Dance

         

          Dance to the music!” sang Sly and he also might have said “Sing to the dance!” Music is movement in sound and movement is music in motion and young children understand that they are joined at the hip. Watch a 3-year old tell a story. The chance to refine and focus and more clearly express their physical exuberance is a great gift for young children and one of the many reasons they love coming to music class—because it fits precisely the way they like to be and they like to learn.

The Art of Distillation

Two dictionary definitions of distillations:

1)   The action of purifying a liquid by a process of heating and cooling.

2)   The extraction of the essential meaning or most important aspects of something.

Sometimes art demands a large field in which to play with no restrictions. The Muse strikes and the words/ sounds/ images start flowing and lo and behold, it’s a Wagner opera or Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or Tolstoy’sWar and Peace  or Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 

But sometimes art loves to be confined, to be limited, to be challenged to express the essence of something in the 17 syllables of the haiku or the 3-minute jazz recording or the short story.

The oceanic wave of surging liquid needs to be purified, to be heated (felt passionately) and then cooled (thought out with detached intellect) to be able to extract the essential meaning of something. 

Tomorrow night, I’ll be speaking at an Art’s Event, but instead of the usual romp through a 90-minute playground, I’ve been handed a specific form, asked to comment for exactly 30 seconds each on a series of 14 slides. Get my meaning across in fourteen distilled minutes.

My first draft was the usual long sentences with passive verbs and many clauses, but as I tried to speak them in 30 seconds, they all felt too heavy and cumbersome. So the distillation began, the more active verbs, the shorter sentences, the simpler ways to say what’s important. And wasn’t that interesting? 

I hope you’ll think so because the next series of posts will be the 14 comments with photos. One per post. Hope you enjoy it!

Mission Statement

My wife turns 70 this Friday. (“Yikes! How did that happen?” says every aging person, as if time’s march toward an unwelcome destination is a perpetual surprise.) To prepare for the occasion, I’m making a little book of 70 memories of our 46 years together. I began digging down into the basement of my own memory, then got a little help from old-fashioned photo albums and then had the brilliant idea of consulting our annual Christmas newsletters, a tradition begun in 1987 of “the year in review.” There was always some creative angle to them beyond the dull prose of what happened—multiple choice test with funny wrong answers, rhymed versions to the rhythmic meters of “The Night Before Christmas” or “Good King Wenceslas,” match the photo with the event, etc. 

Looking through them, I noticed I usually gave a closing paragraph reminding us all to be active and alert citizens working to improve this weary world while also taking time to enjoy its bounties and beauties. As good a summary as any of my lifelong “mission statement.” So even though it’s out of season, thought I’d share this rhymed version from some 10 or 15 years ago. On the surface, we seem farther away from these sentiments than ever and yet, each day, more people are also leaning towards tolerance, compassion, inclusion, especially if they have the good sense to turn off Fox News (their mission statement is to keep spreading fear with the goal of protecting rich and wanna-be-rich white people’s unearned privilege). So happy holidays in February and public greetings to my wife on the occasion of her decade-turning birthday!

So that is a smattering of our news from this year

And now we look forward to life free from fear

A new way of thinking, a new way of seeing,

A new way of living, a new way of being.

A world in which each  life is precious and blessed

Where no one is living at the expense of the rest

Christians and Pagans and Muslims and Jews

Buddhists and Taoists and yogic Hindus

Each building hope for the next generation

By teaching the children that God loves no nation.

No religion, no people, more than another,

That now is the time to be sister and brother.

A world without naming the others as Satan,

Where each faces boldly the mistakes he is making.

A world free from ignorance, hatred and strife.

Happy Holidays to all and to all a good life!

Keats in the Hood

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

-      Keats

Just had the pleasure of seeing Don Reed’s one-man show East 14^thSt.  at the Marsh Theater. It was his autobiographical tour-de-force of growing up in East Oakland with a Jehovah’s Witness step-father who occasionally beat him “for his own good” and a pimp father who was steeped in the low-life crowd, but told him “be who you gotta be.” As a teenager, he left the first to live with the second and ended up going to college in UCLA and creating his life as a successful actor, an extraordinary mime, an eloquent storyteller and an intelligent, soulful human being. Here was a stellar example of someone who used his “pains and troubles” to become a loving father, an upright citizen and a complex feeling person mastering a difficult craft. 

John Keats was an English poet born in 1795 who also “felt and suffered in a thousand diverse ways.” His father died when he was nine and his step-father (are the fairy tales true?) was not kind to him. His mother died when Keats turned 15, when he was in boarding school just discovering his love of language and turning towards poetry. But one-year later, he was apprenticed to become a surgeon. Still he pursued poetry and published his first book, with a mean-spirited critic telling him to stick with surgery. His brother Tom died of tuberculosis at 18 years old and he himself contracted it and died at the tender age of 25. But not before he had written some of the most powerful and eloquent poetry in the English language. 

Some of us our blessed with easy lives—food on the table always, enough money in the bank, loving parents and wonderful friends and no big catastrophes. Others struggle through poverty, hard times, people who shun us or betray us, loved ones snatched away by the jaws of too-early death. And most of us end up with some combination of the two. But as Ella Fitzgerald once said, “It’s not where you come from that matters, it’s where you’re going.” And it’s up to us to set our destination and do what we must to keep taking the next step forward. 

The Balinese talk about taking seven steps up to Heaven or seven steps down to Hell. In the end, Hell is the same as Heaven. The difference is simply going up through seven happy places or down through seven sad places. Doesn’t matter which you take, you end up in the same place.

And so John Keats and Don Reed took on the world as a “Vale of Soul-making” and stepped forth accordingly. We would do well to do the same.

Gandhi Agrees

After writing that last post about the potential role of children in deciding our future, Facebook gave me one of those memories and it was this quote. It’s good to know that Gandhi and I agree on this neglected point of view. Maybe this would be a good retirement project— a Children’s Crusade that will march on Washington and insist that their voices be heard or their future be considered. Anyone want to help organize?

Life Without Children

I’m noticing that my tolerance for injustice, ignorance and just plain bad news (is there any other kind these days?) is lower than usual these days. Hope is waning and despair is growing and I think I just figured out why.

Except for one delightful day teaching kids in Singapore, I’ve been three weeks away from young children. I’m just beginning to realize how much they keep me alive, alert and full of optimism for the human condition. Yes, their extremes of constant motion and explosive screams and squeals and pee-pee and poo-poo jokes can wear one down a bit, but even the worst pee-pee joke is a thousand times better than any Trump tweet. (Or a pee-pee tape.)Their energy, expressiveness, humor, curiosity, honesty, fascinating perspectives, open faces, loving hearts greeting me every day makes me happy and feeds my faith in human possibility.

Since I’m about to retire from that daily encounter, this is a bit worrisome. Of course, I can sub at schools and visit the grandchildren, but I worry about my state of being away from children for too long, especially in an election year! Maybe there’s a “rent-a-child” program I can contact. 

And speaking of children and elections, how fantastic would it be for the upcoming Presidential debates to include questions and answers with children! One each with 5-year olds, 9-year olds, 13-year olds, 17-year olds. Anyone thinking of that? Of course not!! But wouldn’t we learn so much as candidates tried to smooth-talk their way through truly provocative questions and the kids would hold them accountable for their piss-poor answers? Anyone on board?

The Art of Conversation

… lives on! Sometimes heads raise up from the self-enclosed worlds of screened phones and people look each other in the eye and talk. And then keep talking without getting drawn back to the phone! It can happen! And it did to me yesterday.

Though I’m perfectly at home talking in front of a group of 10, 100 or 1,000 and equally at home getting a group—any group—moving and singing and playing music, as your airplane seatmate, I’m the introverted guy perfectly happy to read, watch a movie, do a Crostic puzzle without a single word of greeting. Talking to strangers is not my go-to default. But I’m happy to respond.

So while reading a bit of Willa Cather’s My Antonia standing at the bus stop, a woman came up to me and said, “I read that book!!” “Really?” I said. “It doesn’t seem to be that well-known.” “Well, that’s because I’m from Nebraska. Everyone in Nebraska has read that book.” 

And on we went, talking about the Nebraskan countryside, its seasons, her more conservative family still living there, the idea of an American exchange-program where San Francisco folks live with a Nebraska family for 6 months and vice-versa. When the bus came, we actually sat down next to each other and continued the conversation. She found out I was a music teacher, I found out she was a nurse and just started work at the Jewish Home for the Aged, where I had just five minutes ago finished playing piano. “Oh, that was you? I was thinking my sister should be singing those songs you were playing—she loves that music!” So on the conversation went, ending with my giving her my “card” and telling her sister to get in touch with me if she wanted to join the weekly sing. Turns out that she (my conversational partner) lives in my neighborhood and that sparked yet more talk about the places we liked and the changes we had seen. She got off the bus before me and that was that. No weird male-female undertones, no expectation to meet again, just a pleasant talk between two strangers that seems so rare these days. 

The next day, went on a short hike with my daughter and as we discussed current books we were reading, she told me about Malcom Gladwell’s latest. The title? Talking to Strangers!!! (Exclamation points mine). Turns out the theme is not quite what I’m talking about here (though still interesting), but the serendipity was striking. 

I suppose in some way this Blog is a bit like talking to strangers. Me confessing all sorts of things to people I mostly have never met. But of course, the missing piece is the actually conversation where I get to hear your stories. So, dear readers, if we ever have the good fortune to meet (and I believe I have met some of you), it will be your turn to talk to me and I’ll be happy to listen. At least for the equivalent of some 2500 blogposts. 

Looking forward to it!