Awakening, Not Woke

“When asked ‘Are you a god?,’ Buddha  said ‘No.’  ‘An angel?’   ‘No’  ‘A saint?’  ‘No.’

‘Then what are you?’  Buddha answered, ‘I am awake.’ “

 

Buddha’s enlightenment was not a matter of faith nor an acceptance of dogma nor a conversion to a creed or a doctrine. It was an experience of awakening to the Mystery, to a true nature that realizes it is intimately connected to the nature of all sentient beings. It arose from a physical and mental disciplined practice, a rigorous inquiry, a relentless questioning, a determination born from doubt that lay the foundation to the possibility of awakening from the slumber of ignorance, to clearing the clouds and revealing the true light within. 

 

The same conditions that lay the groundwork to awaken to our own true nature are also useful in discovering the nature of social injustice, awakening to the true history of what we have done to murder, enslave and marginalize fellow sentient beings and why we have done it and what allows us to do it and to keep on doing it. Through a rigorous practice of reading, reflecting, researching, conversing, we can wake up to the lies and deceits of people in power who profit from our ignorance. 

 

The state of awakening is an ongoing work in progress, a verb that is ever-flowing, open, changing, inviting necessary courageous conversations and creating an atmosphere of needed respectful discussion that shines yet more light into the thousand dark corners of our misunderstandings. It thrives on disagreement, multiple viewpoints, new perspectives and diverse voices encouraged to speak without fear of rebuke or shame or anger.

 

That whole necessary verb has now been sadly reduced to a rigid, inflexible, unyielding noun— woke. Woke sets needed fluidity into stone, hardens insight into platitudes and scripts, discourages our efforts to reach across to the other through its “Gotcha!” atmosphere. It reduces complexity to right and wrong things to say or think, evokes knee-jerk reactions and combined with the horror show of the no-accountability-medium of Twitter and its like, further divides us and feeds our fear, stress, anxiety—all of which shuts down our ability to think. While I applaud the movement to further awaken ourselves to injustice, I fear that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing the complex act of perpetual awakening to yet another dogma that distances and divides us. 

 

May I politely suggest that we unthaw the petrification of “woke” and return it to its proper place as a verb of “awakening?” And while we’re at, combine the social justice way of connecting with the “other” with the Buddhist idea of awakening to our deep connection to the true nature of all sentient beings. There’s something for your “to do” list.

Caesar and God

I’m not a big Bible-quoter, but this one resonates at the moment:

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s  and to God the things that are God’s.”

In that ongoing tennis match (pickleball game?), I tend to lean toward the God side. But this week, Caesar is winning. My list:

    • Finish taxes

     • Chase down money owed to me.

    • Mail Ghana visa

    • Renew license at DMV and get that damn Real ID

    • Summer flights

    • Mail Pentatonic Press books to IPG Warehouse

    • Dentist

    • Haircut

    • Look into joining TSA Approval

On the God side:

    • Plan and teach my Jazz History Class. This week Bird and Monk.

    • Neighborhood sing.

    • Play piano at The Jewish Home.

    • Walk through the park to the ocean.

    • Memorize two Chopin pieces, two Bach and two Charlie Parker tunes.

Caesar’s winning 9-5, but I plan to make a big comeback next week.  

A Song for Mother's Day

I can’t assume that you know the old 20’s Jazz Song, Five Foot Two. But if not, Youtube is your friend. Whether you know it or learn it today, try substituting my lyrics below and sing to your mother, whether she be near or far or in the land of the departed. (I wrote it for our neighborhood sing, still going three years after its pandemic beginnings!)

1) Five foot two, eyes are blue, 

She taught you how to tie your shoe,

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

 

She’s cooked your meals, soothed your squeals

Always knows just how you feel,

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

 

Now if you run into, a Mom or two

Go up and shake her hand,

Here’s what you do, tell her “Thank you,” say,

“You’re the best Mom in the land!.”

 

She likes to play, and each Tuesday,

She drives you to take ballet,

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

 

2) Make her some eggs and pancakes too

And don’t forget, say “I love you!”

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

 

Be extra good, well, you always should

Sing with her and the neighborhood.

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

 

Make her a card, it’s not so hard

You can write a little poem

Clean up your room, you can use your broom,

Help her take care of  your home.

 

It’s Mother’s Day, this day in May,

Time to vote for equal pay,

Has anybody thanked their Mom?

What We Are Here For

“Pop-pop, tell us about the 60’s,” my grandkids asked one day.

A faraway dreamy gaze came over my face as I transported myself back to those days. 

“Well, kids, it was a difficult time. A time of great turmoil and division and confusion. There had been four country-shaking assassinations, a terrible war (as all wars are) raging overseas, firehoses and vicious dogs used by the police against children, four peacefully protesting students shot by the National Guard at a college close to mine.

But it also was a beautiful time. What I remember is a great sense of hope, a great confidence that we were going to turn this ugly world over to show its beautiful side. Instead of dreaming about a 9 to 5 job dressed in suits and the home in the suburbs with the two-car garage, we imagined a home in the country with an organic garden. Instead of hours on the couch watching mindless TV, we brought out the guitars and sang. Instead of dutifully going to an elaborately decorated Church to fulfill a weekly religious social obligation, we sat and meditated on cushions. Instead of sitting alone in a dark, dank bar drowning our sorrows in beer and whiskey and throwing up in the gutter, we sat in a circle and passed a joint around and listened to music. 

And what music! Some of it loud and raucous and booty-shaking and some of it exquisitely tender with lyrics that were true poetry. Hopeful lyrics that wrapped us in its dream of a better, kinder, more fulfilling world. Words that asked us to listen to the Sounds of Silence, to Teach Our Children Well, to look at life from Both Sides Now. They gave us sunshine on a cloudy day, helped us look for the answers Blowing in the Wind and petitioned the invisible powers to have the longtime sun shine upon us, all love surround us, and the pure light within us, guide our way on. They reminded us how we got by with A Little Help from Our Friends and that All You Need Is Love.

“Can we hear one of the songs?” the kids asked.

So I chose Love Song by Elton John and I saw that same dreamy look come over them as we listened to words that we need to remember in our present day reality of cruelty, contempt, bile and bitterness that swirls around ourselves and our innocent children.*

The words I have to say
May well be simple but they're true
Until you give your love
There's nothing more that we can do

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for…

 

Love is the key we must turn

Truth is the flame we must burn

Freedom the lesson we must learn…

When the song ended and they snapped out of their 60’s trance, they looked up at me with a pained, confused expression and asked:

“Pop-pop, what happened?” 

* Take a listen: https://youtu.be/Q3RJmv29rHo

My Teacher's Manifesto

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am,

And I don’t know the kind of person you are

A pattern others made will prevail in the world,

And following the wrong god home, we may miss our star.…

    - William Stafford: Excerpt from A Ritual to Read to Each Other

 

I don’t drink coffee, but each day hold an empty cup in my hands and sip slowly, energized by the caffeine of the vision that has sustained me, surprisingly and somewhat miraculously, my whole life. A vision that began with rejecting so many of the patterns that have prevailed in the world, so many of the wrong gods that so many have followed to their home. The gods of power and privilege and prejudice, of greed and groveling and groping to be above your neighbor, of machines and money and Manifest Destiny. All of which narrow us down to a sliver of our promise, grind down our initial greatness to a fraction of our possibility, build fortresses around the heart, dim the light in our minds to a flickering distraction, the bulb sullied by our chosen ignorance, reduce the elegance and grace of the body to a plodding clod of bone and muscle bent over by the weight of our failures. 

 

But thought it may start there, Vision is never built by rejection alone. It sings itself into life through our efforts to fully embrace Life, to dance through the whole catastrophe and plant our flag firmly in the field of beauty, of wonder, of gratitude beyond reason for the mere grace of being alive. It gathers strength through our daily choices and rises up stronger when thrown down to earth by those who don’t want to be reminded of what they have given up or given up on. 

There are myriad paths to the Golden Land— like music, for example. Or cooking. Certainly walks in the woods or work in the garden. It helps to be around children. It helps to be around elders who have never abandoned their childlike selves. Reading is good, writing also and reciting poetry. Any work that brings you fully alive and causes no harm to others. Hanging out with people who welcome your whole self. These the building blocks of vision and when they tumble and fall, why, get back to work and start stacking again.

 

As for me, all of the above (except that garden work) is my yellow brick road I tred on daily. 

So if I'm working in your school, I want to know if I can bring my whole self to work here. I won’t be following any scripts, be it from the Left or Right, but promise to meet each child with my unshakeable faith that there is a hidden genius in them that I’m here to try to discover and help reveal. And that means deep affirmation when they let out a sliver and equally deep rebuke when they run and hide from their radiance or try to dim the light of others. Yes, and sometimes a firm hand if the occasion calls for it. 

Though it’s unpopular these days with the lawyers circling, I’m in the Billie Holiday School of Child-raising. She talks about gathering together all the kids no one wants at some place in the country and dreams: 

 

…I’d take care of them, feed them, see to it the little bastards go to school, knock them in the head when they’re wrong, but love them whether they’re good or bad.We’d have a crazy big kitchen with a chartreuse stove and I’d supervise the cooking and baking. I’d always be around to teach them my kind of teaching—not the kind that tells them how to spell Mississippi, but how to be glad to be who you are and what you are.”

 

So here I am and this is what I have to offer. Shall we dance?  

 

 

A Day in the Life

• Begin the day miraculously finishing the online Ghana visa.   

• Bus and walk to Children’s Day School. It's May and still cold!

• Help four 6th grade small groups improve their compositions for their concert tomorrow.

• Set all the instruments in place for the concert today— correct mallets on each one, tune 15 ukeleles and three guitars, set chairs, etc.

• Help direct fifty 5^th graders performing my piece Humpty Dump, coming speech, song, Steppin’ Body Percussion, blues solos on piano, guitar and marimba, movement and dramatic vignettes. Accompany 25 of them performing and singing Sweet Sue, the jazz standard I taught them and arranged. 

• Run out of the concert to meet the cab that was promised precisely at 2:45 and wasn’t there and called the cab company who (of course!) only gave me 5 voice mail options, not one of which was “Where the hell is the cab?” Checked Uber as a back-up, but wouldn’t arrive until 3:30 and I had to be on time for my 3:00 pm class at SF State 15 minutes away. Cab miraculously shows up and we both yell at each other for a while before realizing that the computer screwed up (of course). Get to my class at 3:07.

• Teach my two-hour Jazz History class to seniors (ie. people my age or even younger!) and get to spend two glorious(and heart-wrenching) hours with Billie Holiday. Cried in front of the class reading one of her quotes.

• Walk home the 6 miles to my house to make dinner. (Grilled cheese, corn and salad.)

• Meet my co-teacher at Yancey’s Bar in my hood to watch the Warrior’s beat the Lakers and keep hope alive that they might make it to the next round of the playoffs. 

• Go home to watch the final of 24 Episodes of Broadchurch, a series we had watched at the beginning of the pandemic and blissfully forgot the details of the plot. The delightful relationship between D.C. Hardy and “Miller!”, the tightly wound and expertly unspooled mystery plot that was a through line through three Seasons, the depravity of men’s sexuality (aargh!), the depth of humanity in people struggling with grief, violation, evil, confusion— truly, a masterpiece and I’ll miss it.

• Check my steps for the day (7.6 miles) and get into bed to read The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Learn that public libraries outnumber McDonalds (over 17,000 libraries in the U.S.)  and are used by over 300 million Americans.

• Go to sleep.

Well, wasn’t that an interesting day!

Jekyll or Hyde?

I believe most of us don’t love conflict, but let’s face it—that’s the price we pay for a human incarnation. Lately, I’ve been battling those who are making my life miserable by their refusal to see me, to know me, to understand me, to help me, to listen to my side of the story, to figure out how to come to some kind of accord and restore harmony to our relationship. They’re making me miserable and don’t care, take no responsibility for the consequences of their actions and pretend that not only is everything fine, but better than it has ever been.

Of course, I’m talking about machines.

The PaymentWorks way to receive payment that didn’t. The Ghana Embassy Visa Application that replaced their simple one-page form with the 12 Gates to the City. And when one door was locked, another four gates to figure out how to get help from an invisible human being in a chat who also couldn’t figure out what happened. The Orbitz flight deal that got lost and never re-appeared again. 

And then there’s the speed and “efficiency” of texts and e-mails and such that allow us to hide behind screens and invite our worst selves to the table. At one extreme, the constant flaming that my daughter has to cope with in her Medium.com publishing world for daring to express her experiences in a patriarchal, systemically racist culture. But also our upstairs neighbors who we always have respectful and fruitful conversations with when discussing the details of sharing our two-flat condo and the decisions that must be made— painting the house, landscaping the yard, sharing the garage. But whenever they send a text, there’s a snarky undercurrent that’s a drag to read.

Likewise, the little e-mails the Middle School Head where I co-teach as a mentor sends to both me and the music teacher. Short passive-aggressive insinuations from his conversation with a confused 11-year old kid who he listens to as if that’s the whole story without consulting us as to what really happened. Like the kid who complained to him that I taught a song about “retards” when I mentioned that there’s a ritardando at the end of the piece we are playing. And the head expressing that “he was concerned about the incident.” I’ve been trying to set up a meeting with him for almost two years that keeps getting deflected. Finally, he came in person to talk to the music teacher and I about another incident and after a five-minute conversation where we got to clarify what really happens in our class and he got to express more clearly his concerns, I felt, “That was a reasonable discussion and he seems like a nice enough guy who genuinely cares about the kids.” Face-to-face, he and my neighbors are decent and reasonable people, but hiding behind their screens, Mr. Hyde wins out over Dr. Jekyll. 

Marshal McCluhan said it over a half-century ago: “The medium is the message.” Giving up both the pleasure and power of human relationship in working out the details of life in this world and giving it all over to machines (don’t get me started on driverless cars and ChatGPT!) is proving to be a bad idea. It has been said that “no labor saving device ever saved anyone any labor” and there’s much truth in that (washing machines and dryers two exceptions I can think of). The hours I’ve spent trying to navigate through broken systems, not to mention the stress and anxiety, is a high-price to pay for so-called efficiency. Being able to call a number, get a knowledgeable and helpful human being right away who can either directly answer my question or refer me to someone who can, is a thousand times more efficient that the 10-step “If you’re calling about this, press 1. If you’re calling about that, press 2. If you’re calling about the other thing, press 3. If you’re calling about something that’s not on the list, well, good luck with that. This message will repeat.” All the while, me screaming “AGENT!AGENT!!” into the phone.

Many years back, when my school’s admin was taking the first sip of Kool-Aid shifting from the relationship model we had enjoyed to the system model, they presented a diagram that looked like a giant pinball machine. If you have a concern about this, then that goes to this committee, who then forward it to that committee, make a suggestion, bring that suggestion to the other committee, who will then present it to the group to discuss and vote on and then the Head will decide regardless of all those steps. Everyone was looking so confused trying to follow it all and finally, one teacher just said:

“Can’t we just sit down and talk?”

Can’t we? Please?