Trivial First-World Quarantine Issues That Nevertheless I Think About

• I’m out of joss stick incense for my morning meditation and there’s only one store left in San Francisco that carries McCann’s 3-minute oatmeal —and it’s line is long. Plus I need a haircut.

• Wouldn’t this be the perfect time to do all the city road repair that they’re always doing during rush-hour morning commutes?

• I suggest opening all the remaining Drive-in Movie Theaters. With curbside concessions, of course. 

• Perfect social distancing sports: 

-      Tennis with one disposable gloved hand.

-      Baseball without a catcher. 

-      Golf with onesomes. 

• With all the daily video-chats and online video lessons, I can’t help but wish this had happened twenty years ago when I could stand to see myself. 

• A walk in the world these days is like a run down a football field, dodging all oncoming opponents. 

• If Disneyland were open and it’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout ride equaled its world-record waiting-in-line time of 5 hours (on May 29, 2017), how many feet/ yards/ meters/ kilometers/ miles would the line be following the 6-foot social-distancing rule? (The perfect online Math Problem for the rest of the school year!)

• Shall we collect for future times sworn statements from children that they miss school?

A Poem For Our Times

A Poem That Shakespeare Couldn’t Have Written

                                    

In the long and sordid history of the entire human race,

There has never been a time when all have sheltered in their place.

Never have we all been so conjoined in our disgrace.

Never have we all been so confined to our home base.

Yet here in April 2020, this precisely is our case

The small pleasures we now appreciate, the challenges we face.

All reduced to smaller steps and a slower, saner pace.

The bloom on the rose bush, the flowers in the vase,

More important than ambition, the wealth that once we chased.

The world starkly unsheltered, but sheltered all of us.

Stores with lines, schools are closed, the restaurants gathering rust.

Uncertainty round every corner, a future we can’t trust.

The same in Timbuktu, Helsinki, Perth, Paris. 

Our lives turned upside-down, our ways we must adjust,

The weighty matters of birth and death we finally must discuss.

Who will we be, how will we live, when the dark cloud lifts?

What ways of thinking, ways of doing, finally will shift?

Will all our wasteful ways now begin to lean toward thrift?

Will we finally see our human birth as a priceless, precious gift?

When can we shake hands again, when a stranger hug?

When will we stop sweeping facts under each and every rug?

When stop shirking duties and dismiss them with a shrug?

Now! For our once high and mighty race has been brought down by a bug.

Wisterianism—the True Religion

The wisteria vine in my back yard is blooming its purple flowers, the real story of rebirth and resurrection— and not a single war has been fought in its name. The resurrection of Jesus, the enlightenment of Buddha, the revelation of Moses and the burning bush, are all stories to remind us of nature’s decay and growth, birth and death. From the microcosm of each inhale a birth, each exhale a death, to the grand moments of emerging as an embodied being and departing leaving this body behind, we are constantly living the cycle of growth and decay. The more consciously we can do this, the more we can awake into each day as a glorious possibility and turn to sleep each night with the contented exhale of life well-lived— well, it seems to me we will have done the very thing a human birth makes possible. 

When we squander our time, get hung up in the which story is more true, get seduced into a faith that justifies us killing others who don’t think the same way, well, we simply have wasted our human possibility and might end up frying in hell or being reborn as a mosquito or simply extinguishing our light wondering what it was all about. 

And so the wisteria and the cherry trees and the tulips and the wildflowers are here to remind us— jump up on the cycle and ride its full length, each stage with its own beauties and gifts. But maybe a little bias toward Spring, that moment of life bursting anew all around us, of the dark winter of our souls beginning to open and smile and bloom and give color again, attracting the birds and the bees—literally and metaphorically speaking, if you catch my drift!

Maybe with the churches and temples and synagogues closed, folks might return to the most ancient and true and least harmful religion— the blooming bounty out their door. But being the weird flawed creatures we are, someone would probably found the Church of Wisterianism, start creating dogma, asking for donations and fight against the Rosecrucians or the Daffodillites. 

Don’t do it!

Kilroy Was Here

Does anyone in the new generation know “Kilroy was here!”? Even if you do know it, do you know what it meant or how it came to be? Well, having just looked it up, I could tell you, but hey, I have an online staff meeting in 5 minutes, so this will now be your homework.

Suffice it to say, it was a popular graffiti and I’ve always taken it in the spirit of much graffiti, someone just letting the world know, “Hey! I’m here! Nobody may know me and perhaps I’ve done nothing worth knowing, but still, I was here. I was born, slogged through the same swamp that we all do and occasionally emerged into bright, sunlit fields bursting with Spring flowers, as I also hope we all do. This marking is just to let you know I was here. I matter.”

As you might discover in your homework, that’s not precisely how Kilroy was used. But my interpretation still is worth considering. This entire Blog, along with my journals and books and Facebook posts, is my “Kilroy was here" testimony. Even if I don’t have anything to report beyond, “Worked on the school songbook. Played some jazz tunes on piano. Cooked a good meal. Watched two episodes of Shetland,” still I am here. Hunkered down in this weird new life, with time off to bike through those sunlit fields of Spring (though more overcast than I’d like at the moment).

And now, most exciting of all, it’s time for the Staff Meeting!

Today's Lemonade

Back a mere four weeks ago, I still had hopes that my scheduled March 21^stSaturday Orff workshop could happen. Silly me! I postponed it until May 2^nd, thinking that surely by then this would be over. Silly me! Then I thought of postponing it again until June, but I had enough of the silly me’s by then. Time for plan B and a different lemonade recipe from the endless supply of lemons on the supermarket shelves where the toilet paper used to be. And so I wrote this note to my workshop mailing list and so I share it with you. 

Dear Friends,

Here is our moment. Everything that the Orff approach tries to nourish and nurture— connection, compassion, community, flexible thinking, imaginative response, disciplined practice and more—is what the Corona Crisis is calling us all to rise to. Here we are, bushwhacking through the unmarked path of online teaching while also figuring out how to negotiate a new hunkered-down lifestyle, filled with challenges but also opportunities. Now we can finally master Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu on piano, learn clawhammer banjo from Youtube lessons, learn how to sing 200 songs from the Great American Songbook! Listen to the collected works of Miles Davis or all of Haydn’s 106 Symphonies, read all of Mary Oliver’s poems, Shakespeare’s plays or all 9 books by Doug Goodkin. (HA! HA!). Get out that Thai cooking book, take one last listen to your cassette tape collection, finally learn that new language you always meant to speak. The possibilities are endless!

It’s also a good time, as Winston Churchill once remarked, to “eat my own words and find them very tasty.” The idea of Orff Schulwerk training online always seemed to me an impossible idea that I would tie myself to a xylophone to shut down in protest. And yes, the work in the physical world of three-dimensions in a place with a circle of live bodies and voices independent of anything that must be plugged in is, and always will be, the real deal. Irreplaceable. Necessary. Life-changing. Unforgettable. The real deal.

And yet… when one door is closed, another must open if we are to keep our passion, curiosity and deep need to still stay connected alive and well. And so in the last month, I have given several online courses, in addition to crafted many lessons for my kids, both “live” Zoom sessions and videos and assignments sent out, and lo and behold, it helps! I’ve figured out a lot about what works and how and what sometimes works even better (recorder class with the capacity to mute and unmute!). 

And so, this Spring’s workshop will be online. I’ll miss holding hands in a circle, playing, singing and dancing together in real time, sharing food at lunchtime, but even if the virtual lemon juice is artificial, we’ll make it as tasty and refreshing as we can. See you on the screen!

Crying Online

Just finished the last of three jazz online classes with 50 to 90 people in my home via Zoom. 

On the first day, I shrieked with joy seeing some 10 or so friends from around the world—South America, Asia, Europe, New Jersey! By the third of these 90-minute sessions, I was beginning to recognize the faces of some of my new “virtual” friends and that was sweet.

My goal in these classes is the same whether live in a circle or mediated by a screen— to give teachers the tools to teach their children better. "Better" meaning with more clarity, more understanding, more fun! I aim to give them the best of child-friendly materials, show them how to develop it beyond the activity into the next possibility, enlarge the understanding of how certain musical styles work, improve their own musicianship and so on.

At the same time, I know that the kinds of experiences human beings have who play, sing and dance together, who create together, who support each other in risking beyond the comfortable, will bond these people together into some kind of ongoing community long after the last song is sung. I have witnessed how such communion lives on in memory, letters/ e-mails, live visits, What’s Ap groups and even shared tattoos!

But when I teach jazz, especially to Americans, I aim for more. I want to use the music and its history as a lens into what went down in this country so that we might finally have the possibility of drawing the line to all the hatred purposefully fostered and perpetuated for unfair economic game, unearned privilege and identity and saying: “Here is where this stops.” I invoke the title of the Albert King song: “Had You Told It Like It Was, It Wouldn’t Be Like It Is.” So I try to model how to be the courageous teacher who will talk beyond the notes and tell the stories that need to be told and (now) show them on Youtube—the Battle of the Bands between Chick Webb and Benny Goodman, the tap dancing of the Nicholas Brothers and Fred Astaire, the singing of Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley. And then examine the story behind the story. And then the story behind that one. Find the disease in the root that keeps the flower from blooming as fully and fragrantly and colorfully as it should. 

And that brings us straight into the center of what it means to be a fully functioning beautiful soul of a human being. The lesson we’re all hunkered down in virtually every corner of the world trying to learn. 

And so in this last session showing how the notes worked in the 12-bar blues on the piano, I somehow circled around to some quotes by Duke Ellington and decided to give Duke the last word in this three-part online series. Imagine my surprise when I got to the last quote and up rose that familiar sign of great grief leavened with joy that made my voice stop and had me reading with tears streaming. Online! With strangers I had just “met.” 

So the verdict is in. The soul and the open heart certainly tend to prefer a sacred grove to wandering around Costco, would choose an embraced circle of warm, sweaty bodies to a checkerboard of faces on a screen. But they can arise anywhere, anytime, if a person has chosen to live with caring beyond the casual, beauty beyond the practical, grieving beyond having a nice day. Have you noticed that when people break down and cry in front of others, they often say, “Sorry?” Why apologize? Let ‘er rip! Duke’s words below just did me in and I was proud that it was witnessed by my new friends and colleagues. 

And so the quote. Duke was asked in an interview what his newly composed Suite was about and he replied:

“New World A’Comin’ refers to a future place, on earth, at sea or in the air, where there will be no more war, no greed, no categorization, and where love is unconditional, and where there is no pronoun good enough for God.”

Please pass the tissues. 

Groundhog Day

For many of us, this life in quarantine is like the movie Groundhog Day. The same day repeated over and over again. Without the markers of varied routine that give weight and character and color to each day, we’re spinning around in a 24-hour unchanging loop. For me, Tuesday used to be jazz with 8^thgraders and games with 5-year olds and Singing Time after lunch and staff meeting and that made Tuesday wholly different from Wednesday’s 6^thgraders and 4^thgraders and so on. The weekend was an event to look forward to and the evening at the restaurant or movie theater or jazz club gave a welcome change to the constants in the week. 

Then, of course, for me, the weekend workshops or courses in Singapore or Sao Paolo or Salzburg made February or March wholly distinct from September or October. The Spring Concert in May was a whole different feeling than the Holiday Show in December. You get the idea. 

Being creatures of rhythmic routine and comforting habit, we’re creating our quarantined markers to the day, but with so much fewer choices for the needed novelty. I can bike ride to the ocean or choose to go to the Bay, Zoom in with my men’s group still on Wednesday night and my grandkids on Sunday morning, sing with my neighbors on the street on Friday’s and Sunday’s, but the scope is so much more narrow. 

If the routines are life-giving, fun and meaningful, it’s not wholly bad. Reminds me of eating in Guatemala, where beans, rice, tortillas and eggs were the main offerings for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was delicious and nutritious and the occasional addition of an avocado or a mango added just enough variety and saved a lot of time trying to decide, “Shall we go with Chinese or Thai or Italian food tonight?” Very similar to my 7-day retreats at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, where each day was an unvaried regimen of sitting zazen meditation, walking meditation, chanting, interviews with the Zen master, meals, a little work, repeat. By limiting choice, we were freed to experience each moment more deeply than the norm, to be released from the often dizzying whirlwind of constant choice—“this show or that? this mustard or that one? this friend for coffee or the other one?”—with FOMO by our side. As we all look for life lessons coming out of this weird epoch, some of us might see the wisdom of limiting choice while also more deeply appreciating choice. 

Meanwhile, the one indication that we’re not imprisoned in the Groundhog loop? The wisteria in my back yard. It is preparing itself for that beautiful moment in its own large cycle of exploding into purple blossom and each day shows a change that reminds me that time still can move forward and bring new things. So for the rest of the month, my plan is to take and share a daily photo as a reminder that the world may be broken beyond recognition, but Nature’s cycles still mostly hold steady. Here’s the first.

Happy Groundhog Day!

PS On the other hand, the bananas I bought two week ago are still not ripe! If Bill Murray starts knocking at my door, I will be worried.

PSS  For the first time, the server rejected uploading my photo! A sign that something doesn't want proof of an alternative to Groundhog Day reality? Hope to try again later!