Whether the Weather

I awoke at 6:30 and wouldn’t have been surprised if the clock said 3:30 am. It was that dark. Coming home from school on Friday, I already had to put my lights on by 6 pm. It’s late October and Autumn is upon is. And I love it.

I always have. Even as a kid, there was something about the crisp air, the crunch of leaves, the smell of leaves, the darkening days and the three best holidays around the bend. I loved the color of the leaves, I loved raking leaves, I loved jumping into the pile of leaves I raked, I loved spinning around in the wide open spaces of the nearby park trying to catch falling leaves. Occasionally, I was treated to a harvest moon. How to describe it? There was just a sense of magic in the air, a different thickness to time, a different weight to space.

I couldn’t have named it back then, but perhaps, just perhaps, these heightened sensations came of a sense of mortality. The dying leaves, the dying of the light, the spirits at Halloween visiting from the other world— nothing like the tangible signs of impermanence to make you sit up and take notice just a few inches sharper.

When I started reading haiku in college, it was the Autumn poems that most moved me. Indeed, the whole Japanese sense of this fleeting and floating world was no where better expressed in these odes to Autumn. Often a tinge of melancholy, but not quite sadness or depression, sometimes bordering on heaviness of spirit, but more the awareness of life’s brevity and feeling of attuning to the precious jewel of each moment bequeathed us.

Even though San Francisco is woefully short of the Eastern Falls I grew up, having few deciduous trees, the sensation persists. I felt it today, a sense of inward turning that has not visited for awhile, but wholly familiar and welcome, truly an old friend. Fall for me is settling into an evening at home with low light with Dickens in hand and Chopin in the air. Garrison Keillor’s radio meditations are a good backdrop to a hearty soup, an old Jimmy Stewart movie a perfect capper to an evening. I find myself more warm toward fellow humans (election madness notwithstanding), some sense that we’re about to hunker down together to whether a winter (even a mild San Francisco one) and we need each other a bit more than on those careless sunny summer days. And when Chopin hits the crystal minor melodies of the Nocturnes, the night wraps itself around me like a warm blanket with a grandparent smell, reminds me that amidst all the madness of the human experiment, there is a spot always reserved for us to curl up together on the easy chair with a glass of hot cider and the dog curled up by the fire.

We are often so insulated from the weather and often gratefully so. And yet these ancient cycles sing on in our blood and keep the verb of our beings active and flowing and changing. “Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot, We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.”  (A great Orff speech piece, by the way). Well, I like it and rather than set myself against it, I love to feel it taking me back to the old familiar homes of my childhood and indeed, my whole life.

Welcome, Autumn!

Musitropism

“Tropism: The turning of all or part of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus.”

We know how that works in plants. Phototropism— plants reaching up toward the light. Gravitropism —roots going down into the earth. Those mysterious inner workings of living beings, energy fields affecting other energy fields, drawing us one direction and not the other. I suppose there is a lovetropism that makes us want to talk to this person at a party instead of that person, a subliminal attraction that magnetically draws two souls who need each other toward each other. Or a geotropism that finds us visiting a city, village or country and feeling that it calls to us and insists we stay.

I think there is a musitropism as well. That could mean the particular artist or style or instrument or cultural expression that we somehow need at a particular moment and notice it when we find it. But here I’m also talking about the way that the energy released in live music-making affects the energy fields of all making the music and those listening as well and acts us a kind of sunlight drawing the participants upward below their conscious intention.

I felt this so strongly at school yesterday when a kid who has never seemed comfortable in his body and for the long time I’ve known him has been stiff and unexpressive in his movement astounded me with some vivid body percussion that really danced. He was with a group of great dancers and their collective energy somehow entered his muscles, bones and nervous system and drew him up higher than he had ever flown. And another kid who generally sang unexpressively was carried up in a similar way from the power of the choir and suddenly her body started moving with the music and her face shone with the emotion of the song.

I often comment about the phenomena of taking 15 new 6^th graders into a music program where kids have been doing this work for eight years. When we first started this some twelve years ago, I was terrified that the new kids would lower the level of musicality in the class. Instead I discovered that they were drawn up into the existing musical culture and ascended more rapidly than they ever would have if all the 6^th graders were new. Musitropism.

I say it again: We have music classes at my school, we have a music program, we have a music curriculum, but more than all of that, we have a musical culture, a musical community where music permeates each day and all aspects of the kids’ lives. We have three music teachers who have the self-generating and inexhaustible energy, heat and light of the sun radiating in our beings and our work appears so effortlessly and generates such stirring results simply because it works below the surface in nature’s mysterious ways, urging forth without speaking the musical seeds lying dormant in each and every child to start sprouting, growing and blossoming toward the light. That light is the music we make and love and prepare and release into the room in full faith that all present will feel its power. We don’t need as many behavioral strategies to motivate and get the kids to pay attention because the music is almost always more interesting than chit-chatting with your neighbor or mindlessly fooling around. The kids feel its power and feel their own power and feel the delight of the conversation between the two.

My advice to music teachers? We can’t just stand in the middle of the room and radiate our musical heat and light—there are a thousand details to attend to in lesson plans that can’t be wholly ignored. But at the beginning and middle and end of the matter, yes, live the music that draws us all upward and all will gather around to feel the warmth and add their own bright light. Be a musitropist!

Conspiracy

It’s the height of hubris to think anyone cares enough about my life—or anyone’s life— to conspire to shape it. But it tickles me to imagine that there is a conspiracy to keep me from retiring. Not that I’m longing for it or even thinking about it beyond the questions that come my way when people know my age. But if I imagine my life beyond walking the halls of this school, there is so much that will be missing.

Like the way a three-year old today spotted me passing by and jumped out of her seat to shout “Doug!!!” Five minutes earlier, most of my 8^th grade class said spontaneously “Thank you” on their way out from a class where I read part of Louis Armstrong’s autobiography and we discussed his remarkable life. And then there’s the unbroken string of Halloween songs with 100 children, so powerful, so joyful, so musical! And as if that weren’t enough, two different groups of 4^th graders stunned me with some of the most expressive movement I’ve had the pleasure to witness. Is this a conspiracy to keep me at school forever?

Who will do these things in my post-retirement life? Where will I find a group ready, willing and able to sing ten Halloween songs with me? Where I can find people interested—or at least willing to consider their interest—in Louis Armstrong’s life story? Who will pop out of their stores when I pass by on Irving Street and shout “Doug!” Who will I shout out to? Who would consider throwing aside their lifetime of armored protection and dance madly, wildly, joyfully? Could that happen in Aisle 4 of Walmart?

If this is a conspiracy, so what? It's working. Me, I’m stayin’ put. 

The Logic of Mosquitoes

… eludes me. Why do they still buzz around your ear all night after they’ve feasted on you?. Are they singing, “Nanny nanny naa naa! I sucked your blood!?” 

Aargh! The mosquito. Intelligent Design’s dealbreaker.

My Great American Novel

I imagine we all have one waiting to be written, yes? (Well, substitute American for the country of your choice). Why don’t we write it?

1)    We’re lazy.

2)    We have no talent.

3)    We have to feed our family.

4)    Printer ink is too expensive.

Today, the ending for my perfect novel descended upon me like a beatific vision. But the distance between the vision and the work is a few hundred light years and… well, see number 1 above.

So I’m going to make you work out the details, in an Orff-style interactive cooperative novel-writing approach. You choose the characters, the relationships, the settings, the situation according to your whims and preferences. But I’ll claim the ending as my TM copyright intellectual property which you must vow not to steal, even if you put in the 10,000 hours to flesh out the details. Deal?

Okay. Here’s the premise. Two people are intimately connected to each other, their lives inextricably intertwined like two wisteria plants blooming on the same trellis. They are:

1)    He and he.

2)    She and she.

3)    He and she.

4)    T and T (transgender)

They are:

1)    Friends

2)    Lovers

3)    Siblings
4)  Two GPS voices

They live in:

1)    Upper Sandusky

2)    Lower East Side

3)    Middle America

4)    A cardboard box

After many adventures and deep bonding experiences, they get separated by:

1)    War

2)    Famine

3)    Rising property values

4)    Confusion about whether they were supposed to meet in this Starbucks or that Starbucks and are still wandering around from one to the other.

Here most of the novel follows them through their attempts to find each other, their deep despair and feeling of being lost with the other, the regrets that they cheated at Boggle and never confessed to the other, that they should have met at Heidi’s bakery instead of Starbucks. They grow increasingly despondent knowing that they may never see each other again. (Choose the time frame here—5 years, 25, 50).

Independently, both of them join Search.com in hopes of locating the other and spend hours in front of screens in a search that leads nowhere. And then against all odds, fate finds them walking towards each other in:

1)   An airport, just as they’re each about to board a plane to a faraway country and never return.

2)    In Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

3)    At Burning Man. Naked.

4)    In the Starbucks where they were first supposed to meet.

Now, since all books these days are screenplays in our heads, we can picture this moment in the movie, the music swelling, the tension growing as the camera pans out to first one and then the other approaching each other from a distance. This is it! The moment they (and the readers) have been waiting for.

But wait! Something is terribly wrong. While they’re walking, each has their head down looking at their cell phone, reading a text from a friend who is bored and asking “Whassup?” They get closer…and closer… and closer…they lightly brush shoulders without noticing, heads down looking at their phone and then… keep walking past and away from each other while texting to their friends, “Dunno, Whassup w.u?”

And they never see each other again.

The End.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1.     Do you think the author of this piece has an issue with cell phones?

2.     Why or why not?

3.     Have you ever thought about what you’re missing when you look at that damn screen every spare second of your life?

4.     Why or why not?

5.     Are you reading this Blog on your cell phone?

6.     Why or why not?

7.     Discuss.