Shopping at the A & P

I’m shamelessly dating myself here, evoking the old supermarket up on Elmora Ave. in Elizabeth, New Jersey where we used to shop. I believe A & P stood for the Atlantic and Pacific Company and according to a quick Wiki check, it actually was founded in 1859! But though tempting to go into the history of U.S. supermarkets, this entry was born from two words that rose up before me this morning while playing Solitaire— Affirm and Provoke. I should post them at my writing desk, in my classroom, on my piano, reminding me of my twin purpose in writing, in teaching, in performing jazz.

Affirmation. We are luminous beings, radiant with a true nature aligned with all of nature. At the top of evolution’s experiment, we’re graced with immense possibility— to think with dazzling intricacy, feel with profound emotion, move with grace and eloquence. Our gift (and curse) is the opportunity and obligation to choose. The promise of self-actualization is given freely to all, the fulfillment is our lifetime path of what we choose, what we don’t choose, what seems chosen for us. It’s not enough to be generically wondrous— each of us has our own particular way of shining and our unique blend of the rainbow colors. In writing, teaching, performing music, I’m looking at how to remind myself and others of this promise, both in general and specific ways. The most moving comment in my recent concert was “It felt like you were speaking to each of us alone.” The most moving affirmation I received recently was that I managed to capture a bit of each person’s genius in talking about the 22 Level III Orff graduates this summer, found the language and had taken the time to notice each’s unique way of being amidst the general appreciation. And I am always happy to receive comments from readers like “You spoke what I felt but couldn’t quite articulate.” To praise, to affirm, to remind— worthy hopes for us all.

And then provocation. We are none of us as good as we hoped to be, as we might be, as we should be, as we could be. The sun of our original nature may be ceaselessly shining, but the clouds of our ignorance, poor choices, troublesome personalities and just plain old emotional weather are constantly obscuring the light. And so each encounter in a class, concert or piece of writing, at the same time that it lovingly affirms, should be kicking our butt. “Get to work, you worthless, lazy scoundrel! Think deeper! Stop covering your heart! There’s bad things happening out there— raise your voice and speak out! Get out and work! There’s bad things happening inside of us— look them in the face and deal with them! Don’t beat yourself up brutally, but don’t be so smug and self-satisfied either!” To challenge, to question, to provoke— it keeps us honest and growing.

Affirm and Provoke. That’s the A & P store I shop at. See you in aisle 4. 

Get Over Double Trouble

“Juba dis and Juba dat and get over double trouble Juba…”

So fun to perform yesterday at our first all-school assembly in our new Community Center! 15 of our Middle School kids pattin’ Juba to open up the Hambone Summit from the Body Music Festival. Here’s how I introduced the show to our kids:

History is a subject all school children must learn and there’s nothing so important and so painful. So much of it is telling stories about how people before us and still today around us treat each other so badly. Slavery in our country is one of the saddest of those stories and even sadder how scientists, politicians, preachers and teachers kept it all going with crafty lies they told so that mean people could sleep better at night. I often wish we didn’t have to tell you about it, but if we don’t, then we can’t notice it when it’s happening again today and we can’t make a vow to stop it.

But history is also one of the most inspiring subjects as we learn about the people who did make vows to stop it and use all their heart and imagination to survive. Juba and Hambone are the stories of people who had their drums taken away and found a way to keep drumming. Who had their stories silenced and found a way to tell them. Who had their spirit crushed and found a way to keep it alive and rise again. And when we pat these rhythms and tell these stories and keep their memory alive, we learn three very important things:

1.  Truth can be told in secret messages hidden inside poetry.

2.  It’s nice to play drums and guitars and such, but the music is not just in skins 

    and strings,it lives close to us, inside our own bodies and voices.

3.  Music lifts us up and helps us sail over, get through, dance around, all our

    double trouble.

Enjoy the show!

Body Slapping for Peace

It’s time for my favorite musical gathering— Keith Terry’s International Body Music Festival. A week of concerts and workshops put on by grown men and women who spend their days slapping their bodies and making odd sounds with their voice. People who come from far and near, from cultures with all sorts of different attitudes about spending your adult lives chasing fun and frivolity (mostly summarized as “Grow up!”), from all walks of life, but united in their determination not to grow up and get serious jobs sitting in front of computers juggling numbers and such. Whether from Bali, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Brazil or Oakland, they are united in their determination to uncover and discover every tone and timbre the human body is capable of producing and join them into a coherent artistry that leaves audiences gasping in amazement.

I’ve moved amongst all kinds of people— from so-called normal adults to Zen students to jazz musicians to Orff teachers and beyond, but I have to say that Body Musicians are some of my favorite people on the planet. You have to be slightly crazy to devote your life to such things, slightly offbeat (and onbeat and in-between beats) and strange, have a low tolerance for dull routine and a high fascination for patterned magic, a stubborn unwillingness to wholly grow-up joined with a fierce dedication to practice and perfect routines— in short, just my kind of folks!

When I find something good, I, like many, feel compelled to convince the world that this is The Way. Not by preaching or proselytizing or scaring people with threats of hell if they don’t clap and snap to the beat five times a day, but simply by inviting them into the party. Besides the proven truths of stimulating the immune system, pumping up the cardiovascular system without the Zumba membership, opening all the channels in the neuro-circuitry of the brain and lighting up the synapses, cultivating rhythmic integration in the body, connecting to your fellow beings in a way many times more profound than the fake smile handshake of peace in the church service, it’s just so damn fun! And free! Available anywhere, anytime, with anyone! Those dang foreigners may have different accents and words than us, different clothes and customs, different foods and festivals, different religious and philosophical beliefs, but hey, they all have bodies and they all can make sounds. Let us join together!

And so Body Music as the untried route to World Peace and Harmony. Besides all the benefits above, body musicians must practice for many hours a day to get their routines in the muscle memory. Consider this: all the time they are practicing, they are not shopping for unnecessary things that are clogging the planet. They’re not buying a gun at Walmart. They’re not using their hand-eye coordination to practice pulling triggers. They’re not listening to hateful talk radio and learning how to despise others. They’re not playing Grand Auto Theft XV. You get the idea. If only Body Music were mandatory in the schools and work place, come on, can’t you feel it? What a wonderful world this would be!

Slap your body for peace! Spread the word— and then get thee to the Body Music Festival! 

The Guard at the Gate

Is there anyone who can honestly say, “I love sitting at the computer for five hours doing busy work?”  Wouldn’t we all rather be fishing? “But I imagine even then, you probably have to look up the Websites to get the fishing permits and fill out the forms and such.

I spent my morning making changes for our Orff Summer Course brochure. It took me way too long (counting some e-mail and Skype multi-tasking) and I’m still not done. How much of our life do we spend preparing to do the thing we love, arranging it, documenting it, advertising it and so on? Why do we do it?

I suspect there is an invisible world of spirits, each assigned a particular corner of human endeavor. Their job is to make sure the bar is set high and no dilettantes can just freely walk in and out. They’re the guards at the gate demanding to see how many hours you practiced before the concert, how many hours you spent organizing the concert, how willing you are to be bored, exhausted, frustrated doing all the petty little things that lead up to your little moments of genuine pleasure. They want to know that you’re serious, that you care enough that you’re willing to sacrifice.

I have a feeling that I’ve whined about this before in these blogs (anyone keeping track?). One reading of this is simply that I’m trying to wrap a philosophy around my present reality that makes me look good— the tireless, dedicated individual doing the behind-the-scenes work that will give 100 people a lot of pleasure this summer at Orff camp. On the other hand, maybe I’m a pitiful fool who is slow to realize I need to hire someone to do this stuff. Take your pick. 

The Examined Life

I stumbled in Billy Collins on the radio yesterday and it was a most delightful chance encounter. The former Poet Laureate of the United States (but of course, you knew that, yes?) is consistently disarming with his wit and strange thinking. A trip through his poems is a walk through the labyrinth of his always intriguing mind as he takes you through unexpected twists and turns to suddenly arrive where you started— or else end up in a neighboring labyrinth.

And so this morning, I grabbed a book of his poems off the shelf and was charmed yet again by his humor laced with profundity. So much of his poetry is about the act itself of writing the poem and you find yourself at his side gazing out the window or contemplating the silverware on the table or listening to the neighbor’s dog barking. Each act of encountering world sparks off strange associations and off you go riding on language to follow them to their dangling conclusion.

The mere act of reading a poem— any poem— is a step off the wheel of simply getting through the day and paying heed to Socrates’ injunction: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Poetry puts a magnifying glass to the everyday objects and experiences perpetually around us and prods us to examine them. And then tell what they awaken in us. Mary Oliver puts it this way:

“…the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one world throws at you each morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’”

 Of course, most of us don’t and many for good reasons—“I’d rather bake a pie or go jogging or say it in tones or paint or ‘Hey! it’s all I can do to survive!’” But language is free and available to all and poetry not just for leisure-class elites. A few moments each day stopping the avalanche of mere sensation and pausing to really see or hear or taste or smell or feel— and then taking the time to take a photo with words instead of your Smartphone— is well worth considering.

For the record, there are many memorable poems by Mr. Collins, but truth be told, I can’t read too many in a row in the same way I can’t listen to too many successive blues songs or bluegrass tunes. The touch of irony and emotional distance in his work starts to wear on me. The charm and humor is everywhere, but I prefer a bit more straightforward feeling and honest vulnerability, some of which his language masks rather than reveals.

But hey, he did inspire me to write this blog and some of his poems are sheer genius (The Lanyard, for example). Thank you, Mr, Collins and keep sitting by the window with that empty chair next to you to invite your readers in.

The 4 H Club

There is a chapter in my book that's been molding on the back burner titled The 4H Club. It defines my vision of a thorough music lesson, one that has challenged the hand, expanded the hearing, revealed the thinking in the head and opened the heart. Conversely, what falls short of the mark—and still way too often— are lessons that neglect one or more of these faculties and missed the connections between them. You can read the full deal when I strap myself down and make myself get this dang book out!

But while washing dishes tonight and preparing a talk for the Orff Interns, I realized that this is also a great model for the teacher, a blueprint to insure continued blossoming. A good summary of my advice to teachers of all ages:

• Keep cultivating the intelligence of the hand. The technique of your chosen instrument or trying a new one, be it the djembe or didjeridoo, sitar or saxophone.

• Keep expanding your hearing. Listen, listen, listen! Recordings, live music, the rhythm of passing trains or cicadas or tuning into your own work rhythms while chopping carrots or riding your bike.

• Keep the mind growing and glowing. Read, read, read! Neuroscience, anthropology, poetry, great fiction, all my books (ha! Thought I’d sneak that in). And write, write, write, articulate your experience and develop your vision through habitual reflection set on white sheets or blue screens.

• Keep opening the heart through the vehicle of music— or any vehicle. Feel the nuances of Chopin, Bach, Indian classical music or West African polyrhythms. Let all the sounds and vibrations in so the emotional life has voices beyond pop radio— from gamelan to grunge to Grieg to Gershwin. And don't forget the most heart-opening vehicle of all— loving the children! Safe to say that as a music teacher, none of the others will matter without this one. 

And heck, no need to limit this to music teachers. Substitute seeing or moving or touching or tasting according to your passion, sewing or skiing or sautéing for the hand and body and yes, always reading and writing and always open the doors to more of the rooms in the heart (yes, it’s going to hurt and yes, it seems easier to keep some closed, but hey, they’ll open eventually and better you do it then have some thugs in the psyche break down with guns raised.)

The 4H Club, baby! Anyone want to join?

United by Loss

One of the most persistent and pernicious lies we tell ourselves is that we’re in this alone. Everyone around us is having a Pepsi moment while we’re wallowing around in the muck. If we’re ever brave enough to sit down and have an honest conversation with someone— and I mean anyone, take your pick, from the stranger on the bus to your colleague who you’ve known for twenty years— we discover that life puts its heavy foot equally on all our necks. One of the marks of healthy culture is to offer opportunities to reveal the lie of individual suffering and be together in the truth of our common griefs and losses.

And so, El Dia de Los Muertos. Went to the celebration in SF’s Mission District last night and carried along by the power of the Aztec Dancers and the Brazilian Maracatu drums, ended up in Garfield Park filled with the exquisite altars. Each uniquely and artfully arranged to honor the passing of a loved one, with flowers, candles, cut paper designs, photos, all put together with love made public. There were also hung papers on clotheslines to simply name the recently departed and here is where it struck me forcibly how we are all united by loss. Not a single person in the enormous throng of people who had not been touched by death, not a single one that would not continue to be touched by death, not a single one that wouldn’t one day be on that clothesline paper— that is, if there is someone left behind willing to take time to honor the moment.

To all my dear ones who have passed on, I public apologize for myself not making you a beautiful altar filled with the things that you loved in this world. But please know that I’ve built these altars in my mind— not the same as making it three dimensional in a shared community setting, but it’s a start. Next year I vow to do better. Meanwhile, please know that you are missed and forever loved.