Winter Solstice 07

Since I left Massachusetts in 1987, I have only once spent the Winter Solstice in my own home, either in Indiana or in Texas. The holiday season is one of the few times I get to go back and see my family and friends in New England. So, at the cold and dark time of the year, I find myself navigating snowy highways and (inevitably delayed) airplanes, headed straight for an even colder and darker world.

Ever walk outside right after a big snowstorm, before the plows start rumbling and the sound of dozens of people digging out their internal combustion vehicles begins? Silence rules. If the storm ends at night, there is nothing but silence, black-blue sky (often with a huge star-display), and a vast expanse of white, which is tinged with pink if the moon is up and shining at a particular angle.

It is extraordinarily beautiful -- if you live in a heated house, or you are a hibernating bear. It is not so beautiful if you are homeless, or if you are a sparrow with your little feathers puffed to the max. It is the dual spirit of the Winter Solstice: death, dormant, cold and silent on the one hand, while on the other hand our local star is on the increase, and the Green Man’s return is promised in no uncertain terms.

The Earth is telling us that this should be a time of quiet, of contemplation, of sleeping later than usual, of cooking and eating the vegetables, grains and beans that were stored in the root cellar. Viewed in this way, the quiet of winter, and the resultant diminished activity, lends itself to reflection, which in turn leads to meditation on the year that has just passed; its experiences, its events, its joys and hardships, and our own actions. And, if you should want to light up a Yule log to remind you that the sun is on the increase, that’s fine too; there’s nothing like contemplating the past year curled up in front of the fireplace with the hot apple cider.

Of course, this is not what happens at all. The energy of the Winter Solstice could not be more diametrically opposed to the crazed and hectic energy that her out-of-touch humans are trying to impose on the season. We have turned the seasonal world upside down, at least here in so-called “western civilization.” Think of the travel, the hassles, the frenzied shopping, the calls, the plans, exams at the ends of semesters, the dysfunctional family gatherings – for that matter, even the happy family gatherings are hectic. We wonder why everyone is stressed, anxious, and flipped out during the Winter Solstice season; well, it makes perfect sense that we would be. We are screamin’, yellin’, and carryin’ on while Planet Earth is trying to sleep. It makes no natural, biorhythmic sense in any way whatsoever: it is the essence of the Denial of Nature.

We love to blame this Denial on post-industrial society and its frenzied consumerism, but in fact, this hyper-reaction against Nature’s quiet time is as old as humanity. The Romans had a ritual for this time of year – they called it Saturnalia. The idea was that everything would be turned upside-down: for one day, the slaves would rule, the masters would be slaves, and so on. I believe this also involved a certain amount of reckless partying. (I also suspect that if Ancient Rome had contained a Wallus-Martus Magnus, there would have been shameless consumerism as well.) Vestiges of this Roman tradition lasted well into the Middle Ages, when the same sort of role-reversal took place at the Feast of Fools (also aided and abetted by reckless partying.) In cultures all over the globe, from ancient times until the present, one can find Winter Solstice rituals that involve imbibing substances that make it feel less cold, and lighting things up and making them go Boom.

The church fathers who attempted to insert the Baby Jesus’ birthday into this mix probably knew that there was no way to stop the crazy stuff; their only prayer was to somehow attempt to tie it to something Christian. But forget dispensing with the wild celebrations -- even Cromwell and his super-Calvinist nutbars were ultimately unable to do that; they were simply outdone by the strength of the human compulsion start bonfires and administer some sort of recreational personal anesthesia when the days are too short and the wind is too cold. As the centuries progressed, the rolling snowball of Holiday Cheer gathered mass and momentum, turning the month of December into a kind of materialistic party-monster. And yet, at the heart of all this, the pervasive sense of unease remains. There is more depression, more suicide, more regret, more dysfunctional family behavior. And it’s my opinion that it happens because we are denying one half the dual nature of the Solstice: the dead, cold, silent, dormant side that we are trying to deny with our Christmas lights and our frenzied activity. To paraphrase the famous bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys” Still Dies -- and we don’t like it One Bit.

It was at this exact time of year, eleven years ago, that my father’s cancer – undiagnosed until it was way too late to do anything to save him – had sent him into a swift decline, while everyone jumped around having Christmas as if nothing was wrong. Apparently we were unable to all just say “Let’s screw all the presents and Christmas dinner, and just sit around quietly and enjoy each other’s company while we’re all still here,” because that would be admitting that one of us might not still be here in the near future. I was incredibly depressed and uncomfortable throughout the entire thing, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that it has, even to this day, pretty much deep-sixed whatever lingering “holiday spirit” has not already been knocked out of me by the annual rat-race of trying to end a semester in time to buy gifts, get my house in order, find someone to take care of my animals, and hurriedly travel.

The Winter Solstice happened this year on December 22, in the wee hours of the morning (1:08 AM if you were on the U.S. east coast, 6:08 AM in Ireland, 10:08 the evening of the 21st if you were in Seattle or California.) I began this post a couple of days before the Solstice, and I am finishing it several days after. In the interim, something interesting happened to me: I became incredibly ill with a stomach virus, and effectively spent the entire Solstice period in a state of nauseated torpor, lying as still as possible in the guest room at my mother’s home. Everyone else in the house was also ill, which did away with any semblance of “holiday.” The weather was abysmal during a good part of the time – wind howling, freezing rain pelting the building. I thought a lot about the fact that I was being more or less forced by circumstance to lie completely still, and feel like Death. As I lay there I also contemplated the Tibetan Buddhist belief that illness is some kind of intense karmic purification; that you are “burning off” negative karma (or in my case, ejecting it.) I thought about the compatibility of that set of beliefs, and the whole idea of bonfires and Yule logs and yes, even the energy-wasting plethora of Christmas lights. In the monastery where my teachers live, they always have some sort of marathon practice on New Year’s Eve; either Vajrasattva, which is a great purification practice, or Tara, which is a practice said to remove obstacles. One might wish that my particular purification could have happened this year without such a literal emptying out of one’s physical contents, but … in 2007, that was my karma.

I wish I could say that all of this ruminating has brought me to some sort of huge insight, but I don’t think that it has, except to ponder this: I think that the desire to cleanse ourselves at this time of year may be as old as the bonfires. The problem is, we have no idea how to make this happen, so we keep showing up for the same movies hoping that they will end differently. Maybe this year’s presents will make us different. Maybe the dysfunctional families will get along and all the rotten old stuff will disappear like mist. When all that fails, we make goofball New Year’s Resolutions, most of which last about 48 hours if we’re lucky. We don’t really know what the hell it is we need to change, but at some deep level we know that without some process of purification, the detritus cannot be cleaned away. We know death has to happen for rebirth to happen; if the old year does not die away, the new one cannot come – but it’s hard to accept. Couldn’t it just come anyhow?

What would happen if we all asked ourselves, at each Winter Solstice: what needs to pass away now? (What – my ego? Oh…forget it; I don’t like this game. Can we just eat the cookies and play cards?) The Winter Solstice is probably a very good time for contemplation, purification, clarification, and fence-mending, and for gratitude—for the cessation of nausea, for second (and third and fourth) chances, for 3 minutes more light each day, and yet also for the darkness; and yes, also for the “death” part of the Solstice, for it’s the death part that turns the wheel and brings the “life” again. And it doesn’t matter whether your own personal mythology interprets that as reincarnation, the Resurrection, Enlightenment, cleaning all the crap out of your garage, watching the beans sprout from the compost, or knowing that the Earth will carry on after humanity’s demise – it is None of those things, and it is All of those things.

Snyder: Performance and the "Deep World"

Gary Snyder is one of my favorite writers and poets. In 2006, he presented an essay entitled “Writers and the War Against Nature” for the Daesan Foundation’s International Literary Festival conference. The essay was nominated for a Pulitzer. This is an excerpt. There’s nothing more I can say about it that it won’t say better itself.

[begin quote]

One time in Alaska a young Koyukon Indian college student asked me, “If we humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?” I thought it an excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. I told her, “The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.” The “deep world” is of course the thousand-million-year-old world of rock, soil, water, air, and all living beings, all acting through their roles. “Currency” is what you pay your debt with. We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. How do we repay that gift? Performance. “A song for your supper.”

I went on to tell her that I felt that non-human nature is basically well-inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears. The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists—because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world…

…Art takes nothing from the world; it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished.

Poems, novels, and plays, with their great deep minds of story, awaken the Heart of Compassion. And so they confound the economic markets, rattle the empires, and open us up to the actually existing human and animal world. Performance is art in motion; in the moment; both enactment and embodiment. This is exactly what nature herself is.

Soaring just over the sea-foam
riding the wind of the endless waves
albatross, out there, way

away, a far cry
down from the sky.

-----Gary Snyder, “Writers and the War Against Nature," 2006

To Increase Your Attention Span, click here...

The new Shambhala Sun has some fantastic articles this month. One is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated essay by poet Gary Snyder called “Writers and the War Against Nature.” Highly recommended. (www.shambhalasun.com; they haven’t got the November issue up online yet, but when they do there will probably be an excerpt.)

Also in this month’s issue is a short article by David Loy entitled “The Attack on Attention.” It’s so entirely relevant to the art of teaching, as well as the cultivation of mindfulness (Buddhist and otherwise), that I herewith offer a short excerpt:


Consider, for example, how MP3 players are changing the ways we listen to music. A century ago, you were part of a live audience, and you would settle down and focus on the music being performed. Today, strolling along with my iPod, my decision to listen to any particular piece of music is never completely settled, because I can constantly change what is playing if I become dissatisfied with it.


[Dharmonia comment: this is why musical structure is one of the most difficult things for contemporary music students to grapple with – often, the only time they listen to a piece in its entirety is when they are performing it.]


This applies to many other aspects of our lives…Our old foraging habits were based on info scarcity, but suddenly we find ourselves trying to survive an info glut,and the scarcest resources have become attention and control over our own time. Social anthropologist Thomas Eriksen has formalized this relationship into a general law of the information revolution: “When an ever-increasing amount of information has to be squeezed into the relatively constant amount of time each of us has at our disposal, the span of attention necessarily decreases.”


One problem with such an avalanche of information (and therefore shorter attention span) is that it challenges our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences. Sherry Turkle has noticed that some of her MIT students now reason and arrange their ideas differently. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”

End of quote.

Our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences: this articulates very precisely the biggest weakness I see in my students as a whole. Mr Loy has given me a lot to think about: how do we nurture this ability in sentient beings lost a sea of info-glut? The question is important, because this is precisely what I feel that I and other professors are called to do – in fact, are obligated to do. A culture with no narrative is doomed; and a culture lacking the ability to create logical sequences will continue to believe that Iraq was responsible for 9-11. We have to find a way to help students either maintain or find these abilities, and still live in the twenty-first century – we must, as one Zen teacher put it, show up for the impossible.

Early Music is Dead; Long Live Early Music

Early Music is apparently in trouble – or so I hear. There's a perception that the field is not growing; that the audience today is comprised of the same people who came to Renaissance music concerts in their Birkenstocks in 1976. Recently I was informed that most of the members of the American Recorder Society and Early Music America are also eligible for membership in AARP, or soon to be so.

Is this true? And if so, why? Many early music performers and aficionados chalk this up to the same bugaboos that are besetting the classical music world in general: not enough public support, not enough education of the young, the demise of record stores and classical music labels, fewer labels wanting to invest in “fringe” repertoire, pop music heralding the demise of western civilization, and the hand-wringing goes on and on.


As a person who has been broadcasting so-called early music for 15 years and teaching it full-time for seven, here is my newsflash: Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music are NOT in danger. The act of playing medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music on historical instruments is also NOT in trouble. “Early Music,” however, may be in trouble.

“Early Music” is a concept – an invention of the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, it was a new, useful, innovative, and creative approach to the performance of particularly old Euro-Anglo music, despite the fact that the term “early music” itself was very problematic (what the hell does it mean?) and difficult to explain to the uninitiated. But the advent of the historical performance movement fired the imagination at a time when experimentation, and doing something that was “off the beaten track,” was both fashionable and encouraged. Hearing the music on the original period instruments was a revelation. Discovering new techniques, new pieces, and new approaches was refreshing. The repertoire also provided both performers and listeners with a musical experience that was at once “new” and yet strangely “familiar.” (For a good sampling of both Dorian and Mixolydian mode, I refer you to 1) most hymnals and 2) the entire plethora of 1960s British Invasion bands; for modal contrapuntal guitar pyrotechnics and some Fun With Rhythmic Prolations, I refer you to Led Zeppelin.) Even the vexing “Authenticity” problem, which put the movement in danger of disappearing into a vortex of “Earlier Than Thou” preciousness, was eventually put to rest as many of us took a slightly more ethnomusicological approach to the field, realizing that the past is, in fact, a different country, and we cannot create an “authentic” performance of anything before this morning without access to Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Time-Traveling Phone Booth. We became more interested in an “authenticity” that had to do with the integrity of the performer and the scholarship that went into the historical performance method.

Meanwhile, the “early music” movement gained momentum like a snowball rolling down Taos Mountain’s triple-diamond slope. In the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, early music represented the majority of classical music sales – OK, the numbers still aren’t exactly worrying Britney Spears, but it is a considerable percentage. So what has gone wrong? Where are all the younger “early music” people? What went wrong, in my opinion, is that the concept of “early music” as a self-contained entity has reached its expiration date – an expiration date that was programmed into it from the very beginning of its existence.

Let me attempt to explain my thoughts here.

It is impossible to sustain the image of “early music” as a NEW approach to performing the music of the 11th to the 18th centuries. At some point, the techniques of historical performance either had to be absorbed into the mainstream of classical music approaches, or people had to decide that they were not valid. Fortunately, the former has happened, and with flying colors. A person who wants to specialize in Baroque violin is no longer “on the fringe.” It is now considered normal for a conductor of a “modern” chamber orchestra to explore some of the techniques and performance practices that were championed by the “early music” players of earlier decades. A number of players are active in several different musical genres. As a result, we have a whole generation of performers who are quite active in these areas, and who play period instruments – in Baroque and Classical music in particular – but who do not necessarily self-identify as exclusively “early music” performers. They are much more apt to tell you that they specialize in chamber music. Many of them also play other kinds of music: mainstream classical, New Music, rock and roll, ambient music, Irish traditional music…

It is folly to try to market 700 years worth of music as one genre. In my opinion, this might be the single biggest mistake that the “early music movement” has made. It is not possible to describe, market, practice, or sustain this enormous repertoire of incredibly diverse music as One Large Category. (It doesn’t work that well with “World Music” either, although the marketing of World Music was done a bit more successfully.)

Presenters of concert series, for example, have found themselves in an interesting situation. Suppose their funding and their mission allows for one concert of New Music, one concert of World Music, and one concert of “early music” per year. On their desk are demo recordings of three exciting concerts: An all-Biber concert by a great young Baroque ensemble; a concert of New Music written for violas da gamba; and a performance of medieval Gallego-Portuguese Cantigas de Santa Maria. According to the established category of “early music,” the presenter will choose one of these concerts for their ‘early music’ niche. In fact, each of those three performances satisfies the criteria of a different category in their concert season; they could actually have all three and never stray from their mission.

Even in radio, the “early music” category could be problematic. On the one hand, it lent an enormous amount of freedom and diversity to the programming of a weekly hour of music (as I know well, having been the producer / host of a national early music radio program for many years.) On the other hand, it could be difficult to sell the program, because many program directors felt that they already incorporated plenty of “early music” into their daily playlists. In point of fact, their daily playlists contain loads of Baroque and early classical music, but not the earlier stuff, which in the case of my program has been the more prevalent repertoire programmed. However, since it was all lumped together in the category of “early music,” many program directors saw no point in adding more to their playlist.

Medieval music in particular, and some secular Renaissance music, has suffered from this narrow categorization, being the fringe of the fringe of “early music.” A concert of Playford dances, or medieval Italian laude spirituali done with voices and instruments, would both be completely appropriate for most folk festivals; yet many “early music” people don’t even attempt to market themselves to this demographic, and the folk and world music presenters have often not been made aware that this is an option for them. But if we want more people to hear medieval music – if we don’t want to limit it to the audiences who go to the “earliest” of the “early music” concerts (in other words, the weirdest) – it is absolutely crucial that we figure this out. A medieval ensemble should have a different presenter list than the one maintained by the baroque ensemble. But we have not done this. Not only have we tried to market it all to the same people, but even at our festivals we have often relegated the medieval concerts to some insane midnight hour, thus ensuring that it will be kept on the fringe, rather than have the medieval concert at a sane hour at a venue that normally is frequented by the world- and folk- music crowd (and by the way, this can also be a church – no reason to sacrifice the acoustic.)

We are also guilty of selling potential audiences short. This is a fault we share with a number of musics that attract “purists,” jazz and traditional folk being two other culprits. Why are we not putting the posters for our sacred chant concert at the local New-Age bookstore? (God forbid we should be associated with those new-age types.) Why doesn’t the Playford band advertise their concert to the local chapter of the SCA? (OK, the audience might show up in costume – but they have ears and hearts, and they can have a sincere and deep reaction to the music, even if they have a different approach to historical re-enactment than you do.) Audiences can tell if you think you are smarter / better / hipper than they are. And if they sense that, your audience will end up always being the same 26 people whom you deign to consider your equal.

While I’m on this rant, here’s another question: why do we record all “early music” the same way? If you think your particular flavor of “early music” is going to have a stronger appeal to the people who buy world and folk music, why not record it the way world and folk music is recorded? I’m not suggesting that you should sing Hildegard with a click track; however, it’s not outrageous to consider utilizing some multitrack digital technology in the process of recording a bunch of Cantigas de Santa Maria (at least, not in my opinion.) The mixing and mastering process is also different in folk and world music (unless it’s a field recording.) Ever notice that classical music records are way lower in volume than other genres of recorded music, even if those other genres are all acoustic? Any idea how much iPod volume-twiddling this requires (or setting of radio levels? It drives radio engineers nuts.) Why not experiment? Forget about authenticity. Music, once the most impermanent of all art forms, is now the most precisely preserved for posterity. The minute you stick a microphone in front of a medieval instrument, the process is no longer medieval, whether you are recording direct to digital with no edits (which, granted, is fine, and is what I’ve always done), or recording the basic tracks and then layering on extra vocals and instrumental parts (which I admit I would very much like to try with some medieval repertoire, just to see what happens.)

All right, enough ranting. What are we supposed to do about all of this? How do we attract younger listeners and players to early music?

Well, first of all, understand that They Are Out There. The repertoire is far from dead, and the ears of people under 40 are just as open to medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music as those of their older brothers and sisters. They also are just as fascinated by, and attracted to, historical instruments. This is not just true in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York; I see their reactions every day, and I live out on the prairie 400 miles from Lah-Lah-Land. I have no "magic bullet" for attracting them, but I know for sure that we have to BE where they ARE.This may require thinking outside the Baby Boomer Box. Here are a few suggestions:

----- If you want someone between 18 and 30 to hear some “early music,” don’t wait around for them to hear it on NPR. Be where they are. They are on the Internet. Make a great video and put that sucker on YouTube. Use the media they listen to and watch.

----- Here's another place where they are: in school. Encourage the absorption of early music techniques into the mainstream of classical music, including classical music curriculum. It’s not necessary to have an official “Early Music Department” in order to have an “Introduction to Performance Practice” course, nor is it necessary to have a battalion of early instruments on hand.) It’s not even necessary to have a battalion of early instruments in order to play early music, as blasphemous as that may sound. They have to be introduced to it somehow, and if you need a hundred-thousand dollar grant to introduce them to it, it ain’t gonna happen in most college situations.

----- If you want younger kids to hear “early music,” put together an exciting program and bring it to the local high school or middle school. If you have college students who play early music, encourage them to do these presentations, so that the high school kids can see people close to their own age playing the stuff along with Grandma. (Two caveats: 1) Don’t expect to make money doing this. 2) If the persons involved at the schools can only wrap their brains around this if you are willing to climb into a costume or wear a funny hat, either get a good persuasive speech about why it's not necessary, or gut it out and take one for the team.

----- Allow the times to change. Make yourselves a killer website with interactivity and bells and whistles. (I know, I haven't done this yet. I haven't had time because of the above bullet points. I know it needs to be done.) Don’t wait around to “get signed;” get your CD on iTunes, put it on CDBaby. Call it (and the video) something that will show up in an internet search, so that when some kid is searching for a video game where two medieval avatars are knocking each other’s blocks off, your video just may Google up. Think about marketing the CD with some other descriptive term in addition to "Early Music," because no one seems to know what the hell early music is.


Early Music is "not dead yet." It may be driving up the wrong road looking for the party, but it ain't dead. We just need to point it in the right direction.

How Is Your Practice?

The other day, in the middle of a conversation about something else, my buddy Coyotebanjo described several of his primary activities – playing music, teaching, and doing musicology, and even blogging – as “practices.” He said “Those are my practices.”

This got me to thinking. How do we define our activities as “practice?” Coyotebanjo’s view is quite different from the way many of us look at practice. For musicians, especially, “practice” can become something that the reality of everyday life seems to keep us from doing anywhere near as much as we’d like. “If I didn’t have so many damned students, I’d have time to practice.” (What is wrong with this picture?) The same goes for spiritual practice: how many of us attempt to meditate, only to find that we blow it off regularly because “life” got in the way? This definition of “practice” seems to be something that is only allowed to us as a reward. It’s reserved for a special activity of some kind, exclusive of our other activities. “You can practice your violin when your taxes are done.” “You can meditate after the laundry is folded or the article is edited.”

The word "practice," according to Merriam-Webster, came into the English language through a long convoluted path from the Greek praktikos, through its Latin and Middle French equivalents, to the Middle English practisen. Leaving out literary or archaic usages, as a transitive verb, practice means 1) to carry out, or apply; or 2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient, or to train by repeated exercises. As an intransitive verb, it means 1) to do repeated exercises for proficiency; 2) to pursue a profession actively; 3) to do something customarily.

But there is a way of using the word “practice” that Merriam-Webster does not include. The dictionary definition includes brushing one’s teeth and learning how to tie one’s shoes. These are important activities, obviously, but there is an additional meaning we give to the word practice when it is applied to something that we “do customarily” or “perform or work at repeatedly” in order to create meaning in our lives, or to improve a skill that is edifying to us in some sort of meaningful, internally resuscitating or nurturing way. These are the sorts of practices that we punish ourselves by blowing off – but in fact, in Coyotebanjo’s world, these are not regarded as “special” – this kind of practice is what you do, because there is nothing more important, frankly, than creating meaning in your life. And why does it have to be limited to one thing? It’s ALL the things you choose to do on a regular basis because those activities have meaning to you or create meaning for you.

Does your work have meaning to you? Then it’s a practice. Does gardening have meaning to you? Then you bet it’s a practice. Anything you do. Maybe you do yoga, take a morning walk, bird-watch, say your TM mantra, recite nam myoho renge kyo, read the Bible, Koran, Torah, Heart Sutra, whatever you do that creates meaning for you, and hopefully for those around you. It doesn’t have to exclude “work.” Maybe you bring people’s mail to them every day. Maybe you make food for people every day. Maybe you manage other people’s money, or process their health insurance claims. Can this be meaningful? Can it be a practice? Would your life be better, and have more meaning, if your “job” were a practice?

To that end, it’s also worth considering that all our practices work in tandem with each other. For example, it’s much easier to make your “job” a practice when you’ve meditated that morning, even for 10 minutes. It’s much easier to make a performing for people a meaningful “practice” if you’ve “practiced” the technical stuff enough so that it’s not getting in your way and making you crazy on stage.

There are ways to sabotage any kind of practice, of course, as I know only too well. It’s very easy to strip the meaning out of even the most potentially rewarding activities. With apologies to Merriam-Webster, here are some “anti-definitions” of practice:

1) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to reward one’s self for previously having completed every other obligation in one’s life for a 52-week period.

2) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to punish ones’ self for a) sucking so badly at one’s instrument / sport / other skill; b) having an uncontrollable monkey-mind.

3) to pretend to perform or work repeatedly at something while staring into space / cruising the internet.

4) to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become more bad-ass than any other person who does the same activity.

5) to perform or work at repeatedly so that we will be loved and admired by mommy, daddy, teachers, partners, critics, Jesus, Buddha, God, and a variety of anonymous, emotionally-threatening entities created by our minds.

I realized recently that the single biggest impediment to my practice – both musical and spiritual – is a lack of conviction that such activity would “do any good.” When I tried to unpack the “do any good” part, I discovered that it really meant “a lack of conviction that such activity would result in a state of technical perfection / enlightenment.” What rubbish! How silly our minds are. (A therapist might say my, my, did we have some parents with extremely high expectations of their little darling? Time to get over it.)

I’ve decided I need to come up with a definition of practice that will work for me. To that end, I humbly offer a two-part combo-definition of meaningful practice.

1) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully so as to create meaning in one’s life

2) to perform or work at something repeatedly and mindfully without any expectation of results.


Please note: I didn’t say there wouldn’t BE any results – I said don’t expect them. This is a very, very important distinction. If you don’t include part 2 of the definition, then I guarantee that all those anti-definitions are going to creep up and bite you.

A Zen teacher once said that every day we must "show up for the impossible." Perhaps this is the very definition of practice.

The Fat Lady

The following passage is by J.D. Salinger, from Franny and Zooey. It was quoted in a (highly recommended) book called Getting Your Music Past the Fear, authored by the fantastic singer-songwriter-guitarist Don Richmond. You can substitute musician, poet, or anything you want for the word “actor” in the passage, and it will still work.

“Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I told him they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Far Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together if you remember…”

“All right. Let me tell you something now buddy…Are you listening?

Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.

“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theater, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anybody out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.”

Om mani padme hum.

Meep Meep

For those who have been meditating in a cave and may not have heard the news, a few days ago a crazed gunman killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech.

No, this is not going to be a post asking why someone who has been declared mentally ill by a court of law had a “clean record” when he went to buy a Glock. Plenty of other people will be carrying on about that. It’s also not going to be a post about the fact that we go (understandably) into national hysterics when 33 people get killed in an outrageous, random act of violence, but have become resigned, almost immune, to reading every day about at least that many people getting killed in Iraq (170 today, campers), as if that is not also utterly outrageous.

No, my post is about language.

In the last couple of days I’ve observed an interesting American linguistic phenomenon. Occasionally someone, in casual conversation this week, will be talking about some everyday annoyance, perhaps from a co-worker or delinquent student, and say something like “I coulda shot him.” This, which normally would be completely ignored as a normal part of American idiomatic speech, is followed by a brief, awkward silence, and then a sheepish “I guess that’s not a great thing to be saying this week.”

Apparently, though, it’s OK to say it the rest of the time. Hell, I do it too – all the time. Practically all Americans do. It’s one of the characteristics of American speech: mild annoyance expressed with homicidal or suicidal language. Think about it:

“Your father’s gonna shoot ya when he finds out you dented the car.”
“If I find out my roommate drank all my beer I’m gonna kill him.”
“I told my boss he could drop dead, I quit.”
“These kids never listen – I coulda shot ‘em.”
“If you try to take your sister’s cookie you’re gonna pull back a bloody stump.”
“When she said that to him I just coulda died.”
“When that kid gets home I’m gonna strangle him.”
“Another ticket! I swear I’m just gonna shoot myself”
“That exam was murder – there was blood on the floor after that one.”

We use murderous language to express positive emotions as well as mildly negative ones. To wit:

Humor: That joke just slays me.
Mild annoyance: This person’s procrastination just kills me.
Positive reactions: That new song of yours is killer.
Encouragement: Give it your best shot.

We speak glibly, and metaphorically, about beating the crap out of someone, punching someone’s lights out, tearing someone’s head off, hurling ourselves over a cliff. Sports teams don’t just win and lose; they annihilate, obliterate, and destroy their opponents. We laugh hysterically while the Three Stooges hit each other with hammers and the South Park brats Kill Kenny again. An alien using some kind of intergalactic translator would think that our normal activities were something along the lines of the Roadrunner-Wiley Coyote cartoons.

When in history did this start being part of everyday American language? Is it from British English? My observation is that colloquial British English is more interested in colorfully pointing out other people’s stupidity than in metaphorically snuffing them. (Irish too, for that matter – as in “feckineejits.”) You can’t blame it on us Boomers - it certainly began even before my parent’s generation, because “your father’s gonna shoot ya” was certainly one of their collective favorites, along with such top ten hits as “I’ll give you something to cry about.” (That one was usually delivered after a spanking on the butt, before spankings were a criminal offense in certain New England cities. Now, you can’t spank the kid on the butt, but it’s fine to tell him you’re gonna kill him if he touches that goddam stove one more time.) No, us Boomers only adopted the murderous language, and then spiced it up with a whole bunch of newly acceptable ways to use the impolite word for “intercourse” as all the possible parts of speech (as in I’m gonna f---ing kill him.”)

In fact, “I’m gonna kill him” (with or without the “f” word) usually means “If I get up the courage I’m going to apologetically express my unhappiness about his actions.” “Your father’s gonna shoot ya” usually means that “Dad’s going to rant for awhile, and then later, when he’s forgotten about it, he’s going to tell you he’s glad you didn’t get hurt and buy you an ice cream.” You can see how we form some sort of aural callus around the language of extermination.

The weird part is that when someone actually does die, he or she has passed away, gone to the other side, shuttled off this mortal coil, been taken back home to God, etc. We say “the late Mister Jones” rather than “Mister Jones, who is Dead.” (this is why we laugh hysterically when Monty Python’s John Cleese says “This…is a Late Parrot.”) Does anyone else think it’s odd that our cultural refusal to talk about or deal with death exists side by side with an almost constant stream of metaphorical language having to do with dishing death out?

I’m not sure what this says about us as a culture, but it can’t be good. I think Jung would call it the Shadow. Meep Meep.

Spring Equinox post: Memory is A Function of the Soul

It was in the middle of the Foxhunter’s Reel, for some strange reason, in the middle of the usual stress-filled ear-splitting smokefest, that I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye a vision of my childhood home as seen out of my childhood eyes, and the thought occurred to me that it did not feel like a “real” memory, but rather sort of like a “past-life” experience or memory. And then I started to think: wait – what’s the difference?

I mean, honestly, what IS the difference? My childhood is every bit as gone as the body that was inhabited by this particular “mental continuum” in any other time-space-dimension. And yet, “last week” is also gone forever; and yet it somehow seems more present, more real. Why does one seem more distant?

The most obvious answer is the amount of elapsed time, but time is a concept that we humans invented in order to explain things like aging, and the fact that the moon does funny stuff. If something is past, it’s past. The stuff that happened yesterday is just as “gone” as the stuff that happened twenty years ago, and yet we do not perceive it that way. This must have something to do with the way we perceive ourselves, whatever we are defining as “I.” For example, I am laboring under the false impression that I am still the “I” who was “I” last week, whereas I have no illusions about being the “I” I was when I was 5. And who are all these “I” characters anyhow? Who is this “I” that is seeing my parent’s front yard?

Memory seems to be connected equally to the body and the emotions and the mind – to all the “heaps” that constitute this mythical thing we call “I.” If that’s true, then if we dump the body at death, how can we explain all these freaky stories of people “remembering” other lives? I think there’s something about memory that we just don’t understand. I think memory goes beyond brain-waves, sensory input and emotions. One of my music teachers, Barbara Thornton (who had an amazing memory), used to tell me “Memory is a function of the soul, not the mind.” That advice was meant to help me memorize 12 verses of medieval lyrics, but it ended up being, for me, a giant Zen koan. The “Soul,” for me, is not an unchanging entity that flies in and out of various bodies or will levitate up to join Jesus in the Pleiades when the Rapture comes. For me – and this is part of what drew me to Buddhism in the first place – it is very much like what the Tibetan Buddhists call the “mental continuum,” something that is always in flux and changing, but retains some sort of individuality while simultaneously being part of a vast totality; as the Buddhist saying goes, like water being poured into water, or like a wave that is separate from the sea and yet inextricably part of the sea. In that case, if memory is a function of the soul, then memory – true memory – comes from something that leaves an imprint on that continuum. I think that the body and the mind and the emotions are vehicles through which imprints are left on that continuum, at the same time that the body, mind and emotions are the product of that continuum.

In this same sense, never and forever exist at the same time, simultaneously. For example: in the background of my mental picture of my childhood home was the thought “I can never go back there again.” This isn’t strictly true; it hasn’t been blown to smithereens, and I could technically stand there again, even if someone else lives there now; but in every kind of emotional sense, it is absolutely true: I can never go back there. This thought comes from attachment – attachment to emotional connections, junk I can’t let go of, grief over a dead parent, and all kinds of things that leave an imprint on the continuum. At the same time, I can clearly go back there anytime I want -- I will never be a child looking at my “own” yard again, and yet here I am sitting in a smoky bar playing the chords to the Foxhunter’s Reel and I am, in fact, age 51.9, seeing my childhood home in my mind’s eye – seeing what my Tibetan teachers call the “generic image” of my front yard, a phenomenon that is peculiar to my own “mental continuum.” My sister’s “generic image” of my front yard is not the same, for example, as mine; and yet it is equally real.

This is not exactly the same as a kinesthetic memory, and yet it is related. My fingers remember the first piece in Bartok’s second volume of the Mikrokosmos, and they remember how to play the opening lick of Day Tripper on the guitar. In both cases, those pieces triggered some kind of emotion – in the former, a hard-to-explain fascination with the mode, which seemed vaguely evocative and familiar; in the latter, an almost devotional obsession with the Beatles. It’s not like remembering a phone number, or the name of one of my students, or which medieval polyphonic voice-crossing rule is introduced by Guido D’Arezzo; that is a completely different kind of thing (and tougher when the brain is experiencing middle-aged hormonal purgatory.) On the other hand, if it's your mother's phone number, or you've engaged with that student in some sort of discourse, or if the house across the street blows up at the same moment that someone explains Guido’s rules, that memory becomes something different all together. If the smell of a bottle of liquor at a restaurant in Rome triggers the memory of one’s dead grandfather with such force that tears erupt involuntarily, there is something happening here that is much more complex that simply cognizing a smell or a face. If this “mental continuum” ends up in another human body in some future life, will that same bottle of spirits trigger some positive or even slightly emotional feeling?

A common question asked about reincarnation is, “If we have other “lives,” wherever or whenever that might have been, then how come we don’t remember them?” Why, indeed? I know people who can’t even remember their own childhoods. They can barely remember anything about, say, being 10 years old, never mind being two years old. How are they possibly going to remember fighting at the Charge of the Light Brigade? Not likely. Some psychologists might say that this is a result of too much pain; I don’t know the answer. I asked my Tibetan teachers once why some people remember very little and others remember their very early childhoods and even hints of other lives. Their answer was “karma.” Another koan.

“Memory is a function of the soul.” Our bodies and brains and “souls” are not such compartmentalized units as we’d like to think. Parts drop away and parts continue; sometimes parts drop away and then return. Our current bodies and brains can also stop processing the memories that have still been imprinted on the continuum. Are they gone? I doubt it. And I think that’s true even if a brain tumor or Alzheimers dissolved the organic parts of our previous body-mind. Having given me the above “function of the soul” koan, Barbara herself took a serious memory hit when a brain tumor interfered. If memory is a function of the soul, are there “imprints” that will manifest if the mental continuum that was Barbara Thornton encounters a troubadour song in some other life / dimension? I think the answer is yes, but again, I don’t know the answer. If our “continuums” do continue, then we all will experience that feeling of recognition, of having known someone before, even if you know you’ve never crossed paths, or known how to walk straight from Brookline to Old North Church without a map, even if you’ve never been there. I may not enter some future life with the ability to play Day Tripper anymore, but assuming I have opposable thumbs, I’ll bet I can learn it fast – very fast.