Note from Self

So I’m making another futile attempt to clean out the box- and junk-filled room that is ostensibly my office, and I stumble upon a box that contains various memorabilia and a pile of old journals, typed out back in the day when we were too technologically primitive to keep our journals electronically and password-protect them with an obscure word in an ancient Khazak dialect.

Anyhow, I found an entry from ten years ago – yes, TEN years ago, and I thought I’d share them, especially since I still struggle with this stuff, and I figure I’m probably not alone.

So, from July 1998:

…I had an insight during yoga class, which is this: I couldn’t figure out why I would get to a certain point with a posture and then would feel this incredible resistance. Then suddenly I had an insight, which is that the point of resistance was actually a very specific moment at which I encountered “fear” as a physical presence held in the body. It was as if my body refused to go past that particular point. I had encountered a place where some psychological process was being expressed by the body as an irrational sense that I would snap or fall apart or somehow be harmed if I moved further into the posture. I discovered that if I worked with the breath and simply acknowledged the fact that this resistance might be nothing but fear – will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear? – that invariably my body would release that point of resistance and move farther into the posture. Leaning into and “through” the fear, as it were.

Now, thinking further about it, I realize also that my body was simply manifesting on the physical level a particular set of (life-long) psychological patterns. I also encounter incredible psychological resistance when I encounter my own personal “point of fear.” This suggests that the same tactic of breathing and acknowledging that the resistance might be fear, could result in the release of my “inability to go deeper into the posture,” or in this case, my inability to lean into and through the fear.

And, as with the postures, when one reaches that point, one is faced with a choice. One can either say, “I can’t do this,” and bag it, or one can lean into the fear/discomfort and explore whether or not there is in fact a place where one can move just a little bit farther. I’m willing to bet that doing martial arts brings up some of this stuff too, and possibly not as gently.

There are a couple of implications here that are very interesting to contemplate. One: this can be applied to quite a few things, from paying a scary bill to performance anxiety. Two: there is the implication that continuing to work through the physical resistance encountered in the body through yoga postures might actually activate some body-mind connection and help the psyche work through the resistance it encounters to various stressful stimuli.

It seems to me that this could have powerful implications for performers. We have to work through our fear and resistance with every performance (or at least some of us do), and all of us perform with our bodies…this may help with meditation, too. Certainly I have experienced the meditation equivalent of this resistance while sitting there with my mind spinning around like ten tornadoes. Perhaps there is a point of fear there, too, that prevents one from leaning into the complete chaos of one’s mind and breaking through to some kind of stillness.

Interestingly enough, the rest of the journal entry had to do with a particularly cosmic meditation experience that lasted about 5 nanoseconds, and then several paragraphs agonizing over bagging my pursuit of the doctorate (remember, this was 1998.) I finally decided that I needed to “let go of my attachment to the idea of completing the degree in order to complete it.” Interesting, since that is exactly what happened during the intervening decade (I gave up on it completely and now have found myself in the position of having to finish it). It’s also interesting to have found this piece of writing while I am uncomfortably leaning into the last stages of completing the topic proposal. If I finish it and turn it in, of course, I’ll have to face the next step, which is taking terrifying qualifying exams and then actually having to write a document. Will I really be hurt if I move just a tiny bit farther, or am I experiencing fear?

Enfant Terrible

Citizens of the Big Flat Place are constantly asking me if I have any keee-ids. When I say no, they often go the extra mile and say “Whaah?” (that’s “why,” for the uninitiated.) The real answer is way too long, but it has occurred to me that if Coyotebanjo and I had procreated, it’s altogether possible that some deadly mix of his super-articulate intellect and my Walter Mitty-level overactive imagination might have commingled with our mutual sarcastic sense of humor and tendency to befriend talking dogs.



Any more questions?

Suitcase In My Hand

All my life I have loved to travel. As a child I remember day-long “make-believe” games that involved traveling to faraway places (“Bye Mommy – I’m going to England.” “OK honey – be home at 5:15 for dinner.”) I made Pioneer clothes for my Barbie dolls, rigged up Conestoga wagons for them with cardboard boxes, pillowcases, and the old red Flexible Flyer, and hauled them in a Westerly direction. (Be careful what you wish for.)

I loved car trips. I loved trains (still do), and taking the train from Massachusetts to New York City with Mom is a very fond childhood memory. I loved taking the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard.

My immediate family did not share this passion for travel. That was true to a degree that made me wonder if I was left at their doorstep in a reed basket. When I announced at the age of 22 that I was moving to Boston, my father was distraught and said “You might as well be dead!” (Boston was 80 miles away.) Fortunately, we all shared too many other traits to make the reed-basket theory viable. My guess is that wanderlust skipped a generation – but not because both of Dad’s parents somehow managed to get from Italy to New England. One could chalk that up to economic necessity. I think rather of my Mom’s father, Clayt, who in his youth attempted to cross the continent in a Model T -- until it stalled on a railroad track, whereupon Clayt and his friends pulled their sleeping buddy out of the back seat moments before the train sliced the car in half. For years I thought this was one of those highly-exaggerated or apocryphal family stories; however, after my grandmother’s death, I found the newspaper article documenting the event. I also found the obituary of my great-grandfather, Carl, who had lived in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia, among others. Who knew?

When I was 26, a lucrative regular weekend gig gave me my first opportunity to save up a couple thousand dollars. My friends urged me to replace the red AMC Hornet that I was driving around, but instead, I went down to a travel agency and plopped down 400 bucks for a round-trip ticket to London. Never seen it, wanted to see it all my life. I had no particular reason to go, and no one to go with (boyfriend at the time wasn't interested, although three different male guitarist-colleagues offered, on separate occasions, to tag along.) I suspect my parents thought I was nuts; you might have thought I had signed on for a jog across the pond on the Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria. But I went, and I discovered several things: 1) I am afflicted with an inner ear that makes flying or sailing without Dramamine literally impossible (unless you like throwing up for 6 hours.) 2) I was right; traveling was a blast. 3) Stonehenge is one of the coolest things on the planet.

All of this is a long buildup to the topic of this post, which is actually a rant in disguise. Topic of Rant: traveling is swiftly becoming a large pain in the ass instead of an enjoyable pastime. If you have an unlimited supply of money, time, and patience, you can still enjoy yourself; but if any of those are in short supply, well…spending one’s next vacation farting around in one’s own garden at home starts to look pretty good.

I’m talking especially about air travel, because that’s usually what I have to do, since I live in the American equivalent of Vladivostok. Seriously, are there any airplanes on the American continent that either take off or depart on time anymore? What is the deal? Actually, the deal is that the airlines have fewer flights because of economic necessity, so one thunderstorm or one mechanical problem causes a domino effect.

Then there is Security. Everyone complains about Security, but I’ll tell you, the “thing itself” is not the problem—it’s the absolute refusal of most Americans to either believe or observe simple sentence structures such as “no liquids or gels can be in your hand luggage,” or to figure out no-brainers such as “knee-high lace up boots are a bad idea if you have to remove them while 76 people behind you are late for their flight.” What the hell is wrong with people?

Today I got to Itty-Bitty-International an hour before my flight, only to discover that the flight was delayed and I’d have to take a different connection that was three hours later. Not that big a deal; I’d rather do that than try to catch the original connection in 15 minutes (ever try running from one end of DFW to another in 15 minutes? Not.)

So, I thought, this will be relaxed. I got ready to go through security. This means the following:

1) Check roll-y wheel suitcase. I am too short to hurl it into the overhead efficiently.
2) Unzip boots.
3) Stuff all extraneous adornments in satchel.
4) Take laptop out of satchel and hold in left arm with satchel and pocketbook.
5) Remove jacket and hold in right arm.

The above enables one to get to the security table, grab 2 gray boxes, plop the laptop in one, put the satchel on the conveyor belt, and dump all the other crap into the other box. This takes 10 seconds.

I am in line. There are about 20 people in front of me. First of all, there is a well-dressed lunatic talking to himself. Oh, excuse me – it’s not a lunatic; it’s a BlueTooth Guy. (See recent Blue Tooth Rant on Quantzalcoatl's blog). The overall effect of BlueTooth Guys is essentially the same as being in line with a street person wearing a thousand dollar suit. I get to listen to his conversation whether I want to or not. (Does no one realize that even the slight head-tilt used to speak into a cell phone makes the conversation less audible than shouting into the air with a Borg-like device jammed into your ear?) While I am attempting to ignore him, I notice that the line is moving very slowly. There is a very beautiful, well-coiffed and expensively-dressed young woman in line. She has decided that she needs to carry-on 2 bags and her suitcase. She is wearing a long and heavy wool coat with a fur collar, an assortment of scarves, mittens, doo-dads, and jewelry, and wearing boots. The security people, having obviously spied a certain well-known combination of demographic indicators, make her open her suitcase. Sure enough, she has enough “liquids or gels” in there to start an independent beauty salon. She is in the process of carefully putting all of them in the itty-bitty plastic bags that they provide at Itty Bitty International for people with Itty Bitty Brains who try to take their entire Bathroom with them on a 45-minute trip. They finally get her situated, and the person behind her, who has been standing there for 5 minutes watching all this, is told that she has to take her boots off. She had the previous 5 minutes to take her boots off, but was obviously hoping that the Nice Man would let her wear her rust-colored real-leather spike-heeled crumple-top 400-dollar specials through security, since they would take a very long time to pry off (they did.)

Honestly, people, what is the deal? And it’s not just the women – there was guy in his twenties who also ended up with a grey box full of itty-bitty-plastic bags full of toiletries. After this, you can almost understand why security people get all worked up when they see a guitar case – not because it might have an incendiary device, but because the instrument is likely to be stuffed in there with anything from 350 Travel Size Samples to a live puppy. People are nuts.

Then it’s time to get on the plane, which leads to the following queries:

Question: if you have an assigned seat, and if you don’t have a Stradivarius or a box of Blown Glass Figurines to put in the overhead, why do you need to rush the gate? Why are so many people so desperate to get into a Toothpaste Tube with Wings? Especially at Itty Bitty International, which is mostly limited to Itty Bitty Jets that are basically flying MRI machines. Once on the plane, there’s inevitably someone who farts around in the aisle and holds up 45 people behind him, while he struggles to get his too-big suitcase into the overhead, rummages for the seat-belt, searches the overhead for a pillow, puts his book in the seat pocket, starts to sit down, decides it’s too hot, gets up and takes his coat off, balls up the coat and tries to fit it into the 3 cubic inch space next to his suitcase, and in general does the human equivalent of that thing cats and dogs do when they circle around 25 times before lying down.

Question: This is for people who think that the airplane seat is a giant leather recliner, and that they are the only people on the plane. Do you HAVE to push your seat back so far that my 6 foot 5 inch husband gets his kneecaps dislocated? Ever consider LOOKING behind you to see if you might be slamming someone's laptop shut? (This happened to me today.) Does it cross your mind that shoving your seat back might eject the other person's dinner off their tray table and into their lap? Airlines should simply stop making seats that recline - it's one of the main causes of Air Travel Rage. I am relatively mild-mannered, and I have been tempted to push back as hard as I can (almost did that today during the Laptop Incident.)

Next item: survival tricks.

1) Earplugs. Never fly without them. Never EVER forget them on a flight longer than 4 hours. They are the best defense in the world against screaming babies, shouting cell-phone users, flight attendants who don’t know how to adjust microphone volume, seat partners who keep their iPods so loud that you can hear all the lyrics yourself, people who while away the time playing cards loudly with each other, and big genial Texans with barky laughs who spent the entire flight “visitin.’”

2) Potty time. Go to the bathroom before you get on the plane, and don’t drink a lot during the flight, unless you enjoy relieving yourself in a wildly vibrating gym locker. One of the natural laws of the universe is that turbulence will occur when YOU are on the airplane toilet - doesn't matter who you are or which plane you are on. This phenomenon is caused by a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.

If you’d like to put a little extra shine on these experiences, try taking some Dramamine. Everything is better in slow motion. Also, Dramamine combined with the judicious use of earplugs produces some Very Fine Psychedelic dreams, from which you generally wake with your head hanging at a 45 degree angle and your mouth open.

As I write this, I have just found out that my flight has been delayed two MORE hours. Could be worse – I could have been on the airplane sitting on the runway when this was announced.

Rant Complete. In the interest of leaving my dear readers on a positive note, I would offer the following “good things about traveling:”

1. That fact that the airport I use is an 11-minute drive from my place of work. This is a large contrast from the 65 minute drive I used to have.

2. The new B terminal at DFW. OK, so T-Mobile soaks you for wireless access: there are decent chairs, decent places to eat, an info desk, and Starbucks. (Starbucks are very useful for counteracting the Dramamine effect described above.)

3. Speaking of which: Dramamine. My paternal grandmother, from whom my father and I inherited the inner ear structure, told me that she hung over the side of the boat during the entire trip from Italy to America. I can’t even imagine this misery. I barfed from Boston to Indy once on a plane, and from Portsmouth to Halifax once on a boat, and I’m done with that. Better living through Chemistry.

4. The fact that it takes two hours to cover a distance that required 3 months and one of the aforementioned Conestoga wagons a mere 150 years ago. Above all else, we lose sight of this. No matter how much whining we do about the planes and security and the obnoxious passengers blah blah blah, we’re still not crammed together jouncing around below decks for 4 months. This reminds me of the recent cartoon TV commercial in which a very old man turns an electric light on and off and says something like “Why aren’t you all excited about this? When I saw this at the World’s Fair in 1904, I almost crapped ma' pants.”

Amen. Time to toodle over to the A Terminal.

Devaluations

Right around this time in each semester, most professors encounter one of the great joys of teaching: they receive the results of last semester’s Student Evaluations.

I have spent many hours with my colleagues talking about these documents, which are viewed by a great many professors as one of the great curses of our educational system. In theory, of course, they’re not supposed to be a curse. They’re supposed to help us assess and improve our own teaching ability, and provide students with a vehicle for honest and anonymous feedback that is a matter of public record — all of which, I think, is extremely important. In practice, however, everyone is scared to death that the information gathered on the evaluations is going to be used against them in some yet-to-be-determined way.

And does that happen? Oh, yes, it does. In some academic cultures, if there is a candidate for tenure who has rubbed someone the wrong way, or has unpopular political views, it’s extremely convenient to discover that he or she has some negative student evaluations. But let’s be honest: does this usually happen? Probably not, unless you have a department full of vipers, in which case you might seriously improve you quality of life by getting another job before you’re up for tenure (easier said than done, I know.)

There are, however, other issues connected with student evaluations that have nothing to do with ornery colleagues. They have everything to do with our own peace of mind as instructors. When in a rational, calm mood, or when trying to encourage a colleague who took a hit from one of these things, I have often expressed the opinion that student evaluations should be read as a “big picture.” If a hundred-fifty students think you’re great, and one thinks that you’re a total loser, you don’t probably need to be too worried about the one disgruntled camper. And, I believe that – I really do, when I’m Sittin’ in My Happy Place.

The problem is, if you love your students, you work your ass off more than 40 hours a week trying to stay on top of your field, you try to write interesting courses, and you meet with what seems like a zillion students a week, it feels like a kick in the teeth to read that one of your courses was “The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” (my favorite from the most recent batch.)

This does not hurt because I am worried about a tenure committee. I assume, because I am an optimist, that my committee will have already waded through the 149 positive comments before they got to this beaut. And, because I’m an optimist, I also believe that most people on most tenure committees, having gone through the process themselves, are completely aware that these anomalies are just that – anomalies. I also think that most people on tenure committees realize that there is a certain type of student for whom filling out a teacher evaluation form is akin to an opportunity to kick the cat because s/he’s had a lousy day. These students do not write constructive criticism. They do not write things like “I felt that the exams were too extensive to finish adequately in a 50-minute period.” Nor do they write funny comments that you can easily blow off, like “Less quizzes-more hot chicks.” (Yes, that was a real one.) No; they say things like “Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever” or “I hated this professor and I’m going to tell everyone I know not to take a class from him,” without giving one single reason why. (A friend of mine once got that one.) These students are not concerned about the consequences of their comments; in fact, they may have enough spite in them to hope that there are consequences. They are probably also oblivious to the possibility that a non-tenured professor might go through hell with a tenure committee because that student had a bad day and vented on a piece of paper.

Another favorite activity of this particular kind of student is to lash out via the numerical portion of an evaluation form. Given a set of statements and asked to rate the teacher in each area on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, they skew the numbers by going right down the page and entering straight “ones” all the way down, in most cases without even reading the statements. In a small class, this effectively decimates the professor’s final evaluative point average, but gives the professor absolutely no useful information except “I don’t like you” or “I hate chemistry.”

So why does it hurt? Why even think about a statement like that for more than the .5 seconds it takes to read it? If 32 people tell me I’m boring, I need to take a look at that; but if one person tells me I’m boring and 31 tell me I’m great, why not get a grip and be rational about it? Why is it the case that so many of us simply can NOT put these horrific little poison-pen-wielding characters out of our minds? I know a huge number of my colleagues who have the same experience – even if they know, rationally and logically, that it’s probably not going to cause The End Of Their Career, they still lie there at night wondering why this kid thought that their course, which they spent so much time on and thought so hard about, was a total waste of time. Or why a course that had a carefully-delineated calendar, specific guidelines for every assignment, clear grading criteria, and a logical sequence of lectures was “unorganized.” Or why they thought the TA was “better than the teacher.” Or why person X thinks that Professor Y is “mean,” or that Professor Z treats some students differently than others, when Professor Z knocks himself out to treat everyone the same. (I’m not making this up; these are things that colleagues at various schools have shared with me.)

I think there are several reasons. OK, they’re not necessarily rational; but if we think about the reasons, maybe it will help. Maybe it won’t, and we’ll wake up at 4 am anyhow. I offer the following:

1) It just plain hurts to have mean-spirited comments aimed at you, whether you should pay attention to them or not. This is human nature.

2) Most of us hear and remember criticisms much more acutely than praise or compliments. I don’t know if it’s human nature or if it’s our culture; but it’s a very real phenomenon. This is true even if the criticism is mean-spirited, useless, unconstructive, or just plain untrue. It starts up the inner sound file: you’re a fake, you’re not really very good, you’re inept, blah blah blah. My Buddhist teachers would tell us that this is just one more way for the ego to focus on itself, and of course it is. However, I often wonder why the ego gets so much more stuck on the bad stuff, and doesn’t luxuriate in the other umpteen good comments. (Actually, my Tibetan teachers were mystified by that as well – they told us many times that they had a hard time understanding the culture of self-loathing that seems to be rampant in the west.) My guess is that we are socialized to play down compliments—after all, that would be conceited—and to focus instead on the Puritanical pastime of correcting our numerous and certainly unforgivable faults, which will make us very ‘umble and get us into Hebben much faster.

3) Speaking of Hebben, I think that academia now suffers from a kind of low-grade, pervasive anxiety about disgruntled students, as we experience a rising number of incidents in which some undiagnosed sociopath goes on a shooting spree because he didn’t get into law school. Handing out a deserved F used to be an ethical imperative; but I would be interested to know how many other professors now experience a fleeting vision of a nut with a semi-automatic when they use the F key, or when they read a hateful, mean-spirited evaluation. I suspect that many of us do, but won’t admit it because it somehow feels “cowardly.”

4) Some of us, even when there is an isolated bad evaluation, actually spend time wondering what this person experienced that was different from the majority of the others, and WHY they experienced it. It’s extremely possible that it had nothing to do with us, but there is always the possibility that we didn’t pick up some message, especially from a first-year student who may not know yet how to effectively tell a professor “I’m having a real problem here.” The fact that the evaluations are anonymous (and should be) means that we cannot solve this problem, because we can’t address the student, and in a big class we can’t even begin to guess who it was.


Obviously, I’m not offering a band-aid or a solution, or offering a foolproof way to remain unaffected, because I don’t have one (other than my Buddhist teachers’ suggestion to quit focusing on one’s self all the time.) All you can really do is read the comments, assess whether or not you need to address the issues raised by the negative ones, and then let it go and just continue to do the best you can.

Humor also helps. I suppose it is possible to find some humor in The Biggest and most Boring Waste of My Life Ever. One can find it in other examples too: like the person who gave me a very low number in the category of “sticking too strongly to the textbook.” Newsflash, Dude: There was no textbook for that particular class. Another one wrote “Too many student questions.” Well, I guess we’ll have to do away with THAT age-old mode of student-teacher discourse, and Socrates can go to hell. Another one didn’t like the “method in which the information was presented” in a certain class; that was a tough one, since I was a sabbatical “Sub” for Professor X, and was using Professor X’s format, which has historically been very popular. Ironically, another student commented that the class was MUCH better on the couple of days when Professor X came in and taught it (ouchies.). So, apparently Professor X’s method of presenting information is a problem, but the class was much better when Professor X taught it. There’s humor in there somewhere.

Having said all this, my last comment goes out to the students of mine who might be reading this (and I know that some of you do):

I know and honor the fact that most of you use the evaluation forms constructively. I read them all, I think about them all, and I care about them all. And the fact that some people make comments that are hurtful, unthoughtful or wacko does not, and will never, cause me to ignore all the others. Keep saying what’s on your mind—it’s up to us as professors to be able to use your feedback wisely, to get a grip, and to learn how to discern thoughtful criticism from a comment that combines Family Guy Peter Griffin’s logic with Stewie’s delivery.

Now, where are those chocolate cookies? I need one…

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.

Yule

Scél lem dúib dordaid dam

snigid gaim rofáith sam

Gáeth ard úar ísel grían

geir a rrith ruirthech rían.

Rorúad rath rocleth cruth

Rogab gnáth giugrann guth

rogab úacht etti én

aigre ré é mo scél.

I have a tale for you: a stag bells;

winter pours, summer has gone.

The wind is high, cold; the sun is low;

its course is short, the sea is strong running.

The bracken is very red; its shape has been hidden.

The cry of the barnacle goose has become usual.

Cold has taken the wings of birds.

Season of ice crystals; this is my tale.

From the Irish Liber Hymnorum (11th century)
Translation: Jeffrey Huntsman

By Grabthar's Hammer...

...by the sons of Worvan...we shall be avenged.

You have 7 days.

Look at your calendar.

Look at next Tuesday.

Find a slot somewhere in there - anywhere.

Write down this word:

VOTE.

Trobasattvas

For someone who gives a lot of lip service to the fact that music can be a strong part of a person’s spiritual path, I certainly suffer from a lot of doubt and despair on the same subject. Sometimes I wonder: even if I myself love the music I choose to play, and even though I am moved by it, does it do anyone a lick of good to hear seven verses of a troubadour song in a foreign language? Am I a hypocrite to sing sacred music from a religious tradition I don’t buy, even if I’m moved by the music and the lyrics? Does playing 2 hours of diddly-jigs for a mostly-drunken audience warrant the stern Zen admonition “do not waste your life?”

Once, when one of these grey doubt-funks descended on me, I asked one of my Buddhist teachers if being a musician was right livelihood. The short version of his answer is this: if it’s done with the intention of relieving the suffering of sentient beings, then it’s right livelihood. “Music brings happiness to other beings,” he said, “So it’s good.” Alright, I thought. If the drunks are experiencing a couple of hours of relief from their suffering, then I guess I’m not wasting anything (though it’s unclear whether Turlough O’ Carolan or John Barleycorn will get the merit for that one.)

I got two more answers this week. The first one came when my Mom told me that one of our medieval CDs, “Saint Francis and the Minstrels of God,” had been a great comfort to the dying mother of one of her friends. The story moved me very much – although I lay the merit at the feet of St Francis, who had been either the author of, or the inspiration for, all the music and lyrics on the recording, and we just sort of channeled it.

Then, in the latest issue of Shambala Sun I saw my question asked again, only about poetry, not music; and it was asked by the late Allen Ginsberg. This was transcribed from a talk once given by Ginsberg.

If civilization’s not going to be around that long, certainly not my books or records, what’s the use of poetry? What function has poetry got if the world is going to hell in a handbasket? Gehlek Rinpoche’s answer was really great and clear; the relief of suffering, the relief of mass human suffering…

That instruction or direction is a good compass for any vocation, but it’s particularly applicable to the rudderless poet who is shifting from preservation of his own ego or projection of immortality or the romance of being a poet, to an activity that functions well for other people...

Ginsberg then articulates the connection between meditation and its application to poetics, and continues:

… if you can show your mind, it reminds people that they have got a mind. If you can catch yourself thinking, it reminds people they can catch themselves thinking. If you have a vivid moment that’s more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments.

By showing your mind as a mirror, you can make a mirror for other people to recognize their own minds and see familiarity and not feel that their minds are unworthy of affection or appreciation. Basically, poetics is appreciation of consciousness, appreciation of our own consciousness.”

OK – I get it. Appreciation of our own consciousness, and I would add, the expansion of our own consciousness to include something bigger than Itself. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Italian laude spirituali,Qawwali music, Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, or truly great, heart-stopping rock and roll. I know what music has done for me; and perhaps that’s the answer to my question. I’m no different than anyone else, and if music has jolted me into transcendent states of consciousness, or reminded me that I’m more than my tiny little mind, or relieved my suffering for 5 minutes, well…amen, brother, blessed be, namaste.

Gogs and Magogs

Doesn't the world have enough trouble and strife without having the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the 21st century take a poke at Islam by quoting a 14th-century emperor?

From the Associated Press:

“Benedict quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

“The Emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the Pope said. “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

OK - so there are passages in the Qu'ran that have to do with spreading the faith by the sword. Are there no such passages in the Bible? Does God not smite the bejeepers out of the enemies of the Israelites about a jillion times? Hey, let's try the opening of the Book of Judges: "After the death of Joshua, the Iraelites inquired of the Lord which tribe should attack the Canaanites first. The Lord answered, 'Judah shall attack. I hereby deliver the country into his power.'" I don't hear the Pope reading that tidbit (yet.) And how about Christians? I sat through plenty of Scripture readings about smiting and banishing and exterminating, and we won't even talk about the Book of Revelations, and its plagues, oceans of blood, and an eternity of sulphur for everyone except The Faithful (whoever that is).

Sure, there are Muslim extremists who take the passage from the Qu'ran literally. Have you ever met any non-Muslim extremists? Have you looked at beautiful downtown Beirut lately? D'ya think there have been any Christian extremists who think maybe they should spread the Christian faith with the sword? Ever heard of a guy named Richard the Lionhearted? Ever heard of Ferdinand and Isabella? Oliver freaking Cromwell? I could go on...

I have about the most aggressively Roman Catholic Italian surname on the planet. Guess what? The branch of ancestors who took that surname were formerly-Jewish conversos. Why did they become conversos? Because someone came to the door, sang a few Cantigas and sold them a Vulgate Bible? NO. They converted because a bunch of Renaissance wingnuts were "spreading their faith with their swords." Did it work? I don't know -- four hundred years and many generations later, my Italian grandfather still liked to kvetch about the Catholic Church, and told me one day that most religion was "all-a bullsheet." Spreading religion with the sword ultimately doesn't work, and I would venture to guess that the vast majority of Muslims on this earth believe that too.

One more thing: Did anyone notice that the Pope never mentioned the Persian Scholar's answer to Manuel Paleologos? Is anyone else wondering what it was??

Thought for the Day.



"The main awakening of the human spirit is compassion. The main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion."

--- Joseph Campbell

Tonglen O'Reillys

breathe in samsara like dark smoke

(no imagination required)

breathe out mixolydian mode

may all beings have happiness

breathe in requests for danny boy

breathe out mysterious communion,

wrung from metal, wood and magic

breathe in all this week’s delusions

breathe out ways to be together

no self no other no alone

Oblivious to tradition

something keeps making them come here

mindstreams flow from no beginning

a la recherche du jigs perdu

I will dedicate the merit

of all these lowered seventh chords

To the benefit of all beings

P.S. when I was editing this, I was working on the line that contains “danny boy”
and someone started whistling it on the TV in the other room

Quiet Mind

Quoted from the book "Radical Acceptance," by Tara Brach:




"In a classic Zen story, the disciple Hui K'e asks his master, Bodhidharma, "Please help me to quiet my mind."
Bodhidharma responds by saying "Bring me your mind so that I can quiet it."
After a long moment of silence, Hui K'e says, "But I can't find my mind."
"There," Bodhidharma replies with a smile, "I have now quieted your mind."

Riding the Magic Carpet - reflections on teaching music

Have you ever been in a place that was actually silent?

Probably not, if you were born anytime in the last century. The closest I’ve ever come to a place that was actually silent was on the coast of Cape Breton. A few places in northwestern Ireland came close.

In the prehistoric silence, the movement of vibrating sound waves through time would have an impact that we, with our air-handling systems, omnipresent traffic noise, and industrial yammering, cannot even comprehend. The mathematical relationship of two tones an octave or a fifth apart would shimmer in a way that was practically visible.

So it’s not really a surprise that music was held in such high regard, or that it seemed to be a good vehicle for the expression of feelings of sacredness or numinosity. It’s not surprising that music became the magic carpet on which memory sat, while sailing through hundreds of stanzas of epics, poems, lessons, genealogies, tribal histories.

But at some point in human history, the human ego became tangled up in the making of music, and thus began a sad trajectory:

Arbitrary judgment about various aspects of a performance became more important than the act of creativity;

the performer became more important than the performance;

the composer became more important than the performer;

and both the composer and the performer and the opinions of those who claimed to know something about “music” became more important than the music that was being created.

Thus did music become something to be adjudicated, commodified, argued about, fought over, and used to manipulate. As it was commodified, it became omnipresent. In the end, in the western world at least, this “movement of vibrating sound waves through time” became simultaneously devalued and turned it into a competitive sport that causes young kids to vomit with anxiety before a performance. It has become all about the musicians, who are alternately worshipped and treated with contempt, depending on the circumstance (or the skill of the publicist.)

I once had the privilege of spending a series of Saturday mornings with a wise and kind Tibetan monk who offered to teach a group of American students about Tibetan sacred chant. We learned by the “oral tradtion” method – he would sing the chant and we would sing it back to him. We Americans made fairly heavy going of it, trying to write it all down and struggling with ornaments that contained quartertones and melodic intricacies that were not part of our own musical experience. He was infinitely patient.

There were two or three of us who were professional musicians, and he was aware of this. At one point, as he was listening to each of us, he told me that I was very close to being right, but I had to add in the ornaments. I told him I felt quite shy about putting in the ornaments. He looked puzzled. “Shy?” he said. “Why?” I said, “Because I’m afraid I will get them wrong.” He threw back his head and laughed merrily, which puzzled me greatly. Then he leaned forward slightly, smiled, and shook his head. He looked directly at me, and in a quiet voice, with the kindest tone possible, he said “This not shy. This Big Ego.”

(zzzzing! goes Manjushri's sword.)

This was the single most effective teaching I have ever had regarding performance anxiety. It was also a teaching that unfolds further, like the petals of a lotus, as the years go by; one of the most profound teachings I have ever had on music in general.

We have taken “the movement of vibrating sound waves through time,” with their mathematical magic and their ineffable effect on the mind and the emotions, and we have somehow made it All About Us. Believe me, I am including myself in this – I’m no enlightened being. We use rehearsals to have tantrums and turf wars. We criticize other musicians because they don’t play like Us. We dismiss the hard work of other performers because they don’t happen to share Our Very Important Opinion of how music should sound, or whether it’s “authentic” or some other judgmental hogwash. We somehow convey to 10-year-olds that they are less than perfect human beings if they don’t play a piece of music like Yo-Yo Ma. We glorify the virtuoso and the famous over the sound of an old woman chanting her prayers.

We are a long, long way from the music of the spheres.

What would happen if we found a way to re-animate that “magic carpet?” What if we could somehow preserve the feeling that a 6-year old has when they first discover the big-wide-heart feeling that comes from making sounds with a musical instrument? What if we could somehow let music come through us like a transparent tube, or let the stories sing themselves using our mouths?

There are still performers who can do this - who can let go of Themselves and become living embodiments of the music, the story, or the song.

(Ben Bagby riding the Magic Carpet through the epic of Beowulf)

Some of them, including the bard pictured above, can also teach that way, and those of us who have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end are forever changed by it. Otherwise, if we can’t get outside our Selves, then our students won’t be able to get outside themSelves either. It’s our only hope. It’s what the late Zen master Katagiri Roshi meant when he said that when you teach, you must “take away the flag of ego.” Not the student’s ego – Yours. Mine.