Time and Boredom

The soul-stirring music I’ve shared with 20 beautiful music teachers this past week mostly came from people not working 9 to 5 jobs. Whether by choice or cultural exclusion, these folks had a lot of time on their hands. Time to do something as useless as playing music. And with enough time and sufficient boredom, they began to change whatever music someone else composed, to find their own way to express it. Or to compose something new.

Try it sometime. Play a song over and over again until the nervous system finds it intolerable to keep playing the same old thing. Or else stumbles into a new idea because you made a mistake. And that’s when things get interesting. You follow the fingers or the ear’s or mind’s inclination to explore a new detail and if you don’t have to rush off to an appointment, you keep following it until it crystalizes into something new and worthy of notice. So you remember it or record it or write it down and voila! the world is refreshed by yet another chronicle of human emotion, imagination and intelligence.

But amongst those key ingredients is time— time to follow those impulses and develop them, time to be bored and see what comes up, time to just try stuff out. And if you have a group of more than one with time, then it starts to take off. And if you have a whole culture that values these kinds of activities, well, then you’re really in luck.

Go thou to your local Youtube and type in “Amazing jam session—three random guys sing together” to see how this works. Note the people who just pass by on their way to their important work or off to the next store. Meanwhile, this guy spends his day sitting on the sidewalk playing his guitar and then another stops and listens and begins to add something from the wellspring of his own imagination and yet later, a third joins the party with his point of view. Art forged by time and boredom unfolding in front of your eyes and ears.

Does anybody in Music Education ever suggest these two key ingredients for success in your students? Leisure time and boredom?

Well, I just did.

Gone Fishing

If I don’t post something here every few days, I feel like something is off. But no time now, I’m off fishing in the stream of Jazz and Orff and children’s games and humor and deep seriousness and music, music, music (and dance, dance, dance) with 20 marvelous souls. We’re not just standing in the stream with our waders on waiting for something to bite. We’re swimming with the dolphins and the fish and catching some with our bare hands and throwing them back and catching others and cleaning them and cooking them and eating them. (Well, those who know me know I’m stretching the metaphor because I actually don’t like to eat fish, but bear with me anyway.) Sometimes we’re in the Class IV rapids slamming against the rocks of our challenges, sometimes whirling off to the side in the eddies, sometimes drifting down a calm stream. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, energizing and takes the full measure of our effort and attention.

It’s a trip I’ve made every summer since 1988 and sometimes during the year as well, a journey I’ve shared with fellow fisher-folks in San Francisco, St. Paul, Sao Paolo and Salzburg, in Bangkok, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, in Madrid, Melbourne and Montreal, in Rio de Janeiro, Reyjkavic and Rome, in Taipei, Tenerife and Toronto and yet more cities. Wherever I go, the water is refreshing, the fish are plentiful, the meal is delicious. While others go to work to do serious and important things, I get to earn my keep sipping lemonade with crunchy ice, eating one potato-two potato and more, stealing cookies from the cookie jar and prancing up and down the piano like a kitten on the keys.

So don’t bother to call me with your official surveys and such. I’m gone fishing.

Window Seat

My idea of a plane these days is a combination of a movie theater, library and restaurant.

I’m most often on the aisle seat, with a bit more leg room and easy access to the bathrooms.

But on my flight from Denver to San Francisco, I had a window seat. And it helped me re-discover the miracle of flying.

I mean, think about it. It’s only been a hundred years in the 100,000 plus years of human evolution that people, with the exception of a few hardy mountain climbers, have the extraordinary possibility of seeing the world from above. And already we’re taking it for granted. We’re more interested in reading our John Grisham novel or watching The Avengers on the video than looking out the window.

We ascended through a thunderstormed Denver Airport and quickly found clear air. There below were the soldiered rows of houses turning to the squared and rectangled fields. But within those right angles were some unknown curves of plantings or mounded earth, just enough to bring some mystery to the predictable. Then into the rolling hills and snaking rivers and let’s face it, we are programmed somewhere deep inside for curves. I think the preferred images of women as subjects for paintings and photographs is not just to kick-start the male’s lust so the species can propagate. I think there’s an aesthetic preference for the curve over the straight line that women likewise appreciate. Whether it be in people’s bodies, Italian hill towns or the rolling foothills of the Rockies, they bring a pleasure to the eye.

Then to the sharper jags of the mountains laced with snow and always the clouds in the distance, above and below. We pay big money in Disneyland for a ride that would take us through such landscape, yet often let it pass unnoticed on our flight to wherever. Yes, as you level off at 35,000 feet, the details are harder to appreciate and then it does get dark and you’re grateful for the movie or your book. But next time you’re on a flight, look around and see how many of the window-seaters are enjoying the view.

 And so this entry is a note to self:

 “Get thee a window seat and spend some time looking out it.”

And look! There’s San Francisco!!!

America the Beautiful

My good friend Sofia just wrote a letter telling me how she’s fallen in love with Spain yet again. The reason? A festival in the north of Spain every bit as colorful and powerful and celebratory of life as anything we saw in Ghana. Many decades ago, having traveled for a year searching for —and finding—such festivals in India, Nepal, Thailand, Bali and Japan, I could understand her enthusiasm. If I have any legacy at the school I’ve taught at for 40 years, it is bringing that fascination with and passion for communal celebration into a school community.

At the end of a week in the Colorado mountains, I too have fallen in love again with my native country. But it isn’t because of our festival life. It’s simply because of the heartbreaking beauty of this land. The Rocky Mountains, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Cascades, Big Sur and more. Here I’m accenting the grandeur of the West, but there’s also the intimacy of the East Coast woods, the southern Everglades, the mid-Western shores of Lake Michigan. A beauty mostly preserved in one of the best ideas our country has had—National Parks. Without them, I shudder to think what might have happened as the developers and strip-maulers slashed their way across the country, reducing everything to flatland malls and utilitarian uses.

I think my first hint of the wide open skies of the West came from a Dennis the Menace Goes to California comic book. But my imagination was more expertly and articulately captured by one of my first “favorite” books—Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. Though the extent of my travels beyond New Jersey was to Florida (aged 5) and Toronto (aged 12), there was some seed of wanderlust already sewn into my heart that Steinbeck helped water and bring to bloom. Soon after came Whitman’s poem The Song of the Open Road, Jack Keruoac's On the Road and finally, my own life hitchhiking across the country as a 20-year old. And then driving across and around with my own children—and reading Travels with Charley out loud to them. It held up.

And so the amber waves of grain and purple mountain’s majesties remain wonders to behold and thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, protected somewhat from the invasion of ugliness. Yes, there are the mandatory stores selling kitsch no one ever needs, not ever. There is the parade of Winnebagos, the tourists clicking away to capture the scenery they’re not wholly experiencing, the occasional hiker with his portable boombox playing loud music. But mostly there is the patient presence of mountains, the shimmering aspens, the thundering waterfalls and trickling streams, the chirping chipmunks and majestic elk, the air so fresh and not available to bottle and sell at Costco. You just have to be there.

And I’m grateful that I was.

Henry and Me

At a time when my teenage peers were partying, I was reading Walden and dreaming of a life of solitude in the woods. Henry David Thoreau’s experiment both fascinated me and awakened some sleeping vision of a life fully lived. I believe he became my first literary hero, soon followed by Walt Whitman and a host of other authors mentoring me from afar.

At the time that I first read Walden, I had never been to sleep-away camp or any camp, never had backpacked or visited a National Park. My experience of the natural world was limited to Warinanco Park, a block away from my house in suburban New Jersey. 200 acres of fields and woods and a few playgrounds and a lake that was my backyard in my freewheeling “let the kids go out and play” childhood. My friends and I wandered those acres often, playing pick-up baseball and football in fields of our own creation, hide-and-seek in the woods, skipping stones in the lake, shooting baskets at the playground, spying on the teenagers in Lover’s Lane. We caught Fall leaves, sledded down wintry hills, slurped Creamsicles on hot summer days.

Once I got my driver’s license, I would often go to Watchung Reservation a few towns away. Spent some time at Trailside Museum, with its exhibit of fluorescent rocks and taxidermied wildlife, climbed the tower with the view, boated on Surprise Lake and generally just wandered the woods trying to catch a bit of the magic that Thoreau wrote so eloquently about. I didn’t know one plant from another and still had never slept out under the stars, but I felt some attraction and connection to the natural world.

College was my initiation, beginning with a real backpack trip in the Adirondacks with five students and the teacher of our Man and Nature class. Only one of us had only backpacked before, but with a great deal of mishaps, mosquitos, rain with no tents and Spam dinners, we survived. I came into the trip with some fantasy of instant Thoreauvian enlightenment simply being in the great outdoors. I soon discovered that I had a mind with obsessive thoughts and chatter and simply being in the woods was no guarantee that you would pass each day in blissful connection with all creatures great and small. I believe my most memorable moments came from playing Hearts by campfire and pausing to look at the moon over the lake. Instead of trying to squeeze meaning out of a tree, my mind was busy wondering how to slough the Queen of Spades and caught off guard, a bit of forest magic crept in.

It was also in college that I wandered around in the 1000 acre Glen Helen in Yellow Springs, Ohio, worked at a school in rural Maine, another in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, that I hitchhiked around California and camped alone at Big Sur, Yosemite and Prairie Creek campgrounds. And so the die was cast for a lifetime of outdoor experiences. I ended up living in a city, but summers on Lake Michigan, annual camping trips with the kids at my school and intermittent family backpack trips kept me in touch with Henry’s delight and the pleasure of sleeping under stars, awakening to babbling brooks, bounding up cobbled mountain paths, perching on a stone to absorb the view.

And now here in Colorado at a family reunion. Have hiked five out of these first six days (one more tomorrow) between 6 and 9 miles a day at elevations between 8,000 and 12,000 ft. Every day begins in sun and the rain comes in the afternoon and both are welcome. It's true I haven't backpacked in a while and don't think about it when planning my calendar. Maybe the first signs of a more comfortable and sedentary life befitting my age. But it sure feels fine to up and out walking each day, in company with elk, marmots, chipmunks, the majesty of distant peaks, the tranquility of placid lakes, the roar of waterfalls and the conversation with fellow hikers. Exercise, solitude, sociability, fresh air, all at once.

Mr. Thoreau once said, “Things do not change. We change.” These mountains the same as they were 25 years ago when I came to the first reunion, the people the same and different— the generation above has gone, the generations below multiplied manifold, this old fellow different and yet the same. Happy to be outdoors and walking.

Until dinnertime—which is now.