Belonging and Generosity

 

“Most of us have talents and qualities that live in isolation from the world, never finding a proper outlet or focus. This can lead to a sense of aimless, endless adaptation, rather than a growing feeling of belonging and generosity.”    – David Whyte

 

This description from an upcoming workshop with poet David Whyte captured the essence of my day yesterday. After a morning of arranging upcoming workshops in Spain and Istanbul, I biked to the school where I’m assisting the teacher working with 7^th and 8^th graders. Two satisfying classes with kids discovering the joy when the music locks in and grooves followed by an equally remarkable class in which the kids never quite settled into the chemistry the class required and we had to stop and have them just sit in a circle in silence. 

 

After about five minutes, one of them spontaneously led a go-round in which each kid shared how they felt and what could have been an antagonistic 8^th grade “us against the teachers” moment miraculously was a sincere “I feel disappointed in my peers.” (With a few of the more mature adding “and myself.”) I had to leave before class was over to get to my next scheduled event, but told that child how impressed I was by his leadership, acknowledged to everyone that giggling is not inherently “bad,” a natural response to doing something new and risky, but something to move through and trust the teacher, who also took an enormous risk doing something new and unfamiliar. They listened respectfully and apparently continued their sincere discussion and pledged to try again the next class. What could have been disaster was (hopefully) an increase in trust and respect and accountability. 

 

From there, I went to the Jewish Home and the crowd listening to Javier on clarinet and me on piano seems to be growing, some 20 to 30 people. Because of my next event, I had my guitar with me and began by singing some old familiar folk songs with the group. Things like Bicycle Built for Two, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Que Será, Skinnamarink, A You’re Adorable, Home on the Range, De Colores  and more. Then on to the piano with clarinet, from the Itsy Bitsy Spider  to Mozart’s Requiem and on to our growing repertoire of opera arias, Sousa Marches, Strauss Waltzes, a few jazz standards and ending with a rollicking New Orleans-style Struttin’ with Some Barbecue. No need for these folks edging ever nearer to death’s door to wonder if there’s a heaven. We were in it. And will back for more next Friday.

 

Rushed out to my car and drove to the park where I met the neighbors who I began to sing with out on the street during the pandemic. Many have technically moved away, but we’re staying connected with these monthly meetings and what a delight to see the 3-year olds now 5 and almost 6, with our shared song repertoire part of their growing up. Today’s theme out on the grass at the Fuschia Dell was Halloween and after my repertoire of D minor songs that gave them opportunities to sing, dance, conduct, make faces, we did a free-form version of the playparty Paw-Paw Patch (now, of course, Pumpkin Patch) where one kid skips around freely while all clap and sing and then all follow her or him. Then at the end, all the kids skip around with the adults following and then the adults with the kids. Hilarious and great exercise!

 

So here was my afternoon with 13 year-olds, 93 year-olds, 3 year-olds one after another and every talent and quality that I’ve developed over a long lifetime finding a place where it can be of use. Bring people together, bring the parts of each person together, offer some comfort, some happiness, some beauty. Unlike the plumber who has a recognized profession responding to recognized needs, I’ve had the good fortune and sense to create these little communities where none existed before. Began volunteering to play at The Jewish Home in 2008, starting singing with the neighbors in 2020, started mentoring a colleague at another school other than mine in 2021, began giving workshops nationwide around 1984 and worldwide in 1990. Though I recognize money as a form of legitimate recognition and am happy to receive it (though still less than a plumber’s rate!), much of the above is volunteer, an easy generosity because the happiness of being useful and singing and dancing with others is its own form of recompense. 

 

The moral of the tale? If you can’t find an existing outlet for your creative energies, make one. If there’s no job description that matches your passion and interest, create one. If you can’t find the place and people to whom you belong in the formal institutions like church or work, make the effort to find the people who appreciate what you have to offer, introduce them to each other and begin to gather when and however you can. 

 

And when the forces gather to support and encourage and affirm this kind of work, always, always, be grateful.

Healing Mantras

My walk through the online Collective Trauma Summit feels like a stroll through the woods, astonished by the little treasures of Fall leaves and wanting to bring them home to arrange in a basket on my table. But instead of leaves, there are little phrases tossed out, some accidentally poetic rhymes, some that I’m re-arranging as such. Rhyme and rhythm are age-old strategies for remembering what’s important in the short, terse forms of mantras, proverbs, sayings, short poems and songs. (Advertisers use it too, but for a self-serving purpose. I’m still wondering if I brushed my teeth with Pepsodent whether I’d remember where the yellow went!). 

 

All of these below are first-draft arrangements of reminders of how to heal ourselves and the world (same process), some of which might be worthy of further development into a bonafide poem or song or rap. For now, just a look at what we need to discard, what we need less of as business-as-usual in counter-productive and threatening to our health and survival, what we need more of to co-create the world we deserve and long for. In no particular order (and thanks to the many people who already used some of these words, though not in the re-arranged form here):

 

• Less fanatic forgetfulness, more fantastic forgiveness.

• Less invincible heroes, more wounded healers.

• To sustain the eco-system, dismantle the ego system.

• When the present isn’t pleasant, don’t flee it. See it. Be it. And begin to free it.

• When the heart is filled with fear, don’t feed it. You don’t need it. Just feel it, then heal it.

• When troubles turn up at your door, throw you down to the floor and shake you to your very core, don’t ignore. Run toward the roar. 

• When the slings and arrows come to your town, aimed at you to bring you down, stand firmly on your being’s ground and sing out loud your beauty’s sound. 

 

Sounds better spoken—or sung. If you want to make a hit song from any of it, let’s negotiate my royalites. J

 

 

Through the Eyes of the Other

When the first photos of the Earth from space were publicly shown, people predicted the dawn of a New Age, an expanded consciousness that finally got us out of our narrow slice of reality and see the bigger picture. It was the iconic image on the cover The Whole Earth Catalogue, a shopper’s guide to the new world a’comin’. 

 

Well, it didn’t quite work out as we hoped. At least, not yet. Seems we’re more hunkered down than ever in our little corners, holding desperately on to our security blankets of political or religious dogma, the very divisiveness that got us into this mess in the first place. 

 

But as the Collective Trauma Summit bears witness to, many are emerging and reaching across the aisle and discovering that at the roots of all cultures, all places, all people, we all share the same joys and sorrows, beauties and ugliness, hopes and despairs— with different words/ sounds/ images/ stories, but at the root, the same. And in that recognition comes the realization that we are each other’s medicine, that (as Maya Angelou says) “We go forth alone and stand as ten thousand.” Or seven billion. 

 

To bring the telescope down to my tiny corner of the world, the music class with children. I’ve always tried to think big about what’s going on there, but like most of us, the first step was to teach today’s classes and plan tomorrow’s. But that questioning—“What am I after here? What’s really going on? What are we doing?”— was always on my mind and the path to some answers was not through getting a doctorate in music education. It was through looking at it all through the eyes of multiple disciplines, diverse thinkers, discoveries in other fields. This led me to a lifelong appetite for reading that brought me into the worlds of mythology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, orality and literacy, mathematics, educational philosophies, poetry, gender studies, social justice, spiritual practices, the history of Western music, of jazz, of various “world” musics, the lives and thoughts of composers and improvisers and yet more. Each became a window to seeing deeper into each class with my 3 year-old, 8 year-old, 13 year-old and more students. A way to look at my discipline through the eyes of others and emerge with a large and clearer perspective.

 

So when I copied down some of Dr. Sará King’s words from the recent Collective Trauma Summit, I kept thinking, “Yes! Yes! That’s it! That’s what I’ve been trying to do and am still trying to do, whether at a school, singing with neighbors or playing piano for elders. “ Here is what she said, with the boldface mine.

 

“We need to look at these festering centuries-old wounds of ancestral and intergenerational trauma that is alive in each of us and is interrupting the force-field of intimacy and interconnectness that is our birthright.  What are the kinds of truly intimate spaces in which we can perceive ourselves differently in a way that what matters to me, both the pain and joy in my body can be received by another with a loving awareness. It calls on each of us to be reflecting back to each other the uniqueness and richness of our being.”

 

Yep. Yesterday I had 8^th graders do mirror movement with each other, with partners they normally wouldn’t have chosen. An activity that wouldn’t have been their first choice, but I knew they needed it. And I’d like to think that at the end of watching each closely, expressing something in their body about some quality or emotion they feel and copying the other’s expression, that they had the opportunity to perceive each other just a little bit differently. They had the option to express joy or pain without the extreme vulnerability of words, to show at least a little bit of the uniqueness and richness of their being at a time in life when much of it goes into hiding, worried about being shamed by peers or unseen by adults. 

 

The exercise developed into double-mirroring with groups of four and then all four creating a choreography to a song I sang in which contributed one motion and they decided how to put them together. And so the connection reached deeper into the creative act, as it does. And then, of course, they shared back and commented on each other’s first-draft work, expressing the details of appreciation that helps craft the creative act and refine it.

 

And so when Dr. King said the next thing, I was already there with her.

 

“We have an extraordinary resource in us in the presence of art. In the presence of altered aliveness— the neuroscience of witnessing moving art is that the brain doesn’t feel it as outside of ourselves, but inside.”

 

Here she’s speaking about standing in front of a painting that stops us and draws us in or listening to fabulous music at a concert. But the whole show amps up a notch when you’re the person actually creating art and yet again, when you create it with others.  

 

Nothing she said was a new idea for me, but all of it was a marvelous affirmation and another way to think about and talk about this tiny corner of a big universe that so few understand or pay attention to. Yet here it was, present in a Conference dedicated to the most important thing on our collective table— the healing of ourselves and the world.

 

Perhaps I could be invited to speak at a future Conference? Or better yet, do a class with all participants.

The "We" Pronoun

My teacher Avon Gillespie grew up as a black middle-class child in Los Angeles. He told me that during the Watts Riots, Bessie Smith and the Georgia Sea Island singers came out and sang on the streets the roots music of the Gullah people to help stabilize the community. Avon happened upon them and stood mesmerized, feeling like they sang to a deep black identity that had been hidden under middle class urban layers. He had come home.

 

 I remember feeling a bit envious that such a clear sense of belonging and identity would never happen to me. My grandparents were dispossessed Jews who immigrated from Belaruse, my parents chose to raise me Unitarian, far from any Jewish identity and as an adult, I chose to follow a Buddhist practice. As a musician, I immersed myself in jazz and other music of the African diaspora, continued my childhood piano attempts to master Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, studied South Indian drumming, Balinese gamelan, Bulgarian bagpipe and yet more. In any given week, I may cook Japanese miso soup, Chinese stir fry, Vietnamese bun, Thai curry, Mexican tacos, Spanish gazpacho, Italian pasta. In short, I live at the crossroads of many cultures without wholly identifying with any one of them. 

 

Perhaps the closest I’ve come to feeling I’ve found my people is weirdly, online with the second Collective Trauma Summit. Kudos to Thomas Hubl, the German organizer, for the wisdom and good sense to include a wide, wide variety of people. Not from any obligation to fulfill a diversity quota, but from the clear realization that if we’re going to make it through the multitude of crises facing us, we will need all hands on deck. We need all voices heard and all perspectives joined in sincere and courageous conversation. And so on any given day in this 8-day virtual gathering, you can spend time with indigenous healers from North and South America, African and African American people, European and Asian. The diversity continues well beyond continents and ethnic groups, gathering therapists, social workers, neuroscientists, poets, artists, doctors, shamans and yet more. All are in accord with four non-negotiable tenets (my words here):

 

1) We are living (have always lived) in a broken world in need of healing.

 

2) We are all ourselves —each and every one of us—broken and wounded and are responsible both for our own healing and co-participating in the healing of fellow sentient beings, human and non-human alike.

 

3) Healing requires conscious effort, drawing from our highest intelligence, deepest emotion, firmest determination, most courageous resilience. 

 

4) All work begins with facing our own wounds and traumas, feeling the full grief and sorrow on the way to joy and redemption, with full understanding that, in the words of Leonard Cohen, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.

 

This last is perhaps one of the most moving part of spending time with many of the above people. I have suffered a modest amount of loss typical of anyone who has lived for seven decades, had a few minor health issues, felt mightily betrayed by people and communities I’ve loved— and done more than my share of whining and complaining about it. But as some of these beautiful, shining, loving people tell some of their stories of racial trauma, personal trauma, inherited trauma— things that would have brought me to my knees and left me there, never to walk easily again—I am astounded by the depth of their resilience and the height of their achievement in choosing love over hate, forgiveness over revenge. 

 

That’s the ultimate choice that we all face and we need each other more than ever to help make it, to help each other stand again and begin to move forward. I believe it is the Hopis that had a prophecy for our time: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” None of these people in this gathering are proclaiming themselves as saviors, asking us to believe their words and follow their path and of course, don’t forget to donate lots of money! They are our next-door neighbor, our colleague at work, our distant cousin, who have made the choice to do the difficult, difficult, but necessary, necessary work of healing. They have chosen to serve life as the gift of a human incarnation suggests we do. They are here to remind us that “they” are “we,” the pronoun we all might choose to proclaim our identity. 

 

Let’s get to work— together.

  

Fear and Forgetfulness, Fun and Forgiveness

The day’s list was calling to me. Go through the nightmare of trying call Paypal to find out why it’s not working to transfer money to my bank, the equally unappealing need to check into online banking to see why last week’s deposit didn’t seem to register. 

 

But beginning with e-mail as I do, I noticed Day 6 of the Collective Trauma Summit and the enticing title of Healing Racialized Trauma Through Joy and Fantastic Forgiveness. I made the wise decision of spending 50 minutes with Ruby Mendenhall, Nico Cary, Dr. Sará King and Dr. Andrea Pennington, four black healer-activists who took my breath away with the depth of their eloquence. I was typing furiously trying to capture sentence after sentence, each one with the capacity to open further thought and feeling to Mr. Everest proportions. 

 

In welcome contrast to the surface political correctness I keep seeing that drives me crazy, the tribalist mentality taking hold, the dogma that further separates and stops needed conversations, here were people deeply rooted in the dynamics of social injustice, the anger and grief and trauma and outrage of it all, looking at how to truly heal and re-connect, in their thinking, their feeling and their daily work. I imagine the next five posts will be inspired by those 50 minutes, but I’ll start with some quotes by Nico Cary with a few comments.

 

• Joy is a radical political act. Conversation about black life mostly is about black death. That needs to shift.

 

The poet Hafiz says, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house” and that’s where the daily news wants us to live. To face the horrors of the daily news head on and emerge with joy is a task far beyond even the best of us. So we need to temper it with cultivating joy within ourselves and in our work and in our relations with others. My own unsupported-by-the-facts optimism comes from teaching with joy, unleashing joy in the classroom, be it with children or adults. 

 

• Whiteness as a construct is the highest concentration of fear and forgetfulness swirling in an endless feedback loop. Blackness is the co-emergent availability of love as something to know and be and experience. 

 

The capacity for black people to forgive in the face of everything that’s been done and continues to be done is both inspiring and extraordinary to me. As Dr. Sará coined it “Fantastic forgiveness.” And looping back to joy, I would add “fun” to the list of black culture’s gift to humanity, embodied in the legacy of jazz and musicians like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea. (Chick was not literally black, but embodied the black construct of jazz. In the world of healing, we are all co-present in each other and whiteness can be present in black bodies and minds and blackness in white bodies and minds.) 

 

The white construct of fear and forgetfulness built the narrative that brought fear to the forefront for so many millions, both the people of color who lived under the fear of colonialism and the white folks taught to fear the humanity of the black folks. Forgetfulness of our innate connection to the natural world, to each other, to our own capacity for joy and beauty, was— and remains— a central tenet of the narrative that has wreaked so much havoc.

 

• Forgiveness begins with the radical acceptance of just how entangled you are in the theft of bodies and land, when your inheritance in that catastrophe is revealed and you cry the tears of a body, mind and soul that finally knows itself to be in deep violation and dissonance with that which you really are. 

 

 Read that sentence many times. Slowly.

 

• Healing is what happens when we are no longer so identified with our fear and suffering. My work is opening portals to people’s own healing, not getting healed, but being their own healing. Where do you experience freedom in the body? When does the world feel alive to you?My job is to build as many portals as possible for people to enter the sacred space of truly seeing who they are and who we are.

 

 Boom! He hit it! That’s my job as well and off I go to work with 7^th and 8^th graders, offering a portal into their sacred selves.

Following the Echo

“A place for everything. Everything in its place,” said Maria Montessori and the place for the Orff Schulwerk is an empty space large enough to fit a circle of live human beings, preferably with a wooden dance floor under their feet and a lovely view out the window. That’s where all the magic has taken place in my four decades of teaching like this, a magic so potent that it even manages to appear in echo-ey gymnasiums, carpeted hotel conference rooms, classrooms with desks shoved off to the side. 

 

The two years of trying to move it all onto two-dimensional gridded squares on screens was doomed to failure, though even here, something might arise that had my voice catch mid-sentence as I felt the tears rising or a well-placed sentence evoked a laughter that was contagious even in its electronic delivery. But this venue clearly was not and will never be the place for the real deal of teaching vibration to vibration. 

 

But the Zoom reunion after two weeks of intensive playing, singing and dancing—and laughing and crying and hugging— together is a fine place to re-connect with those forged communities flung far and wide when the summer course ends. And so 18 of the 24 Level III students met on-screen yesterday, these beautiful souls from throughout the U.S., Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Catalonia, Thailand and Iran who had the great pleasure of seeing each other’s beautiful smiling faces again, with me hosting from the actual Carmel Valley site where all that magic happened. It was simply glorious.

 

Each gave a short report on their teaching this past month and how the course influenced it and I cannot adequately convey the immense satisfaction that what we did in those two weeks made a profound difference. People talked about the material they used that their kids were loving, their new ways of approaching the material so that it flowed more musically, their increased capacity to handle the creative chaos of kids happily inventing, their new tendency to be more playful in their teaching, their research into their own musical heritage, their own creative work in composing new material, their honest sharing that they’re still digesting and thinking about and investigating more the deep layers of this profound pedagogy. As if that weren’t enough, the collective sense that they carry each other with them into the classroom, still feeling the echo of the love that was generated in that short time together. Not just the two weeks of last summer, but for many, their time together in Level II and Level I, mostly in the pre-pandemic times. 

 

Often, in the last class of Level III, I send them off with a “Have a nice life!” But now, both with Zoom and my increased post-retirement time to actually visit some of the local folks teaching in their schools, there is the possibility of following the echo of our work together beyond that summer gathering. At the end of our hour or so of sharing, folks eagerly suggested, “Let’s do this again!” And why not? Check in with each other every couple of months to see what new glories have unfolded. And thank you, Zoom, for that.

 

Sorry to miss the six that couldn’t make it, but look at these happy faces! Our cups runneth over. 

Aging with Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky…

 

So begins T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock.  A poem I read in high school and then read again this first morning of October over a half-century later. As a young, energetic teenager with my life spread out in the sky before me, not like “a patient etherized upon a table,” but a grand invitation to adventure, I was impatient with Prufrock’s life measured out with coffee spoons, living a timid indoor life of tea and toast. I was ready to wrestle life’s big questions down to the ground and here he was worried about how to part his hair and daring himself to eat a peach. Not an inviting portrait of growing old, to say the least!

 

As I begin my walk through the 70’s, I’m happy to report that Alfred and I have lived very different lives. No, I didn’t climb Everest or surf at Waikiki or sky dove from planes. I didn’t report the news from the front lines of the Bosnian War or live with the indigenous Shuar people in the Amazon rain forest or hike the full Appalachian Trail. It was adventure enough to face 3- years old most every day for 45 years and 8^th graders, gathering their energies to create some worthy music and dance. To dare to teach in Spanish in Spain, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, even Brazil, Portugal, Italy with nothing but my high school classes in my back pocket. To jump into the dancing circles in Ghana, to walk on to the performing stage at S.F. Jazz, to play Bulgarian bagpipe on stage in the World Music Festival with musicians from Azerbhaijan, South India, North India, China playing the song I taught them. To travel around the world at 27 years old with my soon-to-be-wife, $6000 between us , few plans, no reservations and a deep faith in the kindness of strangers and belief that things would work out. They did. To plunge into the unknown waters of publishing and rise to the surface with Pentatonic Press. To have “heard the mermaids singing” and be astounded that they sang back to me. 

 

What made me think of Mr. Prufrock? The poem I read this morning by Billy Collins that made me laugh out loud. I’ll include it here, but now you are obligated to buy the whole book “The Rain in Portugal.” Which I heartily recommend.

 

Note to J. Alfred Prufrock

 

I just dared to eat

a really big peach

as ripe as it could be.

 

and I have on

a pair of plaid shorts

and a blue tee shirt with a hole in it

 

and little rivers of juice

are now running down my chin and wrist

and dripping onto the pool deck.

 

What is your problem, man?