Through the Eyes of Others

The most sensible thing I did on election day was to keep my phone turned off, the computer closed, the TV off. I went down to my basement and pulled out a box of old letters that I hadn’t looked at in the past 20 or 30 years. Such a pleasure to touch paper and smell the old sheaves and see card after card, letter after letter, filled with someone’s handwriting and all those “someones” loving friends, family, Orff students and colleagues, kids I taught. 

 

Mostly they were cards of appreciation and thank you’s for things we did together that touched them and helped them feel seen, known, appreciated and immersed in great fun and beauty. Included were some letters back in the days when that’s how we kept in touch, sharing the usual news of this, that or the other thing of a human daily life. I spent the morning sifting and sorting and allowing myself to soak in the bath of everything I had managed to do well, with artistry, passion and deep love. Included also were some reminders from both friends and strangers of things I said that confused or hurt them and all except the Mormon who objected to my considering all religions having something to teach, they were mostly right that I deserved a little loving critique. There were the touching birthday cards from my kids at all ages, from my wife and sister and from my father, who used the occasion to praise and bless the person I had become in ways he rarely could in live conversation. 

 

It was a healing tonic to read how my attempts to be a kind, caring and loving human being sometimes hit home and especially interesting to hear it spoken out loud in the eloquent words of others. Here are a few of the gems that continue to bring me some comfort in the aftermath of hatred’s victory yesterday and help me begin to get up from the floor and try again. These from music teachers who had taken a workshop with me:

 

“As I go back into the world to do my daily battle against mediocrity, I will be strengthened by the knowledge that I am not alone. You and your colleagues are stunning examples of what can be done with music in schools. I am uplifted by your example, your musicianship, your love of language and your dedication.”

 

“When I first met you in Madrid, you became part of what I had been looking for. Now I feel you have become a part of my base, of my place where I can come back to. A safe place, a safe person to trust in, someone close to travel with to previously unimagined lands. “

 

“There’s so many people who can sing and play and teach and just move nothing, I mean nothing. I have seen you do all that and at the end you deeply touch the people, it is the real thing.” (This part of re-written words to the tune One Note Samba— it goes with the bridge.)

 

“You made me go into depths that I had never experienced before. I especially want to thank you for being able to see me and understand me and advise me to go into theater. It was one of the best experiences of my whole life that I will forever carry in my mind and soul.”

 

“The author Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” That idea of nurturing “spirit” before imposing “form” well describes what makes your teaching different from typical music classes. After your workshop, feeling my own spirit touched, I could see the future and it was beautiful.”

 

It has taken a lifetime to grow into the truth that my personal pronouns are “us/ we” and these letters have helped me remember. The beautiful future of that last testimony above seems out of reach at the moment, but it’s useful to remember that the future is created by each moment of the present. And my helplessness in not being able to reach the millions of voters in this strange land is balanced by the truth that we can only touch others one mind, one heart, one soul at a time. I have been blessed to have had the chance to do so and appreciative of all those who have taken the time to let me know. Naturally, I’ve also been blessed by all those who have touched and moved and inspired me and I do my best to let them know. 

 

My friends, if you have such letters in your basement or attic or tucked away in your desk drawers, this is a good time to get them out. Doesn’t matter if they’re ten or a thousand. And if you haven’t written for a while to all those who have been important to you and let them know how they’ve impacted you and how you love them, why, this is a good time for that now as well. It’s always a good time, but now more than ever.

And though I can’t see your faces and there may be many of you I’ve never met, let me take the moment to thank you for reading these blogposts. I hope they have brought something into your life that reminds you of your own goodness and beauty and upstanding moral values. Onward! 

Offense and Defense

Below is the hopeful blog I wrote before the election and looked forward with glee to posting it. Now it’s all turned to shit and I’m still reeling from the blow. There are a thousand reasons to just quit the game, take my ball and go home and try to stop caring about it all. But knowing that they win if we all give up, I guess I’ll just keep posting my tiny whispers into a roaring wind blowing the other way. Read this and weep. (And remember that the last paragraph was written in the certainty that Kamala would win.)

 

Life, like basketball and other sports, requires that the players learn to play offense and defense. Life, like sports, is generally more fun when one has the ball dribbling down the court or running down the field or standing up at bat, using the whole of your skillset to make the basket, score the goal, hit the ball. 

Defense is, of course, necessary, but it’s less fun to put all your energy into stopping the other team. Especially in life. It’s exhausting to always be reacting to the next horrific move, especially the ones that the refs aren’t seeing or are seeing and aren’t calling. 

 

I have sometimes been called too negative or cynical because I’ve spent so much time thinking about, writing about, speaking out about what’s wrong in the world. And I stand by that. Imagine never playing defense in any of the above games! You would get trampled! By naming what’s toxic, you take your first step to the tonic. By diagnosing the cancer, you can begin the steps needed for healing. By calling out injustice, you can start to move the moral arc needle closer to justice. 

 

People can—and have—spent their lifetimes making such critiques and I believe that has helped keep the universe in balance. But it is true that such constant naming of everything that isn’t working is both exhausting to the whistleblower and can be dispiriting and debilitating to the people who need to hear it. So it’s a good idea to balance what’s wrong with what’s right and to show it not only in words, but in the very way you live your life and love your live and live your love.

 

My half a century teaching music to kids and folks of all ages has been precisely the antidote I’m calling for, exactly the change I want to see in the world. Showing in the micro-climate what I hope for in the macro. Still, I feel called upon to show how what does work is often thwarted by the toxic systems that pave over the ground where it can best bloom and create the conditions whereby good-hearted people do bad things. Defense will always be part of the game.

 

But the thought of living through another 4-years in a constant reactive and defensive posture, using all my energy to figure out how to survive it and keep it from beating me down, feeling even the joyful moments diminished because they happen against a backdrop of hatred, lies, greed, deceit— well, I couldn’t figure out how I could go through all of that again.

 

But now we have the ball again! I’m ready to move downcourt and work generously and joyfully with my teammates and hug the opposing team knowing we’re all in the game together. There are no words to express how much I—we all— needed this. It’s not a mean-spirited gloating that we won this game. In fact, the opposite. Knowing what would have happened if we lost, where the very rules of the game and its pleasure would have been trashed beyond any foreseeable redemption, here is the chance to get to work. 

With our spirits restored and hope, not fear, nudging us to step up to the hard work and also take time to enjoy it. 

Nothing

My whole life, I have turned to language to sort through the chaos of existence, believed in analytic thought, storytelling and poetry to shine the light of understanding, the warmth of comfort and solace, the fire of inspiration and needed action. There are no words to help me through this.

 

Likewise, I’ve turned to songs and music of all sorts to do the same and almost always find the right ones for the occasion. There are no notes to carry me through this. 

 

I’ve walked out into the woods, parks, forests, mountains, seashores to feel the solace of nature, the way the birds sing and trees wave in the breeze and the rivers run wholly oblivious to the human drama, enduring throughout all our foibles and disasters. There are no beautiful waterfalls that can bring me no comfort now. 

 

I’ve known the power of gathering with beautiful souls to remind each other that we are united in our love for life and together can bring forth the needed changes. Now I am curled up in my house, refusing to join with others knowing that we will only sit together in great despair and disbelief. For the moment, at least, there are no meetings with friends that will help me feel better. 

 

Like all of us, I have known all those things that stop us in our tracks and make us feel that we simply can’t go on as before. The loss of parents and friends, the deep betrayals in a relationship or a workplace, the blows (or news of blows) of natural disasters. And I, like I suspect most of us, always find the way to go on and keep moving forward, to grieve as I must and to rise up again to joy. 

 

But notice. The loss of aged parents is the natural order of things. Sad and sorrowful, but part of the contract we sign by being born. The loss of friends gone too young is harder to accept, but still within the natural order of random sickness and disease. The human betrayals and deep disappointments are built-in to the complexity of our human nature and while so painful in the moment, often open doors to better—or at least different—worlds. The natural disasters are both natural and disastrous and cause for much concern and cause of untold suffering. But again, part of the deal of inhabiting the planet. Even the wars and the dropping bombs have a long history and can be at least partially understood in our flawed ideologies, scramble for territory and mad dictators. 

 

But this is beyond my understanding and my ability to accept. A disaster of tsunamic proportions, a betrayal of our nation’s founding doctrine, a metaphorical death of much that we hold dear and certain death for those bound by the new laws to come. And what I find impossible to understand, accept, figure out how to get through, is the extraordinary fact that all of it could have been avoided peacefully by a simple piece of paper dropped in a ballot box. 

 

That so many would vote for a twice-impeached, 42-felony-convicted, wife-cheater, Bible-faker, cruel to his enemies and so-called friends, proven incompetent leader, psychopathic narcissist lying scumbag, too-old-to-run-for-office, incoherent babbler without a single political plan to benefit the nation— this surpasses all understanding. This is what has thrown me—and over half the nation—to the ground wondering how we can wake up to all the tomorrows of the next 4 years and live anything approaching a useful and happy life. 

 

I— we— am so tired of all the political or psychological or sociological analysis of why this happened, so tired of playing the next four years of the game on defense against a team who doesn’t play fairly or respect the game, so tired of making fun of them all with no effect (sorry, Stephen Colbert—I’ll see you in 2028 if you’re still on the air). None of this should have happened. It simply is beyond human understanding. 

And I’m not just talking to the guy who I was so ready to have kicked out of the game. I’m talking to every one of your freakin’ voters who made this happen. I am ashamed to share the same citizenship as you. Hell, I’m ashamed to share the same species as you. 

 

But here we are. Anger, reason, understanding, won’t help. Staying in bed, turning off the news, watching endless TV, pretending it doesn’t matter, won’t help. Grieving and feeling the full impact of the sorrow won’t help. Listening to the pep talks about how our souls are called upon to grow larger won’t help. Knowing that at least half the nation shares my sorrow, outrage and dismay won’t help. Calling for a now more perfect union by succeeding won’t (but might!) help. Changing our nation’s name to the D.SA.—Disunited States of America—won’t help.  The bottom line is that this never should have happened. I never believed it would have. And it did. 

 

Of course, somewhere deep inside I do believe against all evidence that we will rise again. But I can’t touch that hope or even locate it. And as the saying goes, “Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.”

 

It is one of those rare moments that I am simply at a loss. Everything that is joyful in my personal life— and there is so much— is unreachable and will be for quite some time. Cooking a good meal? Releasing my new podcast? Playing music better than I ever have? Publishing the two new books I have lying around? Going to the national conference in a freakin’ red state? All of it smeared with shit. Why bother? Who cares? Why even try anymore?

 

There’s a black folk song called “The Grey Goose” that talks about people (white slavemasters) who shot it down and tried to cook it, but the fork wouldn’t stick it. They put it in the sawmill and it broke the saw’s teeth out. At the end of the song, it was flying in the sky again with a long string of goslings. So I wrote in my journal yesterday: 

 

“Even if the unimaginable happens (I didn’t really believe it would), we would do well to remember the Grey Goose spirit inside of us that can’t be touched by external events. We can still fly high with the goslings behind us. But it will make a difference as to whether we’re flying over verdant gardens, clear-running stream, restored rainforests or over fracked lands, strip-malled towns, polluted oceans. The Soul is at once independent of politics and completely intertwined with it. May we move together tomorrow.”

 

And when we found out today, we didn’t, I fell from the sky. If I stay crashed and broken, then they win, so I know I’ll need to find my way back to healing, with a little help from my friends. But I’m just oh, so tired, of evoking “We shall overcome” when it was all right at our fingertips. 

 

That’s my report, friends. That’s where I am. Lost, sad and weary. 
 

Re-creation

Fall is fully here, which in San Francisco means no fog or wind or rain and average temperatures between 65 and 70. My wife and I decided to actually do something a bit different together other than our usual separate and together routines. So off we set on a 5 mile walk to the ocean through our beloved Golden Gate Park. A good deal of our route was on car-free JFK Drive, all set up and designed for human connection and communion. Consider:

 

Ten volleyball games in Robin Williams Meadow, the drummers gathered on Hippy Hill, the tennis and pickleball courts, the yellow Adirondack chairs spread around everywhere filled with people gathering, the Roller Skaters dancing to recorded music, the little live jazz band playing some Monk tunes, the ping-pong tables now multiplied to three and always full, the cornhole game that I almost always play alone, but today someone was there and I had two nice games with a stranger who now wants a re-match next week. 

 

He had just come from the outdoor Lindy Hop classes and further down was one of the three pianos on car-free JFK Drive with a singer and guitars and a crowd listening. Much of this was put together post-pandemic and consciously so, going through the democratic process of a voter’s initiative to close this section of the road in the park. It was a bit of a struggle, but we prevailed and we all are happier for it. So many more people than before are walking, skating, biking, jogging, dancing down the road painted with murals and dotted with sculptures, almost like an ongoing Festival feel. 

 

There’s more of the same as we walked on the new paths by a revived Middle Lake near the fly-fishing pools, a tucked-away Native garden and some older paths alongside the frisbee-golf courses. All this fun and fanciful recreation, which noting the etymology of “re-creation” does indeed go a long way to re-creating our playful, childlike and joyful selves in company with others who we already know or come to know through the activity. I have an upcoming post about “offense and defense,” the conversation between pro-actively creating and living the life we deserve and reacting to all the forces that work against it, doing the work to limit the power of the naysayers and the life-haters and the glum greedy accumulators. Seems like we can’t just do one without the other, tomorrow being a case in point. So much at stake and we’re all waiting to exhale into exultation. 

 

And when the future we deserve gets voted in tomorrow, that’s when the real work begins, building day by day a life a fun and fanciful and fantastically fabulous as a Sunday stroll through Golden Gate Park. Let it be so!!!!

Fall Back, Move Forward

The clocks changed today. We are gifted with an extra hour of the day and the question is, “What will we do with it?” Talk a walk? Strum a guitar? Dig out an old favorite recipe and cook a delicious meal? Call voters?" Me, I might sit on the back deck and read the next chapter of my current book, “The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a book which will probably soon be banned from the Left unless the title is changed to “The Neurodivergent Man (he/his).” 

 

Speaking of banned books and the gift of extra hours, Dostoevsky’s biography is quite remarkable. Back in the 1940’s in Moscow, he joined a literary group called The Petrashevksy Circle and they would meet and sometimes discuss banned books that dared to criticize Tsarist Russia. Tsarist Russia, like Trumpist America, did not like that and arrested Dostoevsky, sentencing him and others to death. The group actually was led out to the firing squad and minutes before being executed, a letter arriving commuting their sentence to four years in a Siberian prison camp instead. Followed by six years of compulsory military service. 

 

Can you imagine those moments before the letter came? In the character of the Prince (the “idiot” in the book who is anything but), Dostoevsky weaves the real story into the fictional one: “To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers. A man stabbed by robbers in the forest still hopes he’ll be saved until the very last minute. But when sentenced for execution, all hope is taken away for certain and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there’s no escape. There’s no greater torment in the world than that."

 

He then goes on. “Maybe there’s a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer and has then been told, ‘Go, you’re forgiven.” That man might be able to tell us something.”

 

That man, as noted, was Dostoevsky and he indeed goes on to use an entire lifetime re-gifted to him to tell us something, in the form of some of the most notable books in all of literature. 

 

The clock is ticking toward Tuesday and there is a hint of that feeling of a date set for either an execution—the death of Democracy— or a reprieve— Kamala wins!! Here’s some Dostoevsky’s quotes that Republicans and non-voters would do well to consider. (The first might be preceded by “You may excuse other’s lies, but…”)

 

• Above all, don’t lie to yourself. 

• The worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

• Man has it all in his hands, and it slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice. 

• Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles. 

 

 And for those needing encouragement if the unthinkable happens:

 

• The soul is healed by being with children.

• If you want to overcome the world, overcome yourself.

• Allow me to give you some advice from the heart. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.

• The deeper the grief, the closer is God. 

• The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

 

The clocks changed today, falling back to grant us an extra hour. Let us use that time to move forward, in whatever way suits our character. 

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

 

                        “I said it! I meant it! I’m here to represent it!”  -Rap song

 

I had great hopes for my Jazz, Joy & Justice book to make a big splash in the world. The theme couldn’t have been more timely and no one had ever written anything quite like it. My decades of teaching more than qualified me for knowing how to talk to 5^th grade and above kids and make it readable and interesting for adults as well. The blend of telling “The Stories Every American Should Know” (the subtitle), the fabulous Youtube videos I suggest and the call to action as I ask reflective questions at the end of each chapter seemed destined to make this book a “must read” and qualify it for the YA New York Times Best-Seller List. 

 

Of course, none of this has happened. (At least not yet.) One thing working against it is the fact that jazz is on the bottom of the list of most-listened to musics in America, hovering somewhere around 2% of the listening population, according to various surveys. Another is that I have no literary credentials beyond my little world of Orff music teachers. If John Grisham or Ann Patchett wrote it, I believe it would attract attention. Another is that while I constantly shine the light on black culture and the black musicians who created and sustained this music, I myself am not black. If Isabel Wilkerson or Angela Davis wrote it, more people would be interested. Finally, I have no reputation (deservedly so) as a jazz musician, so I can’t put it out in the public spotlight the way Wynton Marsalis or Esperanza Spalding could. That’s the way the business works and I get it. 

But still I wish this publisher had their act together more. The whole reason I didn’t publish this book myself with my own Pentatonic Press was to try to get a bigger engine behind it to reach a larger audience. It also was attractive that they offered an e-book and an audio book. When I say “offered,” it meant I had to pay a certain amount of the production courses with hopes that I’d eventually be paid back with royalties. Sigh. 

 

Well, they did finally publish the book, with some 10 mistakes that need correcting in a next edition. They’ve done absolutely nothing in terms of publicity, getting the book in libraries, reaching an audience beyond my friends and work colleagues. They did put together an e-book that someone said was terrible, just photos of the pages. And they did send me samples of the audio book that had problem after problem.

 

The first problem was that of the five sample readers, four were from England with British accents in a book about American jazz. I declined, asked them to try again and strongly suggested that they get an African-American person to read it (Morgan Freeman would have been great!) Or else let me read it since I wrote it and knew exactly how say what I meant and how to represent it. But no, that’s not the way they work and yesterday, they sent me the whole book read by a white American guy who starts off pronouncing my grandson Malik’s name wrong in the dedication and goes on to read the book as if he’s just reading a book out loud. It’s clear from the tone that the words don’t mean much, if anything, to him. It seems to me that there’s nothing in his background— not a black man, not a jazz fan, not a teacher, not a crusader for social justice—that qualifies him to read this book. It’s hard for me to imagine a listener convinced, inspired, uplifted by a book that deserves some passion and instead, is read like a someone reading a newspaper article out loud.

 

If this post was only to air my grievances, that would be unfair to you as a reader. The greater point is in the opening quote. We all need to mean what we say and say what we mean and represent it through our very lives and actions. I certainly did all of it in writing the book and it’s a shame that it won’t come across in this audio version. But if you’re intrigued, buy the book and read it yourself. 

 

And imagine Morgan Freeman’s voice. 

Turning the Page

This morning, I turned all the pages on the calendars to November.  For my family, always a big-deal month. My father-in-law Ted’s birthday and now Zadie’s birthday is on Nov. 18^th and my Dad’s was one day later on the 19^th. My nephew Ian’s birthday is the 25^th and my daughter Talia’s one-day later on the 26^th. (Her 40^th!!) One friend’s birthday is November 8^th and another November 9^th. Three sets of such paired birthdays feels unusual! Can’t think of any other month where that happens with people I know.

 

November is also the annual Orff Conference that I’ve attended without pause since 1984 (and two before that in 1976 and 1982). As I believe I’ve shared before, I can recite the order of the cities where they were held and tell you a few stories about each one. But I’ll spare you the list for now. 

 

Then there’s Thanksgiving, mostly always shared with my sister and her family and now a bit more complicated as we’re all spread out. But it looks like we’ll have a small one with daughter Kerala and kids in Portland on the real Thanksgiving and then a larger one the next day with my sister and her husband and nephew Ian’s family (another paired celebration two days in a row!). 

 

And so. The photos on the turned calendar pages include two lovely smiling people in Kenya picking coffee beans as part of a small-business social justice initiative. A temple in a lake in Bali. A beachfront on Lake Michigan. A 5-year-old girl’s painting that looks like a bright water lily in a pond. Happy, hopeful, uplifting images suggesting good news to come. And how we need it.

 

So my friends, as we turn the pages on the calendars, let us turn the page to a new book, discard that same old tired story of greed, hatred, small-mindedness, fear, ignorance, injustice and begin telling the new story, begin living the new story of care and kindness and compassion. The flooding in Spain and typhoon in Taipei are alerting us in the strongest possible terms that business-as-usual cannot continue. The young people are counting on their elders to do the right thing to protect their future and uplift their present. So let us drop the first paragraph of the new needed story into the ballot box and make this November the moment when we chose life, love and laughter, the beginning of the story our kids can tell their grandchildren— “Yes, that was the moment we finally said  ‘Enough!’ and began telling the new story that we’re all enjoying now.”

 

May it be so!