Monkey Mind Unbound

Anyone who has ever tried meditation quickly discovers that the mind in the midst of daily life activity hums along at what feels like a normal frequency. But sit in silence and try the simplest act of counting the breaths to still the mind’s chatter and it’s like the hotel TV is on with all 500 cable channels blaring. It’s really quite extraordinary how much is in there, from advertising jingles from your childhood a half-century ago to wholly internalized jazz solos to just the constant idle chit-chat of 100 monkeys jumping around in your neural circuitry. When you actually can learn to follow your breath past the count of one and let the chatter dissolve into the background, a whole new world reveals itself and a new sense of time and occasionally, timelessness surfaces. You begin to co-participate in the constant creation of each moment, born in the inhale and dying in the exhale.

After a 40-year practice, I’m reasonably adept at this while sitting cross-legged on a cushion. But what concerns me now are the conversations that appear when you awake at 2 in the morning and won’t go away just because you want them to. These are the ones that reveal your anxiety about this, that or the other thing and though you know it’s not a good idea to keep feeding those streams of thought, you do anyway. At 2 in the morning.

As mentioned at the end of my travels, I was well aware of and supremely grateful for almost two months in the Fantasyland of freedom that the traveling teacher enjoys. No meetings, no tangled relationships, no long-term commitments. But the punishment was coming home and jumping from the beach chair into the fire. Suddenly, all at once, three or four major decisions out of my hands that will deeply affect my life and my happiness, situations that I need to put trust in others to do the right thing knowing that their version of right and mine may differ.

And so, one moment I’m happily riding my bike along the San Francisco waterfront on the first sunny day in five days back and then, Bam!! the monkeys (or more like chest-beating gorillas) appear and start some train of thought that I can’t seem to jump off from. Maybe this is where the idea of shouting “Get thee behind me, Satan!” came from. But does it work?

So friends, if you have any helpful strategies to shut down the gorillas of anxiety, I’d be happy to hear them. Meanwhile, maybe a sleeping pill tonight?

Institutional Lunacy

We used to put lunatics in mental institutions—now we have institutionally-approved lunacy. I mean deeply crazy people who get public airspace and can influence social policy. Like the Orange County lawyer who got enough people to sign the petition that gay people should be shot in the head. People, I’m not making this up. I was certain this was a news item in The Onion, but this really made it to Sacramento and will take taxpaper’s money to pay officials to have to deal with it.

As reported by The Advocate:

“Attorney Matthew McLaughlin filed the paperwork to launch a ballot initiative called the Sodomite Suppression Act, which would mandate execution by ‘bullets to the head or any other convenient method’ for ‘any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification.’ McLaughlin’s rationale, as explained in the proposition, is that it is better for ‘sodomites’ to die ‘rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness in our midst.’ ”

So this is someone who passed the bar exam? And is an approved practicing lawyer? Then there was the recent mandate that officials working in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection cannot use the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” I repeat: That’s inside the DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION! Then there were the Republican Senators who stated that homosexuality is responsible for the murder of millions of unborn babies.

It goes on. But my point here is not that some people are deeply disturbed or just plain insane. It’s that they have the floor. They’re given media time, TV time, time in the halls of political decision-making. How did this come to be?

These people need help. They really are certifiably crazy, some huge part of their heart missing or their brain malfunctioning. I would feel compassion for them if they didn’t have so much power to wreak havoc in the lives of others and destroy the fabric of anything that passes for a healthy community. Instead of giving them a soapbox to stand on, we should be gathering a support team to help them restore some sense of sanity and balance. I volunteer to teach music classes with them where they have to play and create music with the people they fear until they find the common core of humanity they so habitually avoid.

But if none of this works, I suppose I can just sign the proposition to shoot them in the head.

The Old Pair of Pants

Let me confess: I don’t fit into my wedding suit. Well, I got married some four months after I had hepatitis and weighed 140 lbs back then, so that’s probably a good thing.  But that aside, how many 60 plus year olds do fit into their wedding clothes? We expect the years to fill us out some and mostly they do.

But today I returned to teaching at The San Francisco School after seven weeks away and lo and behold, those pants still fit fine. I slipped into them effortlessly and it all felt like the next day after that last one on February 27^th. And though some kids gave me warm welcomes acknowledging they noticed I had been gone, some kids acted like it was the next day after our last class and that was fine with me.

How good it felt to play jazz blues with the 8^th graders again and after two months without playing these tunes, they jumped back in like riding the proverbial bicycle. So fun to see the fabulous five’s and put together an engaging soundscape for The Three Billy Goats Gruff. And then to be up front with my old guitar in front of 100 kids eager (well, most of them) to sing. I pulled out the old Earth Day Rap for the occasion of Earth week and then had the sense to analyze each phrase and flesh it out so that the experience transcended mere rote “Pledge of Allegiance”-type recitation. And wasn’t that a pleasure?

Nice to reunite with my friends and colleagues James and Sofia even if we did need to forego the social pleasure of re-connecting in order to nail down the schedule for the next few weeks and months and even year ahead. On to carpool, such a great way to see each kid as they came to me to get their name checked off. And darn if some of them hadn’t grown an inch or two in my mere two months away!

And would you believe it felt great to be at a staff meeting? Something comforting about sitting around the table in the 3^rd grade room and having a spirited discussion about getting more serious about banning cell phones during the day at school. A real sit-around-the-table discussion that we instantly tweeted, took photos and put on Instagram— not! We actually just sat around and talked! What a concept!

So thanks to the kids and teachers and the years of community for helping the old pants to fit so well and to feel such comfort wearing them again. First day back was great. Here’s to the next 33 (but who’s counting?). 

Stoned to Death

The helicopters were whirring outside my window all morning and when I finally got out on my bike, I had to weave through large numbers of people, themselves weaving a bit. Didn’t take me too long to catch on —it’s National Weed Day! And I'm not talking about the things you pull out from your garden. Judging from the number of folks on the streets on a Monday afternoon, it’s a very important San Francisco holiday. The mood was festive, the policemen were everywhere, but just watching and enjoying. Given that marijuana is still illegal, an interesting social comment that on this day, it’s “Yes, but…”. Even the law can sometimes be flexible.

But not in Singapore. Interesting to have just come from a place that has a sentence on its arrival form: “Remember: The penalty for drug trafficking is death.” Perhaps Singapore also has a flexible attitude, distinguishing between massive heroin smuggling and someone with a joint tucked away in their backpack. But I wouldn’t count on it. According to Amnesty International, over 300 people have been executed since 1991 for possession of drugs, some of it marijuana and many of the people the users rather than the big-time dealers. Often with a dubious trial.

And so in one place, weed smokers are stoned to death (well, technically hung) while others are just stoned. Some are caught by killer cops while some partake of killer weed. And there you have the full range of the human comedy and tragedy.

On the plane ride back, I read John Grisham’s non-fiction book “The Innocent Man,” a sobering account of innocent men in Oklahoma put through a broken judicial system and one coming within four days of execution for a crime he clearly didn’t commit. Without giving away too much, he finally is freed, but only after he spent 12 grueling years in a horrible prison. At the end of the matter, the prosecutors who clearly rigged the trial didn’t think it necessary to apologize.

Maybe had the lawyers smoked a little weed at the trial, they would have mellowed out a bit and not been so cruel.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Organized Chaos

“I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines…

…He is nothing more nor less,

Than something simple not yet understood…”

                                                - Edna St. Vincent Millay

The world is random, chaotic, meaningless, a series of haphazard events and relationships that make no sense and all human attempts to explain them are futile and delusionary.

The world is pre-destined, God’s plan, everything neatly explained and tucked into an irrefutable dogma that is the true gospel.

And then everything in-between.

The first leads often to cynicism and a shoulder-shrugging “whatever” or “why bother?” The second leads to iron-bound fundamentalist conviction that freezes thinking and excludes possibilities.

But the in-between is what interests me. Particularly the Chaos Theory tenet that chaos is a harmonious relationship yet to be perceived, a complexity too vast to be easily understood that requires our highest level of thought, constant investigation. relentless effort to uncover larger patterns, a practice of revelation. As the composer Schoenberg put it, echoing the poet above, “Dissonance is a consonance yet to be perceived by the listener.”

Art is one path to organizing chaos, taking the jumble of random noise or shapes, colors and images, physical gestures and motions, verbs, nouns and adjectives and gathering them into coherent music, art, dance, poetry. Depth psychology, deep ecology, quantum physics, meditation are other fields of investigation seeking to reveal hidden patterns that drive our thinking, feeling and living. They are not easily bought for an “I believe!” nor eschewed by a simplistic “it’s all a pile of crap” dismissal.

We are creatures of meaning, constantly seeking some sense of order, constantly creating some sense of order. Whether we choose the easy route of casually accepting someone else’s explanation, give up the search or pledge ourselves to persistent revelation makes all the difference in the world.

I woke up at 5 in the jet-lagged morning with these two words—“organized chaos”—rattling in my brain and felt obliged through my own practice of ordering the world to comment on it. Maybe now that I have I can go back to sleep!