Taking Down the Christmas Tree

“Desire cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there around a room. It stops and guilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it. But when we do, the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part. The glitter that made you want it is gone.”   

             - F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and the Damned

 

The Christmas Season is a sunbeam shining on the things we’ve chosen to ornament our homes and making them glitter yet more brightly— the lights round the windows, the holly and mistletoe, the tree brought indoors and radiant with precious ornaments carrying the stories of family and former times. All of it framed with the songs that open our hearts, the tastes that tickle the tongue, the feel of the wrapping paper and the heft of the gifts, the warmth of the fire and the smell of the mulled wine. It is art, it is theater, it is ritual, all designed to evoke the magic and mystery missing in our day-to-day life and now awakening into the glint and glitter and gleam and glamor, the sparkle and splendor, the shine and the shimmer, the twinkle and the dazzle. Life—all of it— is heightened and we glide where once we trudged, are lifted up where once we felt weighted down, feel cozy and comforted where once we felt the chaos and confusion. 

 

Then without warning, the day arrives when we simply can’t hear Jingle Bells one more time without screaming and even the notes of Silent Night fall flat. The egg nog suddenly tastes sickenly sweet, the gifts are now a problem as to where they will be stored, the tree just takes up way too much room and the ornaments feel like so much dead weight. The sunbeam has moved on and the glitter that made it magical is gone. 

 

I thought we should dismantle the Season on January 6^th, the 12^th day of Christmas, but this sense of “it’s over” has nothing to do with calendars, comes from the inside as an intuition to be wholly trusted, insists that you admit it’s time. And so this afternoon is when we will unadorn the Norfolk pine from its lights and trinkets and move it back into the lightwell where it lives the rest of the year. We’ll tuck the ornaments back into their boxes, fold up the stockings, pour the egg nog down the drain and resume our secular life. 

The sunbeam now shines on "normal" and suddenly, it's exactly the level of glitter we want.

 

Life By the Numbers

If you see me walking around my house for five minutes or so without a clear purpose, chances are I’m acting out a minor neurosis. I have a health ap on my i-Phone and suddenly, it’s not enough that I enjoy the pleasure of a daily walk around the city and appreciate the benefits of regular exercise. Now I need to know how many steps or miles I walked. If I arrive home and find it’s 8.9 miles or 19, 924 steps, I get mildly obsessed with rounding it off to 9 miles and/or 20,000 steps. If it’s too cold or rainy or late to walk around the block, I just walk around the house until the numbers click in and I get my little dopamine rush of satisfaction. 

 

In a similar fashion, my lifetime views of my TEDx talk I gave nine years ago is approaching 50,000 (I know that’s nothing next to Taylor Swift talking about getting a haircut, but hey, humor me here!). I’ve been checking it daily and there’s six more views to go. (If you haven’t seen it, check it out and you might just be the 50,000^th viewer and win… a free Orff workshop?)

 

So I’m confessing here (as I have before on several of my 3,286 previous blogs viewed by 514,924 viewers over the past 11 years) that I’m a numbers nerd. I count my strokes when I swim, notice the 3,631 Facebook friends (and wonder how many I’ve met personally) and when I hear someone has passed away, often asked how old they were. Years back, I had an odometer for my bike that eventually broke and decided not to replace because I was getting too obsessed with the miles ridden. My wife tells me that my walking Health ap might have a switch that works for biking and I’m resisting with all my might seeing if that’s true. Enough is enough. 

 

That was 322 words up to the end of the last sentence and I’m thinking I should keep writing until I hit 500. 

 

But I won’t. 

 

Life Between the Opposites

Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. 

Love tells me I’m everything. 

Between the two my life flows. 

 

                         (From a Facebook friend’s post)

 

One truth tells me I’m utterly alone in an indifferent universe.

Another truth tells me I’m intimately connected with all living beings and helped by unseen hands. 

The two truths dance together.

 

                    (My extension of the above). 

The Best Christmas Gift Ever

THE POP-POP POEM

 

                                      By Zadie Taylor— aged 10: Christmas, 2021

 

My Pop-Pop is filled with love and jokes.

My Pop-Pop is filled with care.

My Pop-Pop is filled with laughter and song.

My Pop-Pop makes everything fair.

 

And when he sings, it sounds like a chime.

And when I’m sad, he makes a rhyme.

My Pop-Pop is filled with presents and stories.

Stories filled with joy and glory.

 

And I hope you like the Pop-Pop poem,

'Cause when he visits, he brings love to your home.  

Being Here Now

 

“To be is to do.”   -Plato

“To do is to be.”  - Sartre

“Do be do be do.” – Frank Sinatra

-      Graffiti in the Antioch College bathroom, 1969

 

Ram Das would disapprove of my last two posts— don’t look forward, don’t look back, just be here now. Good advice, but not wholly practical. Since we are shaped by our past, it rides in on each day with us. Since a new horizon is always beckoning (as David Whyte often puts it), we would do well to look ahead as well. “Here” is in fact a multiplicity of places and “now” the crossroads of past, present and future. Though we can all use reminders to be in the present moment more fully, we are also creatures of becoming, always on our way somewhere, always changing and shifting and moving forward or back. 

 

My experience of the rare moments of being fully present is a matter of grace. A sunset, a sublime piece of music, a quiet moment with a loved one mysteriously stops time and frames the moment as “This. This is what I was born for.” These are not moments to schedule on a calendar or achieve through a pre-packaged step-by-step process, not experiences to call up on-demand and certainly not something to find on any shelf in a store. They arrive unexpectedly, surprisingly, mostly when the self that seeks them relaxes its muscular effort and just lets things be. 

 

But that is not to say that we are at the whim of some outside force of blessing and benediction, waiting passively to be chosen in the lottery of sublime encounters. It begins with a hunger, a thirst, a desire to remember what felt so effortless as a child. There is no better description of that loss of mystery and magic than Wordsworth’s opening lines to Intimations of Immortality:

 

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth and every common sight.

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light, 

The glory and freshness of a dream. 

Turn wheresoever I may,

By night or day,

That which I have seen I now can see no more…

 

So we make the invitation to remembrance first by the seeking, the confirmation that we care to be more attentive and receptive to beauty, magic and mystery. Then there are practices that don’t guarantee, but invite— meditation, music, moon-gazing, morning meandering in mountain meadows. We go to where we might be found and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we meet the moment in its full promise and with our whole self. 

 

So Ram Das, Plato and Sartre were on to something— to be is to do, to do is to be. But Frank Sinatra said it best of all— if you sing your way into the mystery, the being and doing are joined in the dance. “Do-be-do-be-do,” my friends.

 

  

Looking Forward

Someone once said to me: “You need three things in this life: Work that is worthy, something to look forward to and someone to share it with.”

 

My life’s work creating ceremonies at the school followed this intuition that a community marked by memorable celebrations offers something for everyone to look forward to. Sometimes in the first week of school, a kid might ask me what play we’re going to do in December or tell me they’re excited about doing the dance in our Halloween ritual. And so the Fall of the big three—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Solstice/ Kwaanza— has passed and we're all both refreshed and perhaps a bit relieved that they have come and gone. 

And alongside the big events are the small, but significant, enticements on our calendar. For a kid, it might be their Tuesday schedule with both art and music classes or a ritual Friday dinner or a weekend sports event. For an adult, it might be a lunch with a friend, an upcoming jazz concert, a weekend getaway. All those things that give each day or week or month a special character and all things that we can enjoy more fully because of all the anticipation leading up to it. 

 

The pandemic has changed much of that, crossing out happily anticipated events with the next set of protocols. Three years ago, I was invited to be a headline presenter in Australia this January and felt that enticing trip as a happy note in the music to come. By September, it had been reduced to a week of online classes and just two weeks ago, even that was cancelled. At the beginning of December, I signed up for a weekend retreat with a poet I liked in a beautiful setting, his first live gathering in over two years. By the end of the month, with the ascent of Omicron, that also was cancelled. Delete. Delete. Delete. I have a conference in Orlando, Florida in February and am waiting for that ax to fall and behead another live gathering. 

 

And so my January calendar seems suddenly empty. As of now, my weekly piano at the Jewish Home is still intact, with an additional weekly trip there to be tested. I got a summons to Jury Duty (Whoopee!) and the rest of the days are blank. Of course I will fill them the way I do and those rhythmic activities will keep the music playing. But still I yearn for those high notes when something just a little bit special makes a Thursday different from a Monday, this weekend different from that.

 

On the collective front, no one can predict what awaits and what we might look forward to. Naturally, I would hope for January 6^th to remind us that we need to restore the arrival of Wise Men (and please, finally now Women) to follow the right star and come bearing gifts to honor the rebirth of truth, justice and beauty. And finally punish (and educate) those who came to trash the Manger and those who exhorted them to do so. I would hope for every word that Martin Luther King uttered to gain flesh and bones and muscle and remind us to be courageous in the right way and keep moving that moral arc toward justice, be it one inch or one mile. 

I would wish for all of us to renew the vows that guide us to our better selves and our capacities to draw forth the better selves of the people surrounding us. I hope for the California rains to keep falling, the vaccines spiking and the virus fading, the politicians to remember they are elected to serve people, not dogmas and to help democracy rise to its full promise. In short, I hope that each and every one of us engage in work that is worthy, have something to look forward to and have someone to share it with. 

On with the year! 

Looking Back

“I intend to live forever. So far so good.”

 

To paraphrase that joke, I think 2022 is going to be a GREAT year!! So far, so good! Personally, in my little ritual ways, I sat a longer meditation this morning, had a healthy mochi breakfast and rice and beans lunch and soup and salad dinner, played piano for over two hours, walked 8 miles through the city and looked back over my journals to see what happened last year. 

 

The blend of work and play, new things and old things, milestone moments and Groundhog Day repetitions, was fun to look back at. In my extended family, there were significant 10^th and 70^th birthdays, a 50^th wedding anniversary, a fifth year in retirement. My daughter Talia and I made a new paddleball record (802!), my granddaughter Zadie went on her first backpacking trip and I went on (probably) my last. My friend Debby sent me a Mary Oliver poem by text every day of the year, my friend Yana finally came from Toronto to San Francisco after some 30 years of promising “someday,” and I had a psychic reading from someone in touch with the West African orishas. I published two books through my Pentatonic Press, wrote one that got accepted by another publisher (in process) and began another book about a trip around the world my wife and I took in 1978-79. I taught various Jazz History courses on Zoom and three live Orff courses in Carmel Valley, Oklahoma and Charleston, South Carolina. I celebrated 10 years with my Pentatonics Jazz Band with a  sparsely attended but potent concert, played at Flower Piano in the Arboretum, as SIP Tea House and at the Jewish Home. Kept up the SF School Alumni Zoom sings and the neighborhood live sings. I got to be with the grandkids six different times, ranging from four days to three weeks each visit, in Portland, San Francisco, Palm Springs and northern Michigan. It was a busy, fruitful and satisfying year, in spite of all that conspired to make it a miserable one. 

 

Today, I also looked back at the cultural losses in terms of people who have passed on and the list was so much larger than I knew. Authors like Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norton Juster (of Phantom Tollbooth fame), Beverly Cleary, Eric Carle and more. Musicians like Chick Corea, Dave Frishberg, Charlie Watts, Stephen Sondheim, Paddy Moloney (from the Chieftains) and more. Political figureheads like Desmond Tutu, Prince Phillip, Colin Powell. Also people who could have been good but chose to do bad things— Bernie Madoff, Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Donald Rumsfield, Phil Spector, Larry Flynt and more. And then the actors like Ed Asner, Cicely Tyson, Betty White, Christopher Plummer, Hal Holbrook and comedian Mort Sahl. Many had lived into their 90’s (Ferlinghetti and Beverly Cleary over 100!) and though I named their passing as cultural losses, in fact, their cultural contributions will continue to echo on far beyond their mortal bodies. We should all be so lucky. 

 

Personally and collectively, a thousand more things to say looking back over the year, but this is what rose to the top for me today. And you?