Still Traveling

This blog began as an ode to the unusual life of a traveling music teacher. Originally, the catch was seeing distant places through the lens of teaching music. In that first year alone, I taught in Korea, Japan, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Portugal and some 15 cities in the U.S. and Canada. Twelve years later, I’m blessed to continue those journeys. I leave in two days for Sydney, Australia, then Taipei, the Macau and the year’s calendar is filled with workshops and courses here, there and everywhere.

 

But it doesn’t matter if I cross the Pacific Ocean on a long 17-hour flight to work with eager music educators or walk 10 blocks to a local elementary school to sing with 1^st and 5^th graders. It’s all of one piece. And certainly the latter is healthier for the planet! And probably for me as well.

 

That’s exactly what I did today and as so often happens these days, each class was as fine a 45 minutes as one could hope for in any walk of life. With 1^st grade, I did my rhythmic lesson on the months to acknowledge the New Year, sang the song that brings it yet more vibrantly to life, told stories about how the months were named and had them up and dancing when their birthday month was sung. On to some songs for Martin Luther King day and at the end, suggested I might come back in February for Black History Month songs and Valentine’s Day songs.

 

One little girl’s eyes lit up and said, “I remember you came to Valentine’s Day last year and you let me sing a song!” “Do you remember what it was?” “Yes! You Are My Sunshine!” How remarkable that at her young age, she remembered that moment from a visit I made almost a year ago!

 

With 5^th grade, we also began with a short New Year’s round and went a bit deeper into the Martin Luther King Day repertoire. Free at Last, If I Had a Hammer, One Little Step Toward Freedom, Down by the Riverside, The Dream of Martin Luther King. Mostly new songs for them, but I know how to involve them singing parts of the lyrics and they did a great job, even learning a few little harmony parts. At the end, I ventured into new territory, singing We Shall Overcome with the guitar instead of piano (a first for me). I hadn’t gotten more than two phrases in when I felt my voice start to crack.

 

It seems to be common knowledge these days that our traumas are not one-time events that happen and then we can forget them. They lodge themselves into the very fabric of our being, sometimes as a cellular level and can be triggered into a full-blown re-appearance. Or at least a strong memory of their original appearance. 

 

In my experience, I think that not only our traumatic catastrophes are buried in the body, but our sublime moments as well. All those years singing We Shall Overcome with 200 kids and teachers standing hands crossed and joined filling the room with the power and beauty of this profound song. So simply singing it with some twenty kids was enough to release that cellular memory in me. At the end, I told them about those ceremonies at the school and how it was a little game to see exactly when I would start to cry in front of them. Even telling the kids this story I could feel my voice crack and my eyes get moist. They sat there astonished that this grown male stranger would be so unashamedly vulnerable in front of a group of kids, but hey, that’s what I do. 

 

The traveling I try to capture in this blog is not just from one place to another into new and often unexplored territory in the physical world. It’s also about the way music can help us travel to new and exotic and comfortingly familiar territories in ourselves. No passport needed.

 

Now to get packing. And I will need my passport!

The Healing Power of Children's Games

(Below is an article I stumbled across that I wrote years ago. Since I’m indeed about to “get out of town” as I prepare a trip to Australia, Taiwan and Macau, I don’t have time at the moment to tell about the 42^nd New Year’s Walk with friends and family we did yesterday nor praise the active life my friends in their 70’s are leading. So here are some thoughts from years back that actually relate to that active life.)

 

Old Man Mosie, sick in the head,

Called for the doctor and the doctor said.

“Please step forward, turn around,

Do the Hokey Pokey and

Get out of town!”

 

“We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse,” is the provocative title of psychologist James Hillman’s and writer Michael Ventura’s equally provocative book. Mostly a series of conversations between them, the theme comes down to this:

 

Psychotherapy in too many cases has been an attempt to normalize an individual’s behavior so that they adjust smoothly to the mainstream culture. But what if that culture is the one that is sick? Does it make sense to adjust to bad living?

 

Case in point: Kids who ran freely in the woods for hundreds of thousands of years are trapped inside the four-walls of a desk-rowed classroom and forced to sit and answer questions few of them ever asked—or need to ask. If they show a normal child’s energy level, they’re slapped with a label called ADD/ ADHD, given drugs that mess with their brain chemistry and grow up thinking that there’s something wrong with them rather than this completely artificial construct that goes against the grain of everything we know about how the brain, body and heart work. Whether that knowledge comes from neuroscientists, visionary educators, observant parents or wise grandparents, it’s clear that the 99% of the problem is more from the adults’ unrealistic expectations than the kids neural wiring. 

 

Hillman and Ventura venture deep into this territory, suggesting that the world is suffering from a “soul sickness” that neither Prozac, intense complaints on the couch about your mother nor any of the other “therapies-du-jour“ can alone cure.  At the end of the matter, there is nothing to fix or cure, just the potential of a deep healing when we start to live well in company with others who choose to live well. 

 

And so Old Man Mosie! Such wise advice! 

 

“Step forward.” Begin to move out from your limited and stuck point of view.

 

“Turn around.” 360 degrees. See what’s around you and what the world has to offer, all the things you miss when you just walk forward and don’t look back. And now worse than ever, the things you’re miss when walking with your head down buried in your device. 

 

“Do the Hokey Pokey!” Who doesn’t feel more alive, more connected, more vibrant during and after dancing? The scientists will talk about the oxygen that comes to the brain during exercise, the glucose, the happy endorphins and neurotransmitters release, the party folks will remind you that your isolation can become self-imposed and stop being so damn serious, come out with us and shake your booty!!  And the poets will remind you, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Worth considering.

 

“Get out of town.” Travel alone won’t help. Especially these days with your phone constantly in your hand, the next Starbucks right around the corner, the conspiracy to make each place like every other place—familiar, comfortable, convenient, the very things that start to erode depth of culture. But make no mistake about it. The hordes of young college graduates who used to flock to Europe to “learn how to live” from the Italians or Spanish or Parisians or Greeks did not come back the same people. And then the map expanded to Bali and India and Japan and the Andes and West Africa and Mexico and…well, you get the idea. Whole new ways to live this life, complete with yoga, Zen meditation, West African drumming, Himalaya or Andes trekking or Turkish steam baths.All still available if you don’t bring too much of your old “sick-in-the-head-self” with you. 

And no, you don’t have to film yourself dancing the Hokey Pokey in each spot and put it on Facebook.

 Just enjoy.

A Holy Thing

My new life as the Lone Ranger of the piano continued yesterday as I played at the memorial service of Ron Schaer, the man I played for in December when he left this life in his euthanasia moment. (See Death Concert post from last month). I played Schubert’s Ave Maria, Gershwin’s Embraceable You and Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, weaving them into the service filled with poems, testimonies, slide shows and stories. Each did their magic, translating the spoken words into the power of heart-opening tones that allowed for the needed grief and celebration to dance together. My new role as a pianist, one that’s been slowly simmering for many years, is not to dazzle with technical flourish and virtuosity, but to let each note sing out its full promise and charge the air with a kind of beauty we all carry and need reminders to visit. 

 

I knew nothing about Ron when I first played for him, but it was good to hear his story and how he had touched so many people in his life and his work. It was good to be in a gathering of people with their phones tucked away, willing to speak from the heart, choke up and laugh. I was particularly struck by the reading of a little piece that a Rabbi Chaim Stern had written:

 

“Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream to be—to be. And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.”

 

Amen. And isn’t that the source of so much of our misery? Our fear to love what we know we can lose. So we keep an arm’s distance (or a football field’s), or give all our attention to machines or stuff ourselves with sensation and distraction to keep mortality in the far distance. Then when loss inevitably comes, we go through the public gestures quickly and can’t wait to get back to work. 

 

But to love something beyond reason, be it a person, a practice, a place, indeed, ourselves, that we know must change and decay and eventually be extinguished, seems to be a thing for fools, yet indeed is a holy thing. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” So when loss comes to our doorstep, it is wise to admit it, to sit together in sorrow and also allow celebration and gratitude into the room. That’s what people did yesterday and I was honored to be a part of it. 

Carried Away

This afternoon I played piano at a new ward in the Jewish Home, one that housed Russian-speaking residents. I went through my usual eclectic repertoire, leaned a little heavier on Tchaikovsky and several times during the hour, an enthusiastic Russian man shouted out “You make us so happy!” 

 

On the way out of the Home, a resident in a wheelchair was sitting at another piano in the lobby trying to pick out pieces she used to play. It was hit and miss, but sometimes she found all the notes to Fur Elise and a bit of Mozart’s Rondo a la Turk. I tried to join in on the bass, either accompanying her or doubling the melody and we had a few moments of satisfying connection. Ah, the power of music.

 

Two hours earlier, I hosted the first meeting of the 34^th year of the Men’s Group and began by playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. XIV on the piano. In all those years, I’ve played piano for them like this exactly once. Minutes before I was ready to play, my wife was on her way out the door when she got a call from her cousin telling her that her Aunt Lil was dying. Lil was the last of the three sisters that included Karen’s Mom and at 96 years old, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. And yet it was. Karen had been making plans to see Lil in February, while Lil’s ticking clock was making other plans. While I was playing, I imagined her listening far away in Florida and that brought an extra dimension to the beauty of this piece. 

 

Two hours before that, I was teaching two first-grade classes at The San Francisco School, the last of my three-day reunion with a place that still resonates with such power and beauty in the way that it gives children exactly what they need to be the happy kids they deserve to be. Every one of the fourteen classes I taught was a jewel, but my last first class brought it all yet one step higher. I decided to end the class with a little seated Singing Time with the kids preparing to learn or remember the wonderful repertoire of songs associated with the upcoming Martin Luther King celebration. We began with “Free at Last” and watching their sincere faces singing with so much gusto and passion was an icing on an already delicious cake. But it got better.

 

At the end, one girl raised her hand and looked at me and said, “For a moment while we were singing, I didn’t know where I was.” She seemed to have had a little spiritual epiphany, not exactly an out-of-body experience, but maybe more an in-the-body experience of all her nerves, muscles and breath dancing together to help her forget for one moment that she was a separate little identity in a place called a school. In fact, at 6-years-old, the same kind of experience I see the elders sometimes have at 96-years old. Music is for every one at every age in every place. 

 

Lil passed away an hour after that phone call. I can only hope that she also had the sense of forgetting that leads to the most profound kind of remembering, the kind that takes us out of places with names and brings us wholly, completely, home. 

 

It was a good day. 

 

Ring Out, Wild Bells

 

I’m seated in my old pink chair in my old music room as I write. Just finished a class with the 4^th graders who were my 5-year-old students in my last year of teaching here. That old pleasure of watching them grow and develop in the character that already was partially revealed almost half of their lifetime before. The New Year’s Ritual class I created years back, with some welcome new twists recently given by my colleague James Harding, clearly has hit each class I’ve taught these two days exactly where they live. 

 

Part of this unique class is shown in The Secret Song film, but I couldn’t help but wish the cameras were rolling again to show how young kids can participate in a beautiful ritual that aims them toward a future best self by giving them exactly what they need now. A chance to improvise a farewell song on the xylophone to the Old Year and a welcome song to the New Year, an opportunity to send the wishes for what they hope to leave behind riding out into the air on the powerful vibrations of a large Balinese gong and their hopes of what they hope to bring to the New Year with a smaller Thai gong. To respectfully and silently witness each other step through the doorway into their new possibility and then come join a seated circle with handbells awaiting them. When the last has arrived from that little ritual journey, they watch my signal, ring the bells exuberantly and exclaim, “Happy New Year!!” A welcome release after the kid-difficult task of being still and silent for some 10- 15 minutes.

 

Then some musical games with the bells, listening to the melody they create if we ring one at a time around the circle and the effortless new melody when we go the other way. Having kids conduct the bell orchestra. Passing bell sounds one at a time across the circle with eye-contact. And so on.

 

The 4^th graders had an extra surprise of a slip of paper under their bell which they then read out loud one at a time in a numbered order. It is a Tennyson poem titled “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” The language a bit archaic for them and some words needing explanation, but the sentiment is clear and needed and welcomed. Ring out our old personal and collective failures and ring in our always-present but so-difficult-to-realize better natures. Yes, indeed

 

In this election year, stanzas four and six feels particularly strong. No naïve hopes here, as those who have built their life around slander and spite, who view sweetness and kindness as weakness, will not be motivated until they face their own pain and vulnerability and stop trying to blame it on others. Or have a foundation of experience with those who have treated them kindly and shown them what true bravery is, the beauty of being large-hearted, kind-handed and free. Everything that I tried to give these kids in my days of subbing here and all the years before that, and judging from their happiness and focus in each class, it feels like they’re getting it. Those clinging to the slowly (but not fast enough) dying causes of party warfare, lust for gold, false pride and ongoing war can only be rung out by the new generations trained to nobility, purer laws and the fuller songs of minstrels that marry grief and joy. Here’s Tennyson’s poem:

 

RING OUT, WILD BELLS: Alfred Lord Tennyson

1) Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.

The flying cloud, the frosty light. 

The year is dying in the night.

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

 

2) Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow,

The year is going, let him go.

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

3) Ring out the grief that saps the mind.

For those that here we see no more.

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

 

4) Ring out a slowly dying cause

And ancient forms of party strife.

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

 

5) Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times.

Ring out, ring out, my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in. 

 

6) Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite,

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

 

7) Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold.

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

8) Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand,

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the light * that is to be.

 

 

    * Original poem says “Christ”

Back to the Salt Mine

 

My colleague Sofia needed to extend her winter break, so for the next three days, I’ll be teaching her classes back at the old school. Dusting off my repertoire of New Year’s songs, games, poems and activities with kids from 4-years old to 4^th grade. In a couple of hours, I’ll be back in the car driving the route that I could almost do blindfold and stepping back into that (slightly re-arranged) sacred space that is the music room. In my 4^th year away from the school, the younger kids will all be kids I haven’t taught. But some of them the kids of teachers I taught with and some of them the grandkids of teachers I taught with. How it goes on. 

 

So back to the ritual with bells and gongs and the song-sheet hanger structure that becomes a doorway for kids to walk through into the New Year. After first ringing the large gong of the old year and sending behind them any mistakes or transgressions they wish not to repeat and then the small gong of the New Year to privately think of what new possibility they would like to bring into 2024. A bit of a tall order for a first grader, but why not start them young? Help them understand that rather than wish for what the year brings to them, they need to actively resolve what they can bring to it. 

 

Then comes my go-to “Everyone Born in January” game/song/dance. I have my particular way of doing it, but when subbing at another school in December, I tried a completely new way and loved it. Yet another affirmation that I still can teach an old Do(u)g new tricks and it’s another clear sign that this is the work I was meant to do and I’m not done with it yet. That this particular salt mine still holds great riches.

 

Speaking of which. One of the stories I told my grandson when hiking last week was an old Russian folk tale named “Salt.” It begins with a ne’er-do-well third son getting stranded on an island when sailing off to find his fortune. There he discovers a large mountain of salt and has the wits to bag it up and take it back on board when the storm subsides. He then brings it to a King and Queen who scoff at this useless white dust, having never seen salt before. They dismiss him, he goes down to the kitchen and notices that not a single dish is salted. So he secretly goes around and salts them and when the King and Queen praise the cook for a dinner that tastes better than anything they had ever eaten, he expresses great confusion. They then figure out what happened and suitably reward the young man. It goes on from there…

 

I still enjoy having my days wholly to my own whims and fancies. As I always reply when someone asks me how I like retirement: “I like my schedule and I like my boss.” But keeping teaching kids in that schedule as the invitations arise is salt to my day, bringing out the flavors that marry taste and nutrition. So to the salt mine I will go, “whistling while I work…”

 

And So It Begins

 

A day just like any other day. That is, if you’re a tree or a river or a rock or a squirrel or indeed, most of Creation. No name or number attached. Just the rhythms of slithering, crawling, creeping, climbing, flying in search of food or escaping becoming another creature’s food. Or the slower rhythms of growth and decay while the light brightens and darkens, the constant, steadfast stars appear to appear (though always there), the earth rotates to hide the sun or reveal the moon. 

 

But we humans are creatures of meaning and so we assign each day a name, connected (thought rarely known) with some grand mythological figure from ancient days, give each day a number and after 28 to 31 of them, give another name to the grander beat of the monthly moon cycle (plus a little), again, with other mostly unknown and unthought-of mythological figures. Like January for Janus, the guardian of gateways with his two-heads-in-one, one looking back to the macro-rhythm we call a year at the same time the other looks forward to the next, both also assigned numbers. The new year is 2024 on the Christian calendar, 5784 on the Jewish one, 4721 on the Chinese calendar, 1402 on the Iranian calendar and some 25 other numbers on other calendars worldwide. We are all the same creatures of meaning, but we don't necessarily agree on the same precise names and numbers. And it matters not a bit. 

 

The sun shines outside my window with the same light as yesterday, but I feel compelled to chant my entire Buddhist sutra book, start cooking a New Year bean soup, begin my annual ritual of re-memorizing some of the 30 or so poems I’ve once memorized. I’m committed to a minimum number of miles to walk or bike today, want the first person I talk to on the phone to be my sister, think about what the first piano piece of the year I play will be and in general, move through this day a bit more consciously, as if how I live today will set the tone for the 365 (it’s Leap year!) days to follow. None of it makes any sense from the plants and animals’ points of view, but again, we are creatures of meaning, determined to search one out that might be hidden in the grand cycle of life and death and/or create our own. 

 

Here I re-commit to this writing, beginning my 13^th cycle around the sun marking each day with my own personal meanings in hopes that some touch some universal nerve that may be of use to a reader—or at least interesting or entertaining. No big dramatic vows or resolutions beyond my hopes to keep doing what I do and love doing. Of course, I will be happy if the new book I’m working on gets published and some opportunities to perform keep coming my way and I am considering collecting my entire history of unpublished poems (which means all of them!) into at least a Kinko’s hard copy, if not an actual book that five people will buy. I do think it’s time to push past my resistance and finally get myself a hearing aid. And I do think it would be rather sweet to get and give a few more hugs and kisses this year. Well, there you go. I guess I have made some New Year’s Resolutions after all.

 

And you, my friend?