Me and Chopin

I’ve always wondered how musicians, artists and writers who suffered from debilitating diseases or chronic pain could function. I’m talking about Frida Kahlo, Serge Rachmaninoff, Renoir, George Orwell, John Keats, Frederic Nietzche, Marcel Proust, Rilke, Frederic Chopin and more. It’s a long list. How did they do what they did while coping with their bodily ailments?

 

So now I’ve been diagnosed with my first syndrome. Mild by many standards, but the two attacks I’ve had of Meniere’s syndrome have been alarming— intense vertigo and vomiting, as described a few posts ago, but then a fairly quick recovery. I’ve had some back problems at various points in my life but have had a good run of some 15 plus years where it has been okay. But lately, a chronic pain in my right lower back that a recent visit to the chiropracter didn’t help. So between that and some mild dizziness and ongoing lightheadedness the past few days (and the week before in Australia), I’m feeling concerned that I’m joining the above club that I prefer not to sign up for. 

 

But what’s interesting is that during all this, I finished the first draft of a new book and my writing has been as strong as ever. Today I taught five classes, from 5-year-olds through high school and each one was filled with good music, expressive movement and happy children. So it’s clear I can function with both pain and dizziness.

 

But it sure ain’t fun. I’d much rather be more fully present, not feel my attention split as the body struggles to reach some equilibrium, to just not hurt so much or feel so spaced out. Of course I would. We all would and so many have it worse than me, with severe arthritis or diabetes or chronic back pain and so on. It theoretically could make me yet more empathetic towards those who are physically suffering, but hey, I felt pretty empathetic already without having to share the pain. 

 

At any rate, Chopin died way too young and suffered from various illnesses, but sure wrote some fabulous and immortal music. Though sometimes I wish he would stick to the beautiful passages without suddenly going into a chromatic 16^th note rage up and down the keyboard and then calming his storm again. But now I understand why a bit better. Perhaps it was mirroring his own state of health when all was going well and then he was suddenly hit with the next attack. 

 

 Not that I’m exactly comparing myself to Chopin. I’m almost twice his age, I did walk up 1448 steps in Taipei yesterday and then down again without a problem, I have some confidence that this dizziness will pass and my back will sort itself out— and my contribution to the legacy of memorable music is nil. But going through this, I just want to both thank Frederick and let him know, “I feel your pain.” 

 

Sorting It Out

“Order is the only possibility of rest.”   -Wendell Berry

 

Yesterday I had the good sense to get out and walk after my 20-hour travel to Taipei and hooked back into my Audible book One Plus One by Jo Jo Moyes. (One of her best, I think!) Throughout the book, as a family meets difficulty after difficulty, the ever-optimistic Mom keeps saying “We’ll sort it out.”

 

I believe this is a British expression (the book takes place in England) and I rather like it. It suggests that when things go awry, it’s partially because they’re not in their proper place. Sorting it out is like the image in the fairy tales when the wicked queen gives the hero or heroine the task of sorting out different seeds thrown helter-skelter over the floor. Of course, an impossible task, but there always arrives help from some wounded bird that the hero or heroine befriended. Suggesting that though indeed we should pick up the tweezers and start making piles of the poppy and sesame and sunflower seeds, the final task often needs help from the world beyond mere will and sorting skills.

 

I believe that the act of sorting, starting with physical acts like cleaning your desk or organizing your files on the computer or arranging the tools in your tool chest, indeed brings satisfaction and clarity to our usually muddled minds. As Wendell Berry suggests above.

 

But the act goes further yet into the invisible or mental or emotional or metaphysical world. All polytheistic spiritual deities, from the Greek gods to the African orishas to the Catholic saints, are suggesting that all your petitions for help when you’re in dire straits shouldn’t be directed to the big guy in the sky. He has too much on his plate. Instead, direct it to the proper deputies she (or he) has appointed. First sort out your petition or prayer—fertility? Health? Wealth? Patience?— and then go to the oracle in charge. Sort out your need before you bother the spiritual world with your plea for assistance.

 

The same kind of thing is going on in the therapists’ office. You put your symptom out on the table and start to sort out what its probable cause might be. Your mother? Your relationship? Your childhood trauma? Your biorhythms? You and the therapist try to sort it out, as $150 an hour, thank you very much. Once you put a name to a condition, you have made the first step toward understanding it or remediating it or learning to live with it. Same is true for your visit to your medical doctor. 

 

Sorting doesn’t automatically cure anything, but by putting things in their proper perspective, we often can learn to adapt or change or even welcome what often in a backdoor way leads us to our gifts. We can rest more easily in the comforting arms of coherence. 

Indeed, that is one of the great gifts of the arts. Setting the actual content to the side, the mere ordering of sounds or movements or images or words that music, dance, visual arts or poetry achieves in the creative act is in and of itself a blessing. 

 

The very act of writing this post is my attempt to sort out my feelings about the term “sorting it out.” And now I can rest.

Steeper Sleeper

Sometimes blogposts come to me in my dreams. Like this one, that I’m setting down in the middle of the night in a Taiwan hotel after a 20-hour journey from Sydney to Taipei.

In my dream, I was hanging out one evening in a dorm-like situation with some young people about to give an Orff workshop the next day when a few of them said, “We like you better than most of the other teachers who have come to us.” 

 

“Oh, really?” I replied. “Why’s that?”

 

“Because you’re a steeper sleeper.”

 

Meaning I slept through their noise when they partied and didn’t tell them to “Shush” like those other teachers. Ha ha!

 

I then quipped, “I’m also a sleeker speaker.”

 

And realized I had my speech piece tongue-twister for the next day’s workshop:

 

“Steeper sleeper, sleeker speaker.” Say that five times fast.

 

Well, it was a dream after all. Writing this down at 1:30 am, I indeed hope I can be a steeper sleeper and get back to sleep! 

Lay Your Comfort Down

In Hong Kong airport after a 9-hour flight from Sydney, at the end of a 5-hour layover with another 90-minute flight to Taipei, arriving at 12:30 in the morning. Holding up okay, but think this trip is suggesting that my Superman days are waning and I might lean a bit more to Clark Kent. Still though a pleasant enough time in my movie-theater-in-the-sky, alongside my ritual Crostics puzzle and a few chapters of Great Expectations.

 

The last day of this most marvelous Jazz Course was true to form. Discovered this old body can still teach my version of the Lindy Hop and the group did a swingin’ version of Jumpin’ at the Woodside with half playing and half dancing. From there to a hot Latin tune Soul Sauce. The afternoon began with another break-out group assignment, five groups creating interpretations of Langston Hughes poems with body percussion, movement, acapella vocals, Orff Ensemble and band instruments. Stellar, stirring work and again, so impressed by the group’s effortless cooperative spirit. A quick review for the video cameras of the 35 pieces/ activities/ games we learned, a closing circle with people’s “takeaways,” and our final soulful game, Little Johnny Brown, where each in turn goes to the middle and using a scarf, “lays their comfort down.” Comfort short for “comforter”, as in Linus’ security blanket no longer needed because the singing and dancing circle is our mutual security, the place where all can safely go beyond their comfort zone. Indeed, that was one of the most surprising and revealing takeaways of the whole course. 

 

Naturally, I had to post something on Facebook, which feels worth repeating here.

 These people. Every day, every hour, every minute of the 5-day Jazz Course in Sydney, Australia, affirming that jazz touches universal strings, unleashes unbridled joy, holds deep sorrows in a container of beauty. And that people like these most lovely human beings willing to open their minds, hearts and bodies, jump into the center of the dancing circle, take daring risks on instruments they never played and hold each up through encouragement and support, are precisely the kind of people the world needs. And yet more beautiful that the kids they teach have them. There is nothing in this world that is perfect, but each day of the five came pretty damn close. On to Taiwan! 

Renewal

It is 10 pm at the end of a most remarkable day. Every cell in my body is radiating happiness and I feel like a prisoner long confined suddenly released into a bright and radiant resplendent world. After a mere few days of a jet-lagged body struck down by dizziness and vomiting and always aching hip and a pretty good Day 3, but still light-headed and not wholly myself, some part of me couldn’t remember what it’s like to feel normal, never mind feel embraced by a loving world. And part of me convinced myself that it didn’t matter. I could still teach from the depth of my soul and make others happy. The Spirit was shining brightly in spite of the shadow of ill-health in the body. 

 

But who was I kidding? Today I felt the moment when the astral body reconnected wholly with the physical body, that “poof!” when jet-lag finally disappears. My lightheadedness was mostly gone, the pressure in my ear eased, my hip pain mysteriously disappeared for a while and suddenly, I felt the bliss of an integrated happy body, felt it down to my bones and though from the outside, perhaps my teaching looked the same, from the inside I felt the full joy of each activity. I could feel my humor (and humors) flowing and the deeper connection with both the group and each person in it. It was a most marvelous day, starting with a fun preschool movement activity, into a partner clapping game that I extended to a social mixer, with all the buzzing energy that releases. Then four exquisite pieces of music connected by the five notes of the G pentatonic scale and played so expertly and enthusiastically by the group, with so many still trying new instruments and taking their first solos. 

 

The day included a Singing Time with yet more stirring protest songs sung beautifully and passionately, yet one more delightful piece bouncing between the two life-giving grooves of swing jazz and Latin style, complete with a unique duet between garklein recorder (quite high) and bass clarinet (quite low). Somewhere in there I read a letter one of my former students wrote that had me yet again publicly tearing up (that’s “tearing” as in tears, not ripping paper!) and ended the day’s class with videos from my SF Jazz Performance with my band and two students from the SF School. That’s a lot of territory to cover in one day!

 

But it got better. Teaching in a windowless theater during four days of constant rain and overcast skies and chilly temperatures, it was yet another feeling of a prison break-out when we walked out into sunny skies with a perfect 70’s temperature and walked two blocks down to a beautiful beach. That astounding sense that there’s a world out there and walking the beach with water to my ankles (didn’t have my bathing suit), I felt the infusion of ozone, the lull of the gentle waves, the blue sky and people drawn to nature for refreshment. Add to that a Greek dinner (Greek salad and chicken souvlaki) in company with the convivial jazz course students and minus all negative associations with the term, the words “born again” came to mind.

 

But yet more. I then gave a 90-minute solo piano concert to the students and some of their family members and by the end, I was feeling the whole vibrations of the beautiful Steinway piano and found myself entering unexpectedly eloquent excursions based on already-great tunes. Some moments of room silence where we all could feel something was afoot here. Back to my hosts’ house for a game of King’s Corner and Triangular Dominoes and the sweet sensation that “it doesn’t get much better than this.”

 

I confess that the past couple of days were an unwelcome reminder of the body’s mortality and slide into decay, but having gone down that dark road, the blessing of today was especially vibrant and has my fullest measure of gratitude. One day left tomorrow, then off to Taipei the next day and instead of the dread of not being up for the work ahead, renewed confidence that I cannot only do it, but actually be present to enjoy it all.

 

May it be so!

This Spinning World

Day 2 of this Sydney Jazz Course every bit as glorious as Day 1, but even more so as the already congenial and enthusiastic teachers loosened up yet more. Tempting to describe the particulars, but it all is a “you just had to be there” kind of experience unlike almost anything else most people encounter. I was feeling so happy and grateful to be there and then…

 

Just before the last session, I got up from my chair and was hit with a dizziness that felt sickenly familiar. The exact same thing that had happened to me in Ghana. With a half hour left to teach, I soldiered through, which was no small task as I wanted to acknowledge Martin Luther King Day and led them in the song Free at Last, showed them the video of the last five minutes of Dr. King’s still powerful speech and then had them all stand in a circle singing We Shall Overcome with me at the piano. They sang so strongly and beautifully, but there I sat, with the world spinning around me. At the end, I said goodbye and stood there wondering how I could walk to the car.

 

My lovely course host, Peta Harper came over to me and I told her what was happening and suggested she might want to find a bucket, because as we were talking, I felt a cold sweat overcome me and the moment the bucket came, up came the vomit. Just like had happened in Ghana. They walked me to the car and I was driven half an hour to my host house, vomiting every ten minutes and trying to empty the bucket on the side of the road. Not a pleasant experience for me or the driver, to say the least. 

 

Lay down when I arrived and slept for a couple of hours and woke up feeling better, as had happened in Ghana. Lucky for me, my host’s husband Paul is a doctor and described a condition of fluid in the ear that he has that sounded exactly like mine. That certainly would account for the dizziness and the sense of pressure I had felt in my ear.

 

Slept through the night and woke up still lightheaded, but ready to try the third day. And a marvelous day it was, with break-out groups doing such a fine job playing their chosen Blues from my books and then learning Perdido in the 36-person Big Band, so swinging and joyful. Felt a tiny wave of dizziness after lunch, but now it seems a bit better again. Going to lie down before trying to go out to dinner with the group. 

 

Yu can imagine my concern with this new condition that could erupt unannounced at any time, my worry about a 9-hour flight to Hong Kong with a 6 hour layover before getting to Taipei, my fear about meeting the task of the 16 straight days of teaching awaiting me. I needed the Inspiring Quote for the day from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield:

 

Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting. Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be.

 

Well, I’ll give it a try. Really, what other choice do I have? Wish me luck!

  

Coffe in a Teabag

At the break of my first day at the Sydney Jazz Course, I roamed about the snack table. Spotted the Lamington treat I had forgotten about, an Australian delight. Then thought perhaps a little coffee for my jet lag. Couldn’t find it until someone pointed to a teabag. “No, I wanted coffee.” “That is coffee.” 

And darn if it wasn’t! Coffee in a teabag! Never seen that before! It seemed so logical and convenient. 

 Like wheels on a suitcase, I thought “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?” Until they did. 

 

I took a sip. Hmm. Maybe it’s not as great an idea as I thought.