to ride on the coattails of the stars and celebrities, but watch for our own place and time and understand that each person’s divine spark is in balance with all others. 

 

Stay tuned for more on Princess Di.