Surfing on the Waves of Love

Don’t think I’ve ever written a Blog post in a car, but here I am in an Uber (called “Grab”) in Singapore on my way to my Holiday Inn Hotel in Little India. 

Had a lovely day yesterday teaching a “non-jazz” Orff workshop to 30 people. My host Siew Ling kept insisting on group reflections during each of the 4 days of teaching and she was right. In order to lock any usable ideas in, they need to be said out loud and better yet, shared. I often am so impatient to fill every minute of the workshop with music that I often let this go and this was an important reminder. And also so satisfying for me to hear their takeaways and feel that they indeed, had some understanding of the key points I’m always hoping to make to transform their teaching. Many were heartfelt testimonies as to not only how they were inspired, but deeply touched by the little 7 hours of life we shared.

 

Walked the mile back to my hotel and had the good sense to plunge into the pool for one last swim. Perfect! Then send off the day’s notes, pack and turn to the plans for my next day teaching at XCL World Academy, where Brazilian friend Luciana teaches. It looked to be a full and challenging day, with three morning classes with 3rd, 4^th and 5^th grade — each one with 60 kids!! Then an improvisation class with twelve 12^th graders, another with twenty four 11^th graders and then a workshop for some 16 teachers at their staff meeting. 

 

I did it all and it was glorious. Yet another testimony that after four long days of teaching and then thrown into the challenge above, I should be exhausted, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I feel wholly energized and uplifted and ready to have dinner with another friend tonight. Because, as I say time and time again, when you know how to teach so it’s fun, the children pick up on it immediately and send all their happiness back to you. All the smiles and laughter and sheer joy comes back as energy that creates more energy. And then when the music is good, it’s another major jolt of energy charging every nerve, muscle, brain cells, heartbeat of the human organism. 

 

I am a deeply flawed human being like all of us with my fair share of disappointments, but when my activities are wholly aligned with what I do best, what I love most, what I value and care about, all of it echoing back to me in waves of love from the energies I set in motion and the people whose lives I touch, whether for a single class, a whole course or a long connection, well, then I might as well say it plainly.  I am the luckiest person alive. 

 

And now, I have arrived at the hotel. 

 

Bridge to Childhood

It’s nighttime in Singapore and I’m listening to Offenbach’s Barcarolle in my 12^th story hotel room. The body fortified by another simple dinner at “my” vegetarian restaurant, topped off by a $.35 (US dollars) soy ice cream cone from Ikea, the Spirit uplifted by the final day of my three-day Jazz Course, my Soul at peace after a full 9:00 to 5:30 day of teaching and another two hours gathering the notes to send out while planning tomorrow’s workshop on the theme The Humanitarian Musician. Busy, but also moved to tears at least four times today, not counting a brief awakening in the middle of the night last night and getting an e-mail from a group of college friends reaching out to each other in this time of great darkness. 

 

Spotify sent me from the Barcarolle to Saint-Saen’s The Swan and here in this blessed Solitude, the space is cleared for the notes and the feelings behind them to fully enter. Now it’s on to Carmen and all of this music that I’ve known for oh- so- many years. The mere arrangement of tones and rhythms is walking me across the bridge to my childhood, where I sat in this same sanctuary of solitude and let my imagination roam freely. Each piece bringing me to a different land, but all lands sharing the sense that this world is a beautiful place to be wholly savored and enjoyed. A place where everything makes sense, where I could feel invisible helpers assuring me that I was put here for a purpose, and they were here to escort me to the life I mysteriously was meant to live. 

Adult life seemed a confusing interlude, determined to distract me from my childhood wonder and bury me under busyness, to damp down or downright trample my dreams, to lure me into the trivial and away from listening dreamily to music and letting it carry me where it will. Like everyone, I kept losing that thread. 

But if I’m to claim any merit, it would be a certain tenacious determination to not wholly let go. So yet another day of playing with strangers become instant fellow travelers, creating the space for both laughter and tears. As I mentioned, the latter came to the edge of the eyes many times today, most profoundly watching the video of Nina Simone singing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. In a mere six minutes and ten seconds, her singing and playing travelled the full range of emotion that constitutes an authentic life—the tender hopes and dreams, the angry outrage and fury, the sly smile of joy untouched by other’s failings, the humility and grace, the courage and purity to be wholly herself. 

 

Back in my hotel room, the music rolls on, now Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, bringing this aging man back into his 10-year-old body and mind. But the adult-mind reminding him that he’s in charge of 30 people tomorrow for 7 more hours and that it might be a good idea to go to sleep. So I’ll leave off here, grateful have revisited that child filled with wonder, innocence, dreams and love for this life. 

Good night.

 

Intelligence Having Fun

Back to the life I was born to live. In a room with teachers eager to learn, sharing the music I love with 50 years of learning how to share it effectively and joyfully. A small group of 11 in this Singapore workshop on teaching the Blues, so enthusiastic in their playing and insightful in their reflections, noticing the details of the magic that emerged. 

 

Alongside the pleasure of playing great music that everyone could do, could hear, could feel and could understand (my 4H club of hand/ heart / head and hearing), I shared some of the historical context. I told them that it will mean something different to them because it is not their history and yet, I found them nodding their heads hearing the story of human beings owned as property and 400 years (and still counting) of unfathomable suffering so white folks could get rich without working, a nonverbal “Word!” to information that Americans find so difficult to hear. From there, they joined in on a powerful improvised field holler and the path was paved to keep walking all the way to the Blues. 

 

Having paid their dues of attending to a difficult history, they were qualified to receive the full weight of the joy the music offers. Especially when invited to improvise their own particular style of expressing themselves musically. Smiles abounded and I shared with them a quote I saw in a window on my Saturday Singapore walk and wander. Attributed to Albert Einstein, it perfectly captures why I love teaching the way I do so much and never want to stop:

 

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

 

Yep! I would have loved to have Einstein in my Orff class! We understand each other.

I ended the day walking the mile and a half from the school to my hotel, stopped at a charming vegetarian restaurant where I ate the other day and tried the pho noodle dish (delicious!). Then stopped in IKEA next to my hotel. Why? I went there last night to buy a bowl for my breakfast cereal and after buying it—for 70 cents U.S.!— I noticed there was a machine dispensing Soy Ice Cream for 30 cents U.S.! I haven’t had ice cream that cheap since Uncle Gaylords in San Francisco in 1975, so I felt morally obligated to get some. But the problem was you first had to get a token and the line for the tokens was 30 people long! In fact, the entire IKEA was like a Black Friday Walmart, packed wall-to-wall with people out shopping on Sunday night. Really?

 

So having forgone the line last night, I thought I’d peek in and there was exactly no one in line. The whole store with just a few people wandering about. I guess Sunday night at IKEA is a thing in Singapore! I got my token and my coin and enjoyed my refreshing treat and topped off the early evening with a long swim in the hotel’s Infinity pool. 

 

The teaching is enough for me to exclaim time and time again, “I love this life!” but when combined with warm weather in January, good cuisine at amazing prices and a daily/nightly swim in a silky-smooth pool, one could get spoiled. Maybe I should write a blog about it, something like “Confessions of a Traveling Music Teacher.” The theme would be the meeting point of creativity, intelligence and fun. I think I’ll look into it. 

(Ha ha!)

 

Maggot In Chief

“Follow your Muse” is the unspoken agreement of any author who has been chosen to be the conduit for private thoughts that at their best, serve a public purpose. No one can predict precisely how they will land with a reader or with whom, but that’s not our business. Just maintain an intuitive faith that something needs to be said and if you don’t say it, no one else will.

 

In the past few days, my Muse has turned me towards the unfathomable chaos of my confused country come face-to-face with centuries of undigested grief and deep shadows. All of it coming to light at once. So any insight that goes beyond name-calling to a deeper understanding of the forces at work is fair game. In that spirit, I ask:

 

“Has anyone noticed how closely MAGAS and MAGGOTS are connected?”

 

If you do, it should send you running to Google to remind yourself as to what exactly a maggot is? But I’ll save you the trouble. Here was the first definition:

 

A maggot is the soft-bodied, legless larva of a fly, a worm-like stage that hatches from eggs and feeds voraciously on decaying organic matter like rotting food, feces, or dead animals, rapidly growing before transforming into a pupa and then an adult fly.

 

So calling the MAGAS maggots is not just an amusing Shakespearian insult, but a scientific description they’ve earned. They have no spine and their heart and brain are negligible. Led by the Chief Maggot of all, they feed voraciously on the shit that he releases into the sewers of his Twitter. They are disgusting creatures that wriggle and worm in the decaying flesh of people killed by ICE, in the moldy, crumbling pages of our Constitution, in the rotting, deteriorating, corroding beams of our Institutions, in the trash heaps of lies and deceit and spin. 

 

And fed by it all, what do they grow into? Flies! Who buzz around our heads and keep feasting on feces and use their whining voices to annoy us at picnics. 

 

The metaphor enters new territory when we consider that in the natural world, these pests actually have a role in the ecological balance. They assist the process of decomposition, releasing new energies into the system that are vital to life and growth. In short, the compost of our waste matter is an essential component of growing food and flowers. 

 

But balance is the key word. When the waste is overwhelming and lines our streets like a New York City garbage strike, and the flies multiply and the rats show up on the scene, there is trouble in paradise. If we can convince the red-hatters that they are on the lowest level of the food chain, secretly stick maggot stickers on their hats and awaken them to the shame they’ve refused, maybe that would help support the balance. And after looking for new names for the unspeakable Head of the Trash Heap, perhaps we might consider:

 

Maggot-in-Chief. 

 

So ends your science lesson of the day. There will be a test. 

The ICE Floe

It has been said that in some Inuit cultures, elders who had outlived their usefulness were sent out on an ice floe to die. Closer examination reveals that if indeed this practice (called senicide) was real, it only might have happened when resources were scarce and the young were in danger of death by starvation. Nevertheless, the term “sent out on an ice floe” drifted into our language and describes the sense that an elderly person might have of no longer being needed or useful.

 

If there is one person on the planet who qualifies for this practice, someone who has not only never been useful or needed but does nothing but daily wreak havoc and horror wherever he turns, it’s ………. 

 

Well, if you don’t know now, then you never will. Let’s just say that he is responsible in direct and indirect ways for the recent murder of a kind, compassionate, patriotic mother of three and will never admit an ounce of remorse or offer a microdot of condolence. He has completely transformed ICE, a formerly legitimate branch of the government, into a group of vigilante thugs with no training in law enforcement and let them loose to tear families apart, spread terror and murder innocent people. All the while abducting the leader of Venezuela and threatening to take over Greenland.

 

So if there’s any justice in this world and any God still functioning in any celestial realm, then I have the perfect natural consequence. 

 

IN HIS UPCOMING TRIP TO GREENLAND, HE SHOULD BE ABDUCTED AND SENT OUT ON AN ICE FLOE TO A DIE A SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH. WHILE INUIT DRUMMERS, JOINED WITH PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD, WILL PLAY, SING AND DANCE, “GOOD RIDDANCE!” 

  

Requiem for Renee

Yesterday I asked how much to let the news seep into my heart and used my privilege of being far away from the direct impact of ICE violence to make it seem okay. Shame on me. But today, Renee Nicole Good’s story found its way into my heart and this poem is my response. 

 

ON THE MURDER OF RENEE NICOLE GOOD

 

My silence is not complicity. 

It is neither uncaring nor unknowing. 

My silence comes from a heart which can find no words large enough 

to express the enormity of this next calamity. 

Add together grief and anguish and deep sorrow, 

outrage and horror and fury, and 

you still don’t get one step closer 

to expressing what needs to be expressed,

but is impossible to express. 

 

The grief has come, arm in arm with the fury. So as the politicians begin their avalanche of lies, the talking heads begin their empty chatter and the Facebook comments reveal our calloused hearts, I give voice to my Fury.

 

“Any citizen who dares to defend this action, to spin it, to ignore it,

to justify it, to refuse it, to shrug it off,

is not fit to claim membership in humanity.

If you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or other, you will be

denied entrance into your sacred buildings—you have defiled any god’s mandate to see the divine in all. If Catholic, you will be excommunicated.

If you are a teacher, you will be fired for violating the sacred trust of protecting children’s future.

If you are a politician, you will be impeached and taken from office for violating your oath to uphold the Constitution.

Family members who defend the Criminal-in-Chief will be struck from all wills, public figures blocked from all media, social and otherwise, spouses instantly divorced and prohibited from any further contact with the children.

 

Then all of you together will be locked into a football stadium or 100 or 1,000, 

to begin the education you never got or refused to learn. To finally look clearly at who we have become, and realize, once the lessons have begun, that it is exactly who we have always been. Consider the following:

 

• Our gifts of smallpox blankets to the native peoples who helped us survive.

 

• The brutal rapes and lashings of those enslaved human beings who made us rich. 

 

• The burning of those mothers who bore our children, denounced as witches.

 

• The assault and massacre of strikers who worked in intolerable conditions to give us warmth in our home.

 

• The church child-abuse perpetrated by those who led our worship services in the name of God, covered in the cloaks of institutional silence. 

 

• The lynchings and later, the sanctioned police murders, of black folks who gave us jazz, sports, literature, uplifted us with the moral courage of Martin and Malcolm and Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm. The endless list of innocents slain with their murderers mostly getting off scot-free —Tarika Wilson, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Fred Brown, George Floyd and 583 more black people since 2010.  (Every morning, all in that football stadium will be required to say their names.)

 

• The slaughter of innocents abroad and our own young soldiers in needless wars 

  so we can claim the oil that mysteriously got in their fields, 

        the oil we need to drive to the mall that has defaced our own land 

               to buy products made in sweat-shops far away that no one needs 

                        and then fill up our oceans with unrecyclable waste. 

 

Perhaps then all of you who have refused history’s lessons,

 will finally understand that everything that happens like this 

         makes sense inside a narrative 

                that makes no sense at all. 

 

Now you just might understand that a human being who just wanted

      to raise her children with love, 

            write poetry to praise this life and

                  perform her duty as a concerned citizen,

                             has now joined the Ancestors of the Needlessly Slaughtered. 

 

While the leader who set this all in motion and approves it, will wake up the next morning in his defaced White House without a single word of remorse or condolence. 

 

Oh, day of reckoning, when will you finally come? How many more must needlessly die before we greet you?

 

 R.I.P. Renee Nicole Good."

Coming to Ground

It’s a Sunday morning in Singapore and I awoke with the sense of coming back to an authentic self. Jet lag mysteriously already gone, my dizziness switch turned off, the body in some blessed state of homeostatic equilibrium and the mind happily free to wander through its own appointed regions. These things are rarely a simple “cause and effect,” and yet, doing the right things and making the right choices does make an impact. Like what I did yesterday, for example. 

 

1)   Wandered the new neighborhood a bit to get to see what’s here and begin the day with some two miles of walking in fresh air.

2)   Swam a vigorous 600 strokes in the hotel’s lovely 7^th- floor-with-a-view pool, then sat by poolside with a Crostic puzzle and my book.

3)   Skipped lunch and walked down Alexandra Road to the Labrador Nature Reserve, a lovely park by water’s edge. 

4)   Did not listen to my story on Audible on my phone, but instead, listened to the bird life, noticed the plants and trees, let my thoughts freely roam without interruption from other’s music or stories. 

5)   Discovered a lovely little place with Japanese bean cakes and a friendly owner and then a vegetarian restaurant next door— Pad Thai and a barley drink for $8 U.S.

6)   Returned to the hotel having walked 7.8 miles and decided to swim 180 more strokes for some 780/7.8 harmonious connection. Sat at poolside watching birds dive and dip briefly in the pool where no one was swimming, wrote in my journal and felt myself closing with the day.

7)   Back to the hotel room and my little project of organizing the list of where I’ve taught the past 30 years (not counting the U.S.) and how often I have returned to places to teach. For the city’s record, Salzburg was first with 22 visits, Toronto 18, Madrid 14. For countries, Canada was first with 42, Spain, 37, Austria 28. More important than the numbers game was sparking of memories of each of those courses, who I was, who was with me, what I was feeling then. A slow motion “traveling-music-teacher-life-flashing-before my-eyes” that brought back the full measure of blessings of my life choices and great gratitude.

8)   Read my book, go to sleep and (miraculously), sleep through the night.

 

Naturally, this is more a reminder to self than a list for others, but the general principles hold true for all to consider. 

 

1)   Eat lightly and healthily. 

2)   Exercise, preferably in the open air. 

3)   Read and write. 

4)   Use phone sparingly and leave space for your own thoughts.

5)   Reflect on your life with gratitude. 

 

Another day awaits before the teaching begins. Back home is government violence and  murder alongside resistance to it all and it’s hard to know how much to let seep into my open heart. But I remember a line from the movie Bridge of Spies, where a character asked if he was worried about what was happening, answered, “Would it help?” When it does, open the doors wide. When not, choose the wisdom of the microdose and go deeper into your own beauty, power and celebration of life. Find the ways you can support others to do the same. That’s my work in this coming week of teaching. 

But first, another blessed day of wandering and wondering.