Windy Weather

 “ Windy weather, windy weather,

When the wind blows, we all come back together!”

 

This little game is part of my story about getting hired as the music teacher at The San Francisco School—but that’s a tale for another time. 

 

Right now, I’m fed up with the wind. It has been so annoyingly present in San Francisco the last five months or so and somehow followed me to Michigan, where it rarely comes to our little beach. My sister is here for the first time in the 48 years I’ve been coming and I wanted to show off the luxury of lying on the beach— reading, talking, jumping in and out of the water, choosing the sun or the shade of the umbrella. You know— relaxing. The way summer is spozed to be. 

 

But that’s my issue with the wind. It’s hard to relax with it blowing in your face— or even at your back. It interrupts the sense of repose, blows the sand around, creates choppy water hard to swim in. Inside the house, the grandkids bouncing around with their energy create their own kind of indoor wind and I find myself just craving the tranquility of still air. 

 

I’m reading The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Society(Gabor Maté), Fearlessly Embracing This Burning World (Barry Lopez) and Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam), a passive-aggressive apocalyptic end-of-the-world piece of fiction I don’t recommend. In face of all the above, my discontent with a little bit of wind is hardly cause for complaint. I could rightly be accused of too much privilege, not enough gratitude for simply being alive—and especially in this lovely place, with food, shelter and the company of family. I get it. And yet I still complain.

 

Grant me the patience to accept whatever the weather brings. I know it could be—and according to my source, will be— so much worse. Maybe I should just fly a kite!

 

Do's and Don'ts

I re-posted a version of the “How Do We Begin?” post on Facebook and the comments affirmed what I feared. People needed to hear these words because they weren’t being spoken in their beginning-of-the-year staff meetings. Instead was the barrage of online trainings, Powerpoints and administrative announcements about all the things they can’t do. From both sides of the political spectrum. We can’t tell the truth about slavery, we can’t sing a song that was once used in a minstrel show, we can’t use this word or that word, we can’t include a banned book in their reading list nor suggest a book that might trigger a trauma and on and on with the list of “cant’s.” What are we, five years old? Having to obey the rules others set down, be they hateful, arbitrary or well-intentioned? 

 

The end result is that all of this stops independent thought, stops the needed courageous conversations, erodes the trust in our own values or the possibility to have the needed discussions with kids, parents or fellow teachers when lines invariably get crossed, they way they always do and always will in human relations. Caught in the Web of the “gotcha” culture, we shut up and shut down and tiptoe around worried that we might say or do or think the “wrong” thing. And worry is a kissing-cousin to stress, anxiety and fear and that puts us exactly in the part of the brain that is the anti-thesis of education, that slams the door to higher thought and offers only fight, flight or freeze. 

 

It also robs time from the real questions. What can we do that will unlock our students’ imaginative, intellectual and humanitarian promise? That helps us return to the source of our passion for teaching? That helps teachers remember their shared purpose in a community alive with curiosity, fun and togetherness? Where is the spot on the agenda for these kind of questions? Where is the trust that we are intelligent and caring people who can figure out the kind of world we want to live in for the next 175 days and create that world together with each other and the children?

 

Sold down the river to the politically incorrect andpolitically correct fearmongers. In the ongoing crisis that is today’s world, the proper response is more intelligence, more imagination, more humanitarian promise from both teachers and kids alike. What we certainly don’t need is this atmosphere of distrust, fear and sheer nonsense (the wonderful job skills enslaved people learned/ singing Jingle Bells as supporting vicious racism). And yet be it in “Progressive Schools” or “good old boys” institutions, here we are sitting slack-jawed in front of the screen ticking off the pre-programmed little boxes of do’s and don’ts.

 

I retired not a moment too soon. But still I care.

 

(Below is the re-posted excerpt, along with a photo. By all means, share! Text it to your teachers while you’re sitting bored in the staff meeting!).

 

As the school year begins anew.  I send good wishes to teachers far and wide. As they get together to prepare the year, may the Powerpoints be few, the bureaucracies tucked away in locked drawers, the 55- page staff handbooks lie unopened. May teachers gather in games, songs, dances and the meetings be filled with exciting new ideas for collaborative projects. May discussions include the children and how to give them what they’ve always deeply needed—worthy work, the feeling of welcome, the sense of being seen, known and valued, the permission to play their way into understanding, the deep sense of connection— all of which they need more than ever in a world in short supply of all of the above. May teachers reaffirm their vows to nurture, nourish, protect and tell the children the truth, Republicans be damned, about how the world has been broken over and over again when we refuse to see what has happened and why and how every act of kindness, love, understanding can help heal it. Amidst all the details of how to get a school year up and running again, may they all keep their eyes on the prize and let the children swim out to the waters of their infinite possibilities.

Rummikub

Amongst our metaphors for life, being dealt a hand of cards is a common one. You’re given your family, your skin color, your genetic make-up, your culture, your location, your religion (or lack of it). Now we might include your ancestral traumas, the undigested grief of your forebears, the inherited shames of your cultural group. You have some choice as to how to shuffle and play the cards, but if you don’t draw the winning ones, it’s not your fault— just random chance at work. You just get what you get and you don’t get upset.

 

There are other theories at work. Hindu reincarnation suggests that your past karma determines your present card hand. The Greek idea of the Daimon and the Fates give you what you need to discover just exactly what you were born for. Certain psychologies suggest that your experience determines all, that nurture overpowers nature— though such experience also seems like a random card hand. 

 

Here with the grandkids, the games are abundant, with all levels of the dynamic between luck and skill. Card games that lean more towards luck— like War, Go-Fish, Trash— give us an out when we lose. “I just didn’t get the cards.” Games like Rummy 500 or Hearts require more choices and thus, more skill, though the cards you pick still matter. Games like chess (can’t think of a similar card game) start with an even playing board, so skill is everything.

 

I find myself enjoying the middle category, games that require skillful choices with “a little bit of luck.” My new favorite is Rummikub, which allows for a flexibility of adjusting and re-adjusting the numbered tiles in a way that keeps the brain wholly searching and active and considering a wide variety of choices. If had to pick one game that symbolizes our own choices in life, both the ability and the need to shuffle and re-shuffle our life experiences based on the inherited tiles we drew, the requirement that we stay alert and attentive to the possibilities, the suggestion that we needn’t attach to any combination of tiles already on the board, but treat them flexibly (like verbs instead of nouns!), Rummikub takes the prize. I find myself less concerned with winning and losing and more delighting in the way my brain feels while playing, a sensation of being wholly alive and present, the axons and dendrites firing on all cylinders like a happy dance. 

 

Shall we play? 

How Do We Begin?

It’s the first day of school at The San Francisco School. And I’m not there. For the fourth year in a row.  I’m sitting at the breakfast table looking out at Lake Michigan, the day spread out before me to do as I like. Truth be told, I’m not wishing I could trade this for a staff meeting. (The kids don’t come until next week, this the usual staff preparation.)

And yet when the time came each of my 45 years, it mostly was something to look forward to. Reuniting with fellow staff members, many of whom I felt as friends, catching up on our summer adventures. Returning to that sacred space of the music room and starting to organize, clean, re-organize. Leading or co-leading some musical staff gathering to re-connect and learn the song for the Opening Ceremony’s tunnel of singing teachers. 

 

Yes, I didn’t always love having to do the CPR training again and when we took out the calendars to negotiate the year’s schedule, I often felt exhausted as if I had already lived out the year ahead. And as the ever-expanding admin took over the meeting agendas and there was this creeping fear of the next announced change without staff consultation, I could feel my spirit slump. 

 

But then the kids would come and we remembered why we actually were there. Off we went into our elaborate and spirit-rousing opening ceremony, a few classes, a re-gathering for tea at the end of the day with teachers sharing their funny stories and my ritual toast, “One down, 174 to go!” With tongue very much in cheek, as I was in no hurry to “get through” the year, each day with the kids (mostly) a delight. 

In my “retired” life, the children still await me. Two school residency jobs in Taipei and Toronto for two and three weeks respectively, another one for college students in Tennessee. (Taipei, Toronto, Tennessee— this is my “T’ year. Maybe I should contact a school in Timbuktoo?) I’ll do some guest singing in a few SF Schools and perhaps some more mentoring with an Orff teacher I trained. I’m by no means done teaching kids and loving getting to do it on my terms, no staff meetings or report cards attached.

 

But still I care how the year begins for my daughter and two music colleagues at The San Francisco School, my mentees at Children’s Day School, the various teachers I’ve trained this summer in all of those schools. May the Powerpoints be few, the bureaucracies shut down, the 55 page staff handbooks lie unopened. May teachers gather in games, songs, dances, be left alone in their rooms to sort, clean and prepare, the meetings filled with exciting new ideas for collaborative projects. May discussions include the children and what they’ve always deeply needed—worthy work, the feeling of welcome, the sense of being seen, known and valued, the permission to play their way into understanding, the deep sense of connection— all of which they need more than ever in a world in short supply of all of the above. May teachers reaffirm their vows to nurture, nourish, protect and tell the children the truth, Republicans be damned, about how the world has been broken over and over again when we refuse to see what has happened and why and how every act of kindness, love, understanding can help heal it. Amidst all the details of how to get a school year up and running again, may they all keep their eyes on the prize.

 

Me, I’ll be swimming today, but my heart is still with you all. Happy New Year!

 

Nouns and Verbs

I like nouns as much as the next person, but have long understood their danger, the way they make ice of water and store it in the uniform cubicles of the ice tray, where they lie captive and inert. And when we do free them up for our summer drink, they slowly melt and water down our drink, robbing it of its full robust flavor or texture. 

 

We are living verbs, ever changing, held noun-like together in our skin and body type and character, but impossible to pin down. If you doubt that, look at a photo of you at 8 or 12 and yes, some things are recognizable, but can you really remember that you you once were? Or consider your granddaughter newly arrived at the lake, almost 12-yrs old going on 18 in body, mind and emotion and try to resist wishing that she was the one you remembered at seven years-old. Or celebrate this new version (in-between the eye-rolls) as your level of conversation reaches new levels. 

 

In short, as I think Einstein meant (never did study physics), matter is energy, energy is matter, nouns are convenient summaries of common flowing energies, just as lake or stream or ocean are impossible to pin down as things, but are alive fluid processes always in flux and ever-changing. So are people, so is music, so is gender, so is health.

 

But besides an innate human proclivity toward wanting the comfort of the fixity of things— be they objects, ideas, dogma or political rhetoric— we Americans are particularly vulnerable to a noun-centric view of life. A capitalistic, materialistic society all about the consumption of things leaks down into all aspects of life. Music, for example. What we call the “music” are frozen symbols on paper that need the verb of music-making (which we don’t have—Christopher Small suggested “musicking”). Jazz musicians are much more verb-oriented, playing the notes in the Fakebook song-sheets with flexibility and originality and then departing from them altogether, swinging freely in a playground of solos that restores “play music” to its deeper meaning. 

 

In short, wherever we turn, we like to objectify and try to capture that which is free and life-affirming in its verb form, but stultifying and dull as a noun. An American music teacher, praising a teacher she admired, said “I like her stuff.” In Europe, the praise leans more toward the teacher’s musicality or imagination or process of unleashing her students’ musicality. At the end of Orff workshops, the most common question is “Is this in the notes?” or “Where can I buy those boomwhackers?”

 

This attitude trickles down to all corners of American culture, to our great distress and dimunition. Mental health, for example. Though there’s no scientific evidence that a syndrome like ADD has any physiological basis, we label kids with that limiting noun and treat them accordingly with our favorite prescription—physical pills meant to “cure” the noun we call “disease.” The Bible of turning people into nouned-disorders, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, includes something called ODD—Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Apparently, that’s a “thing” and considered abnormal and eligible for treatment. Some of the most sociopathic examples of this syndrome? Angela Davis, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan of Arc, for starters. Oh yeah, another one who defied Roman law—Jesus. Had the symptoms been recognized and the drugs prescribed, it would have saved the world so much trouble. 

 

These intuitions that I’ve long held are given voice and authority by a remarkable physician named Gabor Maté in his book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Society. Halfway through it, the pages are marked with my exclamation points, “yep” and “YES!!!” I will quote some of this eloquent support statements in the next blogpost or two. Meanwhile, my grandson is begging this old bag-of-bones-noun to get off my butt and throw some active verb footballs around on the beach. More later.

A Perfect Pair

 The other day, I took a tour with a small group of people around The Nature Conservancy’s new building. I learned more than I needed to know about watersheds, state-of-the-art technologies, native gardens and more. There was a couple on the tour that intrigued me, so I came out of it with lots of information and a small poem.

 

A Perfect Pair

The old couple.

She limps to the left.

He to the right.

Don't Let Him In

The only time my parents ever came to this beautiful haven on Lake Michigan was on the occasion of my 30^th birthday. I decided to surprise my wife and shave my virgin beard that I had been growing for some ten years. Since I didn’t know how to shave, my Dad and I woke early and he helped me with the project. 

 

This morning, I shaved in front of that same mirror, recalling that moment 42 years ago. The face that looked back had changed a bit, to say the least. Like so many in my peer group, that sense of astonishment— “How did that face get in my mirror?” 

 

I heard that Clint Eastwood, still vibrant and active in his 90’s, was once asked how he did it. He replied:

 

“I just don’t let the old man in.”

Good advice.