The Real Real Estate

I was happily going to write a post called “June in January.” It’s a sweet little song by Leo Robin and also how I felt walking through the park and suddenly finding myself enveloped in fog. Fog in San Francisco is a summer thing, not something that usually happens in January!

 

But then I came home and made the mistake of looking at the AOL Headlines and reading about the upsurge of far right loonies who are now even denouncing Trump—just as they chanted to “hang Mike Pence” and just as Trump decided not to pay Guiliani. No loyalty with these people, just one person after another thrown under the bus while the psychopaths—those with college degrees who were elected to Congress and those fooled by the former to think they were in the club— want to get rid of anyone who isn’t useful to them or blindly agree with whatever they want to believe. I apparently had 8 people read my last blog on the difficult path of learning how to be yourself, while these extremists seem to be attracting thousands of new recruits each day. It’s enough to make a hopeful person feel just a tad despondent. 

 

But I soldier forward—well, “music teacher” forward— with the idea that real education and reflective thought and the intention to try to understand things make a difference. And so I offer the Indian chakra system as a lens through which to see what’s going on, what has always gone on and what might someday go own just a little bit less. 

 

A Hindu expert might find my explanations simplistic and off-base, so I’ll excuse myself from the start to say that even if they’re wrong in not capturing the nuances, the basic ideas are useful to me and just might be to you. I’m less interested in whether they’re “true” or not or more interested if they illuminate something close to the truth about what it means to be human. 

 

The lowest chakra at the base of the spine is simply the survival instinct, the need for food and such. The second at the genitals is about—you guessed it—sex and our instinct to propagate the species and have a good time in the process. The third in the stomach area is about power—our desire to bend the world to our wants and needs. These first three, in a different point of reference, are like the brain stem, or the reptilian brain. They come for free and little effort is needed to access them. Human beings stuck in these three levels are people who have not fully owned their human incarnation and simply throw their animal selves around helter-skelter. 

 

But even the most “enlightened” amongst us is still somewhat at the mercy of the essential impulses. (Look at all the sex scandals amongst priests, yogis, Zen masters, etc!). And popular culture thrives on them. That’s why despite our intellectual understanding that it is demeaning and counter-evolutionary to use sexy women images to sell cars, cigarettes, what have you, we simply haven’t stopped. Even jazz record producers still seem to want Diana Krall and Jane Monheit to pose in alluring postures on the covers of their CD's. Sex sells. 

 

And so does violence. And what young boy— and more and more girls these days—can resist the war movies and super-heroes and Terminators and constant explosions? Very few. And that counts for adult men—and a few women—as well. Madison Avenue has known this for a long time and now with 500 channels competing for attention, they know that a sex scene and/or explosion will grab your attention. And notice how often those two are often combined. Throw in alluring food in the advertisements— the Pepsi’s and Big Macs and Coors beer— and you got yourself a culture fed on the bottom three chakras. And then the news jumps in with their "if it bleeds, it leads" mission statement and our entire national discourse is reduced to food, sex, power. Are you with me?

 

The Heart Chakra is where the human experiment begins, where the reptilian brain stem moves to the mammalian cortex and the need to nurse the young and care for them awakens emotion, warmth and eventually, love. Though instinctive in nursing mothers, this level requires more conscious effort and it is here that the simple sensation of sex can be married (literally) with the emotion of love. 

 

The 5^thchakra is at the level of the throat and I associate this with Buddha’s Right Speech, with the maxim “use your words,” with the proverb “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Again, the raw power of Chakra 3 is transposed through education and human effort to feel a sense of inner power and to relate through civil discourse rather that punching each other out. 

 

The 6^thchakra is in the middle of the forehead and is known as “the third eye,” that awakened wisdom to see clearly, to transform the physical food of Chakra 1 into the wisdom food for the Soul of Chakra 6. Nurtured through attention, insight, dedication to detaching from the grip of the instinctual levels, we are ascending to the higher levels of a human incarnation. 

 

And finally the 7^thchakra is at the top of the head, where we are crowned with the experience of being wholly a part of everything and everyone else, no duality, just the bliss of an awakened consciousness. We have moved from “I against Thou” in the three lower chakras up through “I and Thou” of the next three and finally to the “We” of the final one. 

 

Is this interesting? Can we see how many people are in the grip of the first three, spread by leaders who should know better to stay there under the mantra of “their ignorance is as good as your education,” who have been steadily indoctrinated (thanks, Fox News and Right Wing radio) into the doctrine that the world is a dangerous place and only the strong survive and you better get yours before someone else takes it and by the way, the people who are coming to take it are black, brown, women, gay, trans and Democratics, so sure, go ahead and bring your guns into the Capitol because that’s the sensible thing to do in our world view. Preferably while we’re out playing golf. 

 

So let’s move the national dialogue from the red state/ blue state, rural/urban, working class/ educated spin and figure out—and it better be soon—how we all can live in the 4^th, 5^thand 6^thchakras. And elect leaders close to the 7^th. That’s the real estate deal of the future. 

 

And remember the three rules of Real Estate?

 

Location.

Location.

Location.

 

So pick the neighborhoods of 4, 5, 6, or 7 and welcome neighbor!

Just Be Yourself

There they are— the three most challenging words in the English language. It’s easy to say, as Oscar Wilde did, that “you might as well be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” No one has our exact appetites, our way of thinking, our way of walking, our way of feeling. Not a single one out of 7 billion—and more if you count all those who have come before us and all those after. Just simply by the act of being born we are stamped with an individuality that no one else can copy.

 

But to truly be yourself means to wholly claim your own way of thinking, feeling, moving, doing, your own way of failing, your own way of succeeding. All of which would be easy if we didn’t have something called a family or a church or a school, if we didn’t have a culture or a religion or an economic class. Because none of these groups want the whole you. They only want the parts that are convenient to their agenda or their fantasy of who you should be or their hope of what they want you to be. And so each day is a grinding friction between the you you actually are and the you that has to give up small or large chunks of yourself in order to fit in. With a spouse or a peer group or a political group or a racial identity or a national identity. In order to preserve some sense of accord with each group, some sense of order and harmony, you check little parts of yourself at the door before you enter and those parts start to add up until you’ve lost the conversation with the depth of your own soul. It’s not easy and we all go through it.

 

Its difficulty is its gift. For if you have the courage to claim and re-claim the authentic parts of your deep soul, not the superficial “I like pizza and the color blue” parts, but the slowly cultivated revelation of “This is who I’m meant to be and what I’m meant to give back to life,” your difficult life—and it will be difficult, believe me—will be redeemed and found worthy. 

 

As someone somewhat in a small public spotlight giving workshops, I’m not the least bit flattered by the little affirmation in the chat, “You’re awesome!!!!!” But when someone recently wrote this next sentence to me, it moved me greatly:

 

"I want to thank you because you helped me be more me by being wholly you."

 

All the years of speaking out what people didn’t want to hear, of standing for something that few people cared about, of feeling excluded from club after club who didn’t want someone like me for a member, all were redeemed by this simple sentence of thanks. 

Because besides the richer life that you yourself will live claiming your authentic self in the face of the world’s determination to ignore, reject or shut it down, you will serve as an inspiration for others to “be more me.” And furthermore, each person who accepts that difficult invitation is not vulnerable to the extremist, fanatical, fundamentalist groups, be they religious or political, that offer a cheap identity at the price of wholly swallowing your authentic self. Stepping toward your true self is a vote for life, for truth, for beauty.

 

“Just be yourself”—I recommend it.

 

  

Travel Ban

If life it a journey, what do we call this?  

The Wrong Mistakes

“The Monk runs deep” is the prevailing notion about Thelonious Monk and it’s correct. I’ve been a lifetime fan of his music and now 2/3rds through Robin Kelley’s extensive biography, I’m both intrigued and inspired by him as a person. I love the stories about him as a family man and guy in the neighborhood and love the way he’s constantly teaching the musicians around him, offering the advice that precisely hits the target of their next step of development. 

Like his comment after listening to a pianist:

 

“You’re playing the wrong mistakes.”

 

That stops you in your tracks. Huh? But if you sit with it for awhile, the light goes on. The wrong mistakes are the ones that you make trying to copy someone else and failing (as you always will). The right mistakes are the ones that are 100% yours, the kind that no one else can make the way you do, the kind that lead you to the expression—musical or otherwise—that you were meant to offer to the world. 

 

Another one of my favorite Monk stories is about the college who hired him to critique their jazz band. He listened attentively and when they finished, everyone waited breathlessly to hear his comments. They were probably expecting things like, “The drummer should switch to the ride cymbal on the bridge” or “Consider this substitute chord in bar 15.” Instead, Monk just stroked his beard and said:

 

“Keep on tryin’.” (Check, please.)

 

I think of this often. At the end of the day, what else is there to suggest?

 

Like I said. The Monk runs deep.

Back to Kindergarten

“Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching…

We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.”

 

-      Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It was time. My wife had been complaining that the books on my bedside table were spilling over and finally, even I got tired of the overflow. So today on a day that threatened a rain that never came, I decided to dive in. And there were all the books that I put close by thinking that one or the other should be next on my list— and lo and behold, a few years later, there they were, still unread. And looking over them today, it became clear that many would remain unread. And so I trudged over to our local independent bookstore and traded eight books in for $28 worth of credit. Yeah!

 

But one of the treasures I uncovered was a book called Emerson on Education and I opened it up to this quote. Astounding. He summarizes in a few sentences what I’ve known intimately my whole life, but never so much as these last four years. And yet more powerfully these last four days! 

 

Every single person who makes it in the news with the next outrageous behavior or statement betraying a complete lack of moral compass, intelligence and overall human decency, I wonder about their family, about their neighbors, about their church. But I particularly wonder about their school. How could they have graduated from an elementary or high school or college without learning how to be better? Remember that book “Everything I Need to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten?” Things like how to share with others, how to help with clean-up, how to play fair and follow the rules, how to say “thank you” and “please”? Don’t lie. Don’t be a bully. Use your words. What happened to that kindergarten self? 

 

And so Mr. Emerson, I agree 1000% that if we did our work well in schools, the politician’s life would be so much easier and so much more effective because we would be having civil conversations based on those kindergarten values. Married to adult minds that cultivated their thought and intelligence as well as their heart. In this little book, Emerson also says: 

 

“It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to affirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true and that was is false is false—this is the mark and character of intelligence.” (Take note, deluded “stop the steal” folks.)

 

An intelligent and caring civil discourse is possible. It just happened yesterday as I tuned in to a San Francisco Board of Supervisors dealing with a hospital expansion right in my neighborhood. I listened to people present both sides calmly and articulately, politely asking and answering difficult and challenging questions. I listened for over an hour and then just needed to get out for a walk. I ended up walking for about 3 hours, but when I came back, my wife was still tuned into the same meeting! It went on for yet another hour and by the end, they agreed to postpone the hasty deadline the hospital proposed to be yet clearer about some of the issues. That’s the kind of civil discourse that could be possible once again in this country.

 

But first we have to pass kindergarten. 

 

  

Speaking Out

I took an online class recently with a poet I’ve long admired and enjoyed it as I always do. Except I couldn’t help but notice that we were proceeding as if nothing had happened a few days earlier that merited some acknowledgement. And that made me feel uncomfortable.

 

So I crafted a letter which I hope to send soon and hope it can get to the poet. Should I share part of it here? I think yes, both because the issue I bring up is our collective issue and because it might be an example of being an ally, of taking the step to speak out when it would be so easy and convenient to say nothing. If the model inspires you to do the same in situations you might encounter, then it is well worth the effort. Decide for yourself. Here's the letter:

 

Your online classes have been a great pleasure to attend. It seems that we all need a place where we can be sheltered from the news of the day, a respite from the constant battering of the storms of the headlines. A place where we can consider humanity’s timeless and universal questions. 

 

And yet. We all exist in a particular time and a particular place that offer their own questions to consider and ask to be invited into the larger conversation. As you often say, the conversation you don’t want to have is precisely the one you need to have and might that be as true collectively as it is personally? 

 

The conversation we keep refusing as a nation (for over 400 years!) is looking at our legacy of racial injustice fueled by a white supremacist narrative. One of the most hopeful signs of this last turbulent year is the increased willingness of white folks to finally break our silence of complicity. That books like How to Be an Anti-Racist, So You Want to Talk About Race, Me and White Supremacy, White Fragility and yet more have become best sellers is a hopeful sign. And yet armed white folks encouraged by the President can storm the Capitol during a sacred democratic rite of transfer of power without even trying to hide themselves and with hardly any resistance from the police— you know the story. 14,000 people arrested in a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, 50 arrested during the recent attempted coup. 

 

And so I felt uncomfortable in your last session that you made the briefest of passing references to our dark times and we proceeded to consider how to cultivate our future happiness as if nothing had happened. I imagine most of the listeners are white and it felt like yet another example of our unearned privilege to have the needed individual conversations while continuing to deflect the needed collective ones. 

 

What would feel most useful to me is to consider how to join the two, to look at how each can feed the other, to put the timeless and timely together in the same room to talk. It’s all well and good for our yoga instructors and Zen teachers to remind us to breathe, but perhaps we should consider that this is precisely what George Floyd requested as that policemen kept his knee on his neck for nine minutes until his life was extinguished— and with little consequence and no trial for murder because of our habit of silence. So as much as I enjoyed some of your recent talk, I felt that elephant loom large in the room and I imagine—indeed, would hope—that others might too. 

 

As you have given me so much food for thought over the years, I offer back this morsel for you to consider as you continue your important, needed and inspiring work. Thanks for listening.

 

Funga Alafia—January 11, 2011

(This is the reprint of my first Blogpost 10 years ago—on 1/11/11!)

I’m at it again. Standing in a circle with forty or fifty strangers singing a song I’ve sung countless times. At first, there’s the usual tension whenever a group of people gather to begin a venture. Once the first note is sung, things start to feel instantly different.  Without a word spoken, we move through a series of steps until the air is charged with the intricate rhythms of drums, bells and shakers. Before we know how it happened, we’re singing and dancing in a circle. We crescendo to a soul-stirring conclusion, complete with drum rolls and shoulder massages, until the final chord leaps into an electric moment of silence, followed by a jubilant exhale. The workshop has begun.

 

Welcome to my life. I am a traveling music teacher, specifically a teacher of a rather esoteric approach to music, education and life known as Orff Schulwerk. I’ve begun teacher-training workshops with this song in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, China, Iceland, and some 30 other countries throughout the world. Same song, different people, different places. And yet the effect is always the same. A group of strangers quickly feel intimately connected, drawn into an instant community by the simple acts of holding hands, dancing, singing and playing music. The deep reasons why all people need music—to awaken the body, open the heart, stimulate the brain and extend the hand of friendship and welcome, are fulfilled in a mere 20 minute activity.

 

I have other opening shticks that accomplish the same, but this is one of the most powerful. Not only because the song is so eminently singable with little effort and charges the body through the long-cultivated genius of African rhythms, but because it’s a song that says what it means and means what it says on every level. Found in various West African countries (and many Orff workshops!), it seems to have come from the Hausa people in Nigeria. “Alafia” is a casual greeting of welcome, “Ashay” a deeper one, akin to the Indian “Namaste”—“the divine spirit in me greets the divine spirit in you.”

 

But not only does the text support the sense of welcome that the music makes physical, but there are the gestures as well. Touching your head, and extending the arms outward, touching the lips and extending the arms, touching the heart and extending the arms, and rubbing each hand in turn on the opposite forearm. And the gestures have a meaning:

 

“With my thoughts I greet you.

  With my words I greet you.

  With my heart I greet you.

  There’s nothing up my sleeve.” 

 

So now we’re hit the feeling of welcome at all levels—music, words, gestures. And yet it goes yet one step further in the dance. Once the drums are playing, I lead the motions of the dance, but soon gesture to my neighbor to have a turn. So now the sense of welcome is amplified yet again as people show their own ways of moving and see themselves reflected as the large group copies them. 

 

And so this is how I travel to other places these days. Not as a mere tourist taking in the sights or an amateur anthropologist charmed by quaint customs or a missionary selling a point of view or a product, but as one person in a circle of diverse people interested in finding out what we’re going to bring to the joint venture of dreaming the next stage of human culture. And since I mostly work with teachers, this is indeed our business. Not education as business as usual, passing on the tried and true and tired, initiating kids into the same-old-used-to-be, but exploring how we can draw from the confluence of our unique viewpoints to create a world of welcome. And so I come with “nothing up my sleeve.” No hidden weapon or agenda, just thoughts, words and heart aligned to simply say: “Here we are, all together in this room. What kind of world shall we make here?”

 

Of course, I’m not naïve enough to assume that a moment of communion in a song or five days in a workshop will burn off the dross of centuries of ethnic rivalry, national allegiances, religious stubbornness and just plain ornery human nature. But I take Gandhi’s suggestion to heart: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I may feel utterly helpless and thoroughly defeated trying to sway the political situation in the United States or even the politics of my own tiny school, but there’s a least one place where I can let the dreams run loose and have some measure of control over the feeling tone in a room—and that is in the classroom with my children and in the workshop with teachers. Part of this blog is about the discoveries we make there, from the moments of epiphany and jubilation to the sometimes sobering realities of combustible chemistries thrown together

 

Meanwhile, as a lifetime traveler who has wandered the world, I am perpetually fascinated by the variations of the same theme that cultures worldwide have composed. Human bodies everywhere begin the same, synapses in brains leap across the same channels, the need to work together, play together, worship together is the same wherever you look. But how those bodies begin to move, the specific routes in the brain that get lit up, the particular forms those universal needs take, is the living stuff of human diversity. One of the sadder stories of the human experiment is the way in which those differences divide us and set us snarling at each other across some field of “right ways and wrong ways.”  And one of the most exciting stories I know is the way those differences can enlarge the conversation of human promise and make our life richer, more nuanced, more compassionate and more intelligent. 

 

It’s the conversation between what seems exotic, strange and home that keeps travel—both kinds—so constantly stimulating and interesting. I can write about going to the jazz club in Bangkok on the ultra-modern Sky Train roaring past the old street markets and passing the man on the street walking his elephant and feel that this is somehow interesting. But why? It’s just business as usual to the folks there. But of course, we travel with the baggage of our point of view and always interpret the world from our own perspective. The point of view can be baggage in the negative psychological sense—or simply the items we bring from home to dress ourselves each day. Of course, I come to each trip with my own suitcases.

 

Truth be told, there is an anthropologist in my suitcase, eager to both observe and learn new customs, songs, dances, foods. There is a tourist wanting to see what is considered tourist-worthy, the monuments from the ancient glories (or atrocities) of the past. There is a missionary wanting to offer the Gospel of Orff education—and hopefully, sell a few of my products (my books!). (Note: wanting to “offer,” not forcibly convert!). There is even occasionally the traveler who just wants a nice beach to lie down on and retreat to my own private world of books or pursue my summertime fantasies of leisure. And finally, there is the author who spends hours pursuing the random thoughts constantly stampeding through his head and trying to corral them into some orderly and sensible interpretation of the world. Many times in these pages, a place or an experience will send me tripping down the Rolodex of my pet obsessions, particularly things like technology and human culture.(I’ll try to keep those dogs on a leash and where I fail, you can just stop reading!)

 

How many times have we thought, “Wait ‘till the folks back home see this!” Like all good travelers, I want to return to my friends and family and show them the slides of my trip. I hope there will be tantalizing food for thought in these pages to come, but my greatest hope is that the armchair traveler feel some of the pleasure that these travels are bringing to me. With apologies for the fossil fuel I’ve consumed and gratitude to my school and family for permission to go away (or was that encouragement?), let’s set off. Ashay!