Remember, Remember the Whole of November: Reflections at the Winter Solstice

There’s a humorous saying to the effect that “Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.” Obviously there was a wrinkle in the space-time continuum in the past month. Sometimes the stars just line up in some unfathomable way – or, to use some Tibetan Buddhist terminology, a whole bunch of “causes and conditions” converge in such a way that a whole bunch of your karma “ripens” at the same time. This gets an extra electrical charge when that convergence also includes “group” karma as well.

These past few months have been so intense, and I have been so confounded and overstimulated with simultaneous overwork, stress, uncertainty, dread, and anticipation, that I could scarcely write a word. Some of it is big, global stuff; some of it is big personal stuff, and some of it is small personal stuff but nevertheless meaningful for one reason or another. A lot of it has to do with the ‘wrapping up” of things, or of efforts coming to fruition, or of getting to accomplish or finish things that were for some reason hindered by various “ob-stackels.” Woven throughout all of it has been a higher-than-normal appearance of synchronicity, “coincidences,” and stuff that’s just plain weird.

Qualifying Exam #1
After a long protracted process of trying to “revalidate” the various components of the doctoral degree that I abandoned 10 years ago, and which I have to complete in order to keep my job, I finally reached the watershed of the dreaded Written Qualifying Exam. I jumped through that flaming hoop in September.

It was 8 hours long and I shook through most of it. I wrote 15 pages of single-spaced type, some of which was very good and some not as good as I wanted it to be. When it was over, I was emotionally and mentally exhausted. I had no clue if I had passed, because I had no clue what would be “good enough.” On the way out to the rental car, I thought with surprise that I might actually hurl my lunch right there in the parking lot of Behemoth School of Music. Mercifully I did not. However, within 5 minutes of driving away from the University realized that I really shouldn’t be driving, because my brain was no longer functioning properly; and some kind of emotional volcano was bubbling. I drove to the backstreets and tooled around aimlessly, until I found myself driving by the house where my now-deceased medieval music teacher and mentor had lived. I pulled the car over to the side of the road just in time to be overcome with paroxysms of sobbing.

Eventually I got over it, and the volcano of pent-up frustration, dread and anxiety gave way to a feeling that is difficult to describe – I don’t think “relief” is quite accurate.

”It Would Be Good if You Could Come”

The night after my written qualifying exam, my Tibetan monk teachers very kindly made a delicious, fantastic meal in celebration of the completion of the exam. When we were sitting around visiting afterwards, they told me that there was a particular teaching being offered in November. This teaching had to do with an important Vajrayana practice that I had been given (several times). When you are given the empowerment for these particular sorts of practices, you are supposed to also take the commentaries, or teachings, on the practices as well. I had not been able to do this, because they had last been offered the very month after I left Bloomington (8 years before –they aren’t offered very often.) I was saddened to have to tell them that I didn’t see how I could possibly come for the teachings – I had already had to take a week away from work to come and complete the written qualifying exam and I would probably have to come back to do the orals at some point. On top of that, the teachings coincided with an important conference at which I was supposed to serve on a panel – not that it was mandatory for me to do that, but I had committed to it, and I needed to do those things for the old tenure resume. The monks seemed disappointed, and one of them said “Well…it would be good if you could come.”

About two weeks later I found out that I had passed the written qualifying exam with flying colors. It turned out that the policy at Behemoth School of Music had changed, and that grad students were now encouraged to do their orals as soon as possible. By now it was October. Could I come in October? No way. I sent e-mail messages to try and find out when I would be able to get all the members of my committee in the same room. The one day they could all the in the same room was during the second week of November, shortly after the conference I had to attend. I figured I would go straight from the conference to Behemoth Music School.

In the meantime, it transpired that the conference session for which I was supposed to be a panel member had been changed to one day earlier. This left exactly three days between my conference obligations and my oral exam.

And what do you suppose were the three days of the teaching I had been requested to take?

The same day that all this was coming together, I was reading one of the Buddhist magazines – Shambala Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, I can’t remember which one—and in one article the writer was talking about how difficult it is, sometimes, to negotiate the cultural and linguistic east-meets-west communication differences between eastern teachers and their western students. The example that this person gave was something to the effect of “For example, when a Tibetan teacher tells a western student ‘It would be good if…’ they would do something, it may sound like a suggestion, but it’s as close to a command as they will ever give.”

Oh….I get it.

The Election

As October progressed, the whole world seemed to be going crazy. The economy was tanking. The emotions were running incredibly high on both sides. I am a liberal living in a very conservative place, so I found this to be emotionally difficult; I tried not to think about it too much, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place where I felt constrained to put an election sign on my lawn because I was fearful about damage to my property (probably wouldn’t have happened, but it didn’t feel safe.) As the election neared, I became more and more aware of how worked up I was about it. The day before, I was reading something on the Internet and I became quite emotional; it was then that I realized that I was really wound up, and that many other people were as well. The vibe of the whole country felt like a stretched rubber band.

When election night came, America elected its first African-American president. I stayed up until the wee hours watching the incredible videos of reaction around the country and around the world. The whole thing was a very emotional experience for me as it was for many other people in the country. I plan to blog more about this around the inauguration.

The Conference and The Guitar

The very next day after the election, I left to go to the conference which was in Nashville this year. I love this particular conference, and I always look forward to it every year. It’s a chance to see a lot of my old graduate school friends who now are scattered to the four corners of the earth, but converge on this conference once a year. I like the scholarly discourse; I like being around people who are interested in the same academic disciplines; I like the comraderie, and I like traveling, so it’s usually win-win for me. I also was looking forward to going back to Nashville, which I had only visited one time before and had a wonderful time.

However, it was a little bit tainted this time by the specter of the oral qualifying exam that was coming up. I brought study stuff with me, and every extra moment I had I was either studying it or feeling guilty because I wasn’t studying it. I was also nervous about the fact that I was going to have to leave the conference early and drive 4 and a half hours up to the University, and about the fact that I still was not completely happy with the 10-minute presentation I was supposed to make for this panel.

That’s when the completely unexpected event of The Guitar happened.

There’s a place in Nashville called Gruhn Guitars (www.gruhn.com). It was very close to our hotel, and Coyotebanjo and I walked down there after breakfast the first day of the conference.

Now, he will tell you that for most of our lives together, I have not been the one who insists on going into the Large Music Stores. Drooling over instruments I can’t have is not my idea of fun. But for some reason, I really wanted to go in there – I mean, it’s a very famous place, but it was more than that.

Now, in order to explain what happened next, I have to go back about 25 or 30 years. When I was working at Guitar Workshop many years ago, in my youth, a friend of a friend had a small Gibson acoustic guitar that I was just crazy about. I probably saw it and played it about 3 times, but that was it – I knew that if I ever was to buy a small-sized guitar solely for the purpose of playing acoustic finger-style stuff, that was the one I wanted. Oh, I love my big Guild D-50; the sound of it is simply unbelievable, and it’s been my musical companion since 1980; but I often wished for a small ¾ or triple-0 sized finger-picking guitar that my little fingers could navigate more easily, and that I could play without my elbow sticking up in the air at a 45 degree angle.

I had never run into that particular little Gibson model again. I didn’t even really know what it was – I was never much of a gearhead so I don’t memorize model names and serial numbers very well. Suffice it to say that while Coyote was sampling the banjos and I was wandering aimlessly through Gruhns, what do you suppose I saw hanging from a rack? Yes, there was IT. “It” turned out to be an early fifties Gibson ¾ LG2 model guitar, sometimes called an LG-00. I found out from Calvin at Gruhn that it’s the model they used to call the “Arlo” guitar, because it was the model Gibson that Woody Guthrie had bought his son Arlo Guthrie when Arlo learned to play.

It was a little beat up, but it sounded great, and it felt even better. So easy to play! Such a great size! Gibson may have originally made them to be “little kid” guitars, but they ain’t toys.

Coyotebanjo tells people that when I asked him if we could buy it, I had tears in my eyes. I don’t remember having tears in my eyes, but I did have an emotional reaction to the instrument. That may be hard for non-musicians to understand, but it just happens sometimes – one jumps off the wall at you and says “I belong to you.” That was the case here. Calvin told us that they’d only had about two of them come through the shop since the 1980’s. They knew nothing about this particular instrument – only that they had bought it from someone from Memphis who’d walked in with it. We bought it, of course.

Having spent the morning having my surreal Guitar experience, I stayed up until 2:30 am putting the last touches on the 10-minute paper I was supposed to give at the next day. When the time came for the panel, I discovered (one minute before I was about to give the paper), that the stand-in chair of the panel—an esteemed early music colleague whom I very much admire and respect--had decided instead to ask all the panelists, with no notice, to respond to a question instead of giving the presentations they had prepared. I think I did fine, and didn’t let on that I was at all ruffled; but I absolutely could not believe that I had spent all that time preparing a presentation that I was then not going to be allowed to give. I was intensely frustrated, but it was not a situation in which I could express that frustration appropriately and still maintain a professional demeanor, so I did not let on.

The Teachings—The Exam

The next day, I left the conference early to drive 4.5 hours up to my alma mater. It was absolutely freezing there and I was not adequately prepared for the weather; but I was blessed by the hospitality of a number of good friends there.

There is not much to say in the Blogosphere about the teachings that I received at the monastery over the next three days. Suffice it to say that they were beautiful and intense, and did indeed help me with the practice I had learned. I still feel inadequate to the task and don’t know quite how to incorporate it all into my daily life, but that is a subject for another blogpost (maybe). I am grateful and glad that I could attend.

On Tuesday afternoon I took the doctoral orals. I feel quite blessed; my committee asked me very good questions which were completely relevant to the areas and pieces I had been asked to study. I was able to expound at length. I did not do so well with my minor field; there was a question relating to the readings that I had done for a course many years ago, and my brain did a complete deer-in-the-headlights freakout. Mercifully, that didn’t deep-six the whole exam. (In the days following the exam, of course, I thought of several excellent responses to the question; typical.)

I had the same experience afterwards of actually not feeling the huge sense of relief that everyone told me I would feel. Perhaps it hasn’t sunk in, even a month later, that I will never have to take another doctoral qualifying exam; but with a large document and possibly another recital looming, it feels far, far, far from done.

The next morning I had to leave at 4 am to drive the 4.5 hours back to Nashville to catch my plane back to the Big Flat Place. The drive back to Nashville was one of the scariest drives of my life, due to my level of exhaustion; I had to pull off the road at one point, close my eyes for 10 minutes, drink McDonald’s coffee and eat some appalling fast food in order to get myself through it.

The Return

Coming back was no relief. This has been an incredibly emotional and high-stress semester for many of my students, for a variety of reasons (economy tanking, emotional election, and an unusual semester calendar that left many of them with everything due at the same time. Many of my students were frazzled; some of them were stressed to a point that seriously worried me. Others were whipped up at the prospect of a potential football championship, in a state where Football is second only to the Southern Baptist Convention as a contender for official state religion (who would Jesus pass to?)

Finally, the day before Thanksgiving, we fled to Taos Mountain, that great mound of radiant something-or-other energy, to spend Thanksgiving with our dear friends there.

It was a great and deeply-needed respite.
I brought the guitar to show my friends. Arlo Guthrie was on the radio.
Synchronicity is everywhere, if you look for it. Sometimes you don’t have to look very hard.

Winter Solstice Coming On

So now the Winter Solstice is coming. It’s been freezing cold here. The Winter Solstice is the time in the Wheel of the Year when one thinks a lot about where one has been and where one is going.

This year, taking the time to do that feels important. I’m thinking about all of these things that have happened, and I’m struck by how many of them are resolutions of one sort or another. The degree that never got finished…the chance to have the spiritual teaching that was missed because of moving away…finding the mysterious elusive guitar…even the African-American President feels like some kind of resolution. They don’t feel like endings, necessarily; it doesn’t make me feel as though I might get hit by a bus. It’s more like an awareness of what needs to be wrapped up in order to move on, and what doors need to be opened in order to move forward.

I would be remiss in completing my theme here if I didn’t also mention that there is some physical synchronicity that’s happening in all this. Without trespassing over the “too much information” boundary, let’s just say that I am now three years past fifty, and my body is going through the hormonal psilocybin trip that sometimes accompanies the passage into the “waning moon” phase you see in all that Triple-Goddess symbolism. It’s hell sometimes; one week your body’s 53 and sweating buckets and the next week it thinks it’s 30 and has cramps. One day you’re happy as a clam and the next day you have to remove yourself to another room because you think you might burst into tears. The anxiety can be so intense you feel as if you’re going to die any minute for no good reason. If you are a middle-aged woman you know what I’m talking about. My doctor thought there was something wrong, which got me extremely freaked out; she sent me to a specialist, who assured me that what was happening to me is “a textbook case” of this particular transition. In the meantime, it brings up all kinds of emotional stuff – talk about things that you did and didn’t do! But there it is: another door, and you have to pass through in order to move forward—and the wheel is going to turn, as it does every year, and every eon.

Long time no blog

Yes, I haven't blogged for a long time. The last 22 days have been pretty overwhelming, and included a historic election, a very intense teaching semester; an academic conference I look forward to every year; the serendipitous finding of a vintage guitar identical to one I once fell in love with about 25 years ago when I couldn't afford it; a visit to my spiritual teachers; the last qualifying exam of a doctorate that was started in 1991, abandoned in 1997, and resumed in 2006; two plane trips, 2 5-hour drives, and any number of other odd & not-odd personal things. I promise I will write some thoughts here when the dust settles. In the meantime, a little silly fun:

[Dharmonia's] Dewey Decimal Section:

801 Philosophy & theory

{Dhamonia's real name] = 147521318914993908 = 147+521+318+914+993+908 = 3801


Class:
800 Literature


Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.



What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Those preachy patriots. . .

All right, I know, I'm trying to practice what I was preaching in my previous post. But sometimes it's really challenging, people.

Apparently, a befuddled chat with Pseudo-Sarkosy wasn't sufficiently fubar for one 24-hour period. Oh, it could have just stopped at giggling over how cool it is to kill things, or not finding it a little bit ODD that the actual President of France might be telling you that his wife is "hot in bed," but Oh no, it couldn't stop there. All it took was a question from CNN's Brad Bailey, who noticed that he was the only black person at Sarah's rally and asked her to comment. Damn, Sarah -- I was so waiting to hear the end of your sentence that began "We have to be all about equality...the Constitution preaches..."

Mr. Jefferson? Huh? The Constitution does what?

But alas, the sentence was never finished...it just moved on to another sentence about how poor Todd knows what it's like to be a minority in Alaska. Uh...what?

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-132425

How many hours have we got left before this freaking nightmare is over?

Divide and Conquer

When I was a little kid spouting the Pledge of Allegiance, I really believed all that “Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all” stuff (after I figured out that it was “indivisible” and not “invisible.”) Kid-idealism, of course; but with a grain of truth, at least at the time.

No more. One of the saddest and most heartbreaking results of the incumbent administration’s complete and total “epic fail” is the fact that my countrymen and women are at each other’s throats. I have never witnessed extreme polarization like this in all my 50-plus years, including the dinner-table wars I had with my Dad over Vietnam back in the early 1970s.

It’s not just that the voters prefer one candidate over the other. It’s that the voters who prefer one candidate hate the other candidate’s guts, and on top of that, they also hate the guts of anyone who’s going to vote for the Other Guy. I cannot believe the hateful (and in some cases, ignorant and misspelled) rhetoric that I see on the blogs, in reader response columns, or even hear on the street. And I’ve been guilty of it myself – there is one player on the political scene that I can barely watch on TV out of dread and horror that she could actually sit in the oval office if a certain convergence of tragedies should take place. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone could even entertain the idea, and yet there are people out there who like her. By the same token, I’ve already voted for someone who is viewed as one of those "dangerous Moozlim commies” by people whom I would otherwise think are relatively sane. You see, I am just as polarized as everyone else.

What the hell is it going to take to get us together, people? An alien invasion? Because let me tell you, another war or a terrorist attack is NOT going to do it—that’s already been proven; twenty minutes after 9/11 the seeds for the deterioration of our civil rights had already been sown, and Clear Channel was already drawing up its list of Songs You Can’t Play on the Radio Anymore (like John Lennon’s “Imagine” – so much for “and the world will live as One.”) The event may have initially brought us together, but the response of our leaders over the long haul sowed some mighty divisive seeds. How? By doing the best they could do to make sure that we were all afraid, all the time. The Department of Homeland Security has set the current Fear Level at Orange (or possibly Red, at this point.) The sad polarization of this country has arisen because the current Powers That Be have managed to cultivate a state of omnipresent Fear and Loathing, exacerbated by the goose-squawking frenzy of the media – both sides of the fence – gobbling and clucking about how the sky is falling. Well, it IS falling, but it’s falling because of the situations that are being inflamed by the Fear, and the propaganda that says that Everything That’s Wrong is caused by those Other Folks Who are Not Like You. For some people that means immigrants, hippies, socialists, both welfare recipients AND Fat Cats, and “Muslims” and anyone else that professes to any religion that isn’t “Christian” (whatever the hell that means anymore.) For others that means neo-cons, people on the extreme right, “rednecks,” Bible-thumpers, pro-life activists, and corporate interests (and you know there has been some creative politicking in the last 30 years when Bible-thumpers, rednecks, and corporate interests are now represented by the same party – how the hell did that happen?)

Well, guess what. Everyone wants to be happy. No one wants to suffer. We all have that in common. This is the oldest cliché in the book, but if you want to work for peace, you simply have to start with yourself. Whatever you need to do to pour a bucket of cold water on your rage, do it. As I mentioned in a recent post, one of my spiritual teachers told me that when you are angry or in any kind of extreme state, the only way to get to the other side is to pass through “neutral mind” first. These teachers also suggested the radical idea that it’s possible to work for change with a great deal of conviction and still maintain a peaceful mind—and a mind full of rage may be motivated, but it sure ain’t peaceful, and I know that my mind won’t be peaceful until I can get from extremely frustrated and agitated to neutral. I don't mean a mind without opinion, without conviction, without motivation – but peaceful in the sense of having equanimity. And we won’t have one iota of success at equanimity as long as we are afraid. Am I afraid? Shit, yes—but I’m working on it. It’s important to work on it – because the true opposite of Love is not Hate, but Fear. Fear is the root; it causes all the hate, frustration, anger and venom to arise. I believe that there is a way to exist in the same space as Fear and act sane in spite of it; and I will continue to try. But most of us just fling ourselves against the side of the box and try to find someone to blame, someone or something to eliminate, or - most dangerous -- some authority figure who represents "safety," to whom we will sacrifice anything from money to our civil rights so that the nasty fear will go away. And those who would take away our civil rights know this, and they know that if they keep us all scared and hating each other’s guts, they have us right where they want us.

In her book Practicing Peace in Times of War,” Pema Chödrön writes:

If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s the true practice of peace.”

So friends, let’s wake up. Have you never heard the phrase “Divide and Conquer?” Don’t let this polarization and hate continue. Don’t you get it? That’s the bulls-eye that both the Rove-Cheney axis and Al-Qaeda have been aiming for.

I'd better give up, then...

Quote of the Day (week? month?)

Found this quote from Zen teacher John Tarrant in his short article "Not Knowing is the most Intimate," featured in the new Shambala Sun's series of articles on relationship:

Most projects to change other people or ourselves are really projects about interior decoration for the prison. A spiritual practice is really about jail-breaking."




Wow.

Norbu

About 15 or 16 years ago, our medieval music ensemble Altramar decided that we needed to do some intensive group meetings to figure out what it was, exactly, that we wanted to do as a group, and what kind of direction we wanted to take artistically. We decided that we would have a formal meeting day – a retreat – and we would work together to come up with a mission statement.

We wanted to do this in a quiet, peaceful, neutral place – in other words, not at one of our homes, and definitely not crammed into some practice room at IU. However, we were graduate students, and we just didn’t have the money to rent any kind of retreat center (or even a room at a retreat center!)

At that time, in the early 1990s, Chris and I had been going for walks on weekends at the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington. We used to circumambulate the stupa that was there, talk to the enormous shaggy dogs that patrolled the place, and once or twice we had stayed for prayers. Altramar had performed at a fundraiser for the Center as well, so they were familiar with us. And they kindly allowed us to use their beautiful main hall for our retreat.
The founder and director of the Tibetan Cultural Center (now the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center) was a distinguished Tibetan lama named Thubten J. Norbu, also known to his students as Takster Rinpoche, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Norbu was a world-renowned Tibetan scholar who taught for many years as Professor of Tibetan studies. Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Norbu had been the Abbot of Kumbum Monastery.

At intervals during Altramar’s retreat, this kind and amiable man came into our room and brought us Tibetan chai and cookies. At the time, I had no idea who he was. Well, I mean, I knew he was the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, but I had no idea of his status in the Tibetan world, or in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. I had no idea about his history, his political activism, the trials and tribulations he had gone through after the Chinese invasion. I didn’t know that several years later I would sit with Coyotebanjo on the grounds of this Tibetan Cultural Center and take the Refuge Vow from the Dalai Lama with about 500 other people. I didn’t yet know anything about the history of the Tibetan Buddhist community in Bloomington (Americans, Mongolians, and Tibetans); the things they shared with each other; the difficult differences that existed or would exist between some of these groups; none of it. Not yet. All I knew was the experience I was having at that moment. I knew I was in a place that had a strong spiritual energy, and I was grateful for the generosity of this man, to allow us to use their hall and then, on top of it, to come in and chat with us and actually serve us and wait on us; because of course none of us really realized the extent to which it should have been the other way around.

Mr. Norbu died last Friday. He was 87, and had been in failing health for some time since a stroke several years ago. Over the next few days, scores of people from Bloomington came to pay their respects, only to find his body sitting on a bed in lotus position. Some offered him katas (ceremonial scarves) as one does when one takes a teaching from an honored Tibetan lama. On Thursday his sons and some of his students and volunteers carried him out to a brick and clay structure in back of the temple that now sits on the grounds of the Cultural Center, and he was cremated, while many monks from around the country chanted him into the Pure Land.

Confronting the Confrontational Culture

One of my colleagues this morning (a rainy Monday here) asked me if I had experienced an unusual amount of confrontational energy lately.

Yes, I have. And why do you suppose this is so? The political atmosphere in this country right now is like a powderkeg waiting to blow. The Left is sickened by Right and vice-versa, and everyone is sickened by the divisiveness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, every citizen who isn’t hiding in a cave is being assaulted with vituperation and hateful rhetoric (especially from the Right – sorry, but it’s true) every time we turn on a radio or TV, open up a newspaper, or have to suffer through a moronic rant happening at a nearby table in a Starbuck’s. Too many politicians are counting on the divisiveness to help them; they are attempting to capitalize on the Three Poisons of hatred, greed and attachment-revulsion as much as they possibly can. And we wonder why there’s a lot of confrontational energy generating?

The side-effect of this confrontational, divisive, thick energy is exhaustion. I have never, in my seven years of university teaching, seen this many students so completely wasted with exhaustion only 3 weeks after the semester has started. My courses are not any more difficult this semester than they have ever been, and I doubt anyone else’s are either. And yet they are pale, tired, and clearly suffering.

In a supreme example of “as above so below” and group Karma, these churning energies are manifesting at all kinds of levels. The Northwest passage has opened, hurricanes are howling in the western hemisphere, the headlines are even more sordid than usual, and the world seems fueled by anger and fear.

But every moment in history is both unique and not unique; we are a constantly changing continuum. Nothing, even the bad stuff, is permanent. Nothing is permanent.Not you, not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the hurricanes. And although we are all impermanent, we are also all interconnected. So there IS something that we can do as individuals, and that is to change the energy one mind at a time. Whether that is possible or not is irrelevant – it is what must be done.

Put your work away; it will be there tomorrow. Turn the TV off, put the newspaper down, sit comfortably, and do whatever it takes to quiet your mind: repeat a mantra, count your breaths, pray…whatever works for you. We all have the Buddha-nature even when we are yelling at the TV. Let yourself contemplate the Six Perfections: Generosity, patience, ethics, effort, concentration/meditation, wisdom. Visualize how you would feel if tomorrow your thoughts were able to lean toward how you might support the political candidates of your choice instead of leaning towards how much you’d like someone to murder the other ones.

One of my Tibetan teachers told me once that it is not possible to go from an agitated mind to a happy mind without passing through the place where the mind is neither agitated nor happy, but is simply in a state of equanimity or equilibrium. We must all allow ourselves to do what we need to do in order to get there. If this takes time away from work, study, or any other aspect of the rat-race, so be it.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the joy of true freedom.
May all beings have equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.

If I had a time machine...

If I had a time machine, and were told I would have 10 minutes to go for it, I would give up the chance to talk to any number of famous musicians and other luminaries if I could go back to August 28, 1963, the day that Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I Have a Dream" speech, and tell Dr King about the speech I am listening to right now.

BANG!

So I’m sitting at the junction of the Loop and Slide Road this morning, minding my own business and waiting for a break in the traffic so I can head north on Slide Road, when BANG! A huge jolt, with a simultaneous huge thundercrack of sound, scaring me half out of my wits, and I realize: holy crap, I have just been rear-ended.

It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.

An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.

When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.

After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:

1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.

So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)

So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.

About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.

That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.

The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.

Final Installment, China Trip Notes, Chapter 14: Beijing 05.27-28.2008

OK – it’s true; I didn’t finish posting all the China Trip Notes, having been waylaid by Massachusetts, family visits, and a desperate attempt to learn the rudiments of the viola da gamba (see previous post.) Since historically one of my character flaws is not finishing things that I start (see all previous references to the doctoral degree), I feel it would be good for the continued progress of my particular mental continuum to bring the Trip Notes to a close…so here they are, from the pub session we played at Paddy O’Shea’s to the last concert in at the PLA Military Band Hall. They should be a good lead up to your Olympic viewing activities later this week.

Beijing: 5.27.2008 Evening

There is an Irish pub in Beijing. That may sound a little weird, but having traveled around quite a bit, I am now pretty much convinced that there is probably an Irish pub in Ulan Batar and maybe even a few in Khazakstan or Antarctica. There’s even an Irish pub now within a 3 mile strike of my childhood hometown, and there isn’t even a damned Borders or Starbucks there yet.
Paddy O’Shea’s is a very attractive area of Beijing, with tree-lined streets. The front is open in a kind of Euro-boulevard-café style that permits folding back the doors so that the sidewalk tables and the interior are contiguous. It was a strange sight, in a way; suddenly, in the middle of this extremely foreign city, there’s a typical-looking Irish pub full of white people drinking Guinness and eating pub food, presto! as if we had just clicked the heels of our ruby slippers and said “There’s No Place Like Home.”

But enough about Oz, and down to the business at hand: Guinness and pub food. I don’t even like Guinness (I think I ordered a Newcastle Nut Brown), but oh Lord the food. Salad, by God, and chips, and Irish-style vegetable soup…at least one of the guys had fish and chips; someone had a club sandwich, I think. I don’t remember anything for about a half-hour after that except grateful hoovering of food that had not been soaked in oil or have a previous life as an invertebrate.

The publican was a gentleman who obviously had some skills in the pub business. He seemed to understand both the thing he wanted to create and the local environment, and how each would have to accommodate the other. He was incredibly friendly. The situation had enough of an Irish context that one felt secure in proceeding exactly the way you would in Ireland, and that everyone would have a set of perspectives in common; you felt as though you could relate, and as though Glen had that same respect for the music and the musicians; you trusted that he would take care of you the way an Irish barman would. And he did, from the food and drink to the posters he had made for our appearance there, featured prominently on the door.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect in terms of who might show up. Before we left for the trip, we had found a clip on YouTube that suggested a very high caliber of music was being made at Paddy O’Shea’s; it later transpired that the players on YouTube ringers brought in from Ireland for Paddy’s Day. On the evening that we were there, it was mostly the three of us playing. We had located ourselves at a table near the front of the building, but it wasn’t an ideal placement, because we had our backs to the sidewalk (no corner tables were available.) But it was fine. We played typical Irish session music (jig and reels, mostly); it was too noisy to play songs, especially as it got very crowded after awhile (a large contingent of our Band Student Fellow Travelers eventually showed up for the festivities, as we had hoped they would.) There was also a variety of people who had made a special effort to come hear the music. Among the interesting folks we met:

1) A Scottish gentleman who was a professor and a consultant for a Chinese education agency. Coyotebanjo noticed him singing along, and it turned out that he was Glasgow-born of a Donegal singing family. He had come especially as a result of the advertising Glen had done.

2) A young Californian and his Chinese wife, with several of their friends, sitting at the table next to us. They were in the embassy district because they were headed to the American Embassy the next day to try to get her a visa so she could visit the US with him. They were anxious about this impending meeting; and, perhaps in an attempt to relieve the pressure, became drunk as lords.

3) A fellow from the US Embassy, who had tried to book us for an embassy reception on the same night as our concert, but failing that, had come along to listen (and brought reinforcements in the form of several young female friends who attempted a few Riverdance moves.) Mind you, we only knew he played because he approached some of the Band Students present, and asked if they thought we would mind if he were to ask to play. Turned out he was a whistle player. If I remember correctly, there was some problem with the whistle, because Coop ended up loaning him one of the extra D whistles he’d brought. He played enthusiastically along with us, and it became quite clear that he wanted to sing as well. We agreed upon a song we both knew (he knew mostly pub songs) and whoa! didn’t he have the loudest, most piercing, huge Clancy Brothers tenor voice you’ve ever heard. You could hear him over the entire lot of the hollering masses in the bar.

In all, it was a lovely evening and pretty much a success; I certainly think the Band contingent greatly enjoyed themselves. (They were probably so elated over having fish and chips and real beer that we could have sung Happy Birthday all night and they would have been content!). As we were leaving, a woman came up to me and told me that she had loved the music, that it had taken her back to Galway and reminded her of the music at the Crane (for those who are not familiar with the whole Irish music culture, this is extremely high praise). She asked me if we’d ever played there; I said that the guys had done some sessions there. Turned out that she lived in Australia for a long time, and I don’t remember what had brought her to China – all I remember is that she then asked me my name, and it transpired that we both had the same first name; we both marveled over that coincidence.

Our driver, a Chinese fellow named John with excellent English, had assured us that we could call him for a pick-up and drive back to the hotel “even if it was very late.” Further questioning about “how late” seemed to suggest that anytime was OK, so we took him at his word and called, although it was midnight. He did come to pick us up promptly, and although I had the distinct vibe that we may have pushed the envelope on “how late” was acceptable, he was perfectly courteous about it – and back to the hotel we went.


Beijing, 5.28.2008: Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City



Reflections on Tian’anmen Square, with polemic

The first week of June 1989, I was driving from Massachusetts to Indiana with an early music friend. We were on our way back from an early music camp. Every time we turned on the radio, more horrible reports came in about the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on student protests in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing. The protests, by students, intellectuals, labor, and others calling for democratic reform, had been gaining steam for a couple of months before that. The matter came to a head the first week of June, when the movement was crushed with great force by the Chinese army.

This is the incident that most over-35 Americans think of instantly when someone says “Tian’anmen Square.” The image of that defiant student became world-famous, and is emblazoned on the collective memory.

But today, May 28, 2008, I am standing in Tian’anmen Square, and Coop has just asked our tour guide where the “world-famous picture of the student standing in front of the tank” was taken, since he wants to take a photo. She has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. She has never seen this picture he describes.

It’s interesting to examine one’s first reaction to this. It’s a kind of knee-jerk American guns-up reaction: "of course, the Commies have suppressed this information from their people." But is our guides’ lack of knowledge genuine? Do they really not know about the 1989 protests, or have they been trained that they must under all circumstances avoid any discussion of this event? Many Americans would assume the latter, but I would just as quickly believe the former. Why? Because when I teach History of Rock and Roll, and I play Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio,” I have to explain Kent State to my American students. A sobering majority of them have never seen the 1970 photographic image of the young Kent State co-ed screaming while her friends, protesting the Vietnam War, are shot down by the National Guard. In fact, not only have they never seen the picture -- they don’t know it happened. They are shocked. That photo was also famous, and I would have thought that it was also emblazoned on the collective memory. Our tour guide’s perplexity, just like my student’s lack of information, is a wake-up call: we cannot continue to allow the suppression of history. We cannot stand around and point the finger at places like China while our own students barely know that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We can not, we must not continue to allow the suppression of history as it is happening here, in our own country.

End of polemic.

Today, Tian’anmen Square is full of tourists, Chinese people queue-ing up to see Mao’s Tomb, and vendors selling hats and watches whose face features images of a hand-waving Chairman Mao. (I wonder if anyone during the Cultural Revolution could have imagined that scenario in their wildest dreams.) They descend on our tour group as we stand there. Coop buys several Mao watches, and when he is finished haggling, another vendor comes up and tries to sell him three more. (As Coop said, “He needed those three, he might need three more!”)

This absolutely huge, paved area is clearly a source of civic pride to the Beijing-ers. At 100 acres, it’s the world’s largest open-air urban public square. We saw a whole team of workers whose job is apparently to weed and clean out the cracks between the squares of pavement (think about this when you have a day when you hate your job.) Our tour guides herded all of us into a group for a photo shot, and I noticed that there were other groups involved in this same activity. It became apparent that the organized tour companies bring their large groups here for the “group photograph.” In the case of our company, they develop the photo and put into a nicely bound tourist booklet which you can order and pick up the next day for about 14 bucks. (Of course I bought one.)

At the end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City. In fact, “Tian’anmen” means Gate of Heavenly Peace, so Tien’anmen Square is the Square that leads up to the Forbidden City gate. Above the arched opening that leads through the gate into the Forbidden City is a huge picture of Mao. We spent some time trying to get humorous photos posed as if the picture of Mao was between Coop’s thumb and forefinger (the place had so much historical import, and such heavy vibes, that a little comic relief was really welcome, for me at least.)



The Forbidden City

From the DK Eyewitness Guide to China:

Forming the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum (Gugong), is China’s most magnificent architectural complex and was completed in 1420. The huge palace is a compendium of Imperial architecture and a ;asting monument of dynastic China from which 24 emperors ruled for nearly 500 years. The symbolic center of the Chinese universe, the palace was the exclusive domain of the imperial court and dignitaries until the 1920s. It was fully opened to the public in 1949.
I must begin by admitting that by this point in the trip, I was pretty much totally overwhelmed, and it was difficult to soak in a lot of new input. That being said, the Forbidden City is a marvel. It inspires some interesting emotions: like a lot of the Hapsburg extravaganzas that one sees in Vienna, one is sort of torn between admiration and wonder for the artisans and laborers (a million plus, apparently) who hauled rare and precious wood and stone from all over China to create it – and disgust over the fact that it was all built for one very small group of privileged aristocrats to enjoy. The “palace” is actually a complex of 980 (!) buildings, all containing a number of treasures. Everywhere you turn there is some new wonder – carved walls, exquisitely painted exterior screens, stairways, statues, sweeping courtyards, gorgeous gardens.

If by some weird stroke of fate I should ever return to Beijing, I will go back to the Forbidden City by myself, or maybe with one or 2 other traveling friends, and I will go in the early morning and take my time seeing the whole thing. I say this because it was so incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring that having to whiz through it at such a breakneck pace was actually a rather frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly crowded, it was extremely hot, and we were absolutely rushed through in a big group. There were 60-something of us trying to follow the tour guide, and even with her little flag held high, I couldn’t always see her. I also didn’t really want to stay with the group, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose them either. I couldn’t see into any of the buildings because I couldn’t see over anyone’s head, and there was no time to really investigate anything. The tour included no time at all to see the gorgeous garden at the end, and very little time at all to even browse in the gift shop (which normally isn’t really a big deal for me, but with only one day left, I had been hoping to grab a couple more presents.) Thank God Coop took a whole slew of outrageously good pictures of it; they have really helped me remember how amazing it was, even if I was zooming through it at the time.

The Tour Continues...


Our next event was a ride in the bus over to the Olympic Village. This was amazing, and I’m glad that they brought our buses over there so that we could gawk at it. Architecture freaks will have a field day with this: the Chinese have gone all out. The Bird’s Nest Stadium, which is literally shaped like a bird's nest, holds about 100,000 people. These pictures simply can’t portray how massive it is. The swim stadium looks like a giant luminous blue rectangular cube that has been bubble-wrapped.

There’s another very striking building, a high-rise actually shaped like the Olympic Torch, that will house the athletes; this caused quite a stir among all of us. They gave us a few minutes outside the buses to gawk at the Olympic Village and take photos (all from a distance – not allowed to go in yet). It is really quite magnificent – but I have to admit that none of it can solve the problem of how on earth the athletes are going to breathe in China’s staggering air pollution. That remains to be seen.

After leaving the Olympic area, we were escorted into a large Teahouse. This is not something that we were expecting; we knew we were going to have lunch, but that’s all. For those who are headed to China: be aware of this when signing on for guided tours – I feel quite certain that the tour companies have agreements with certain establishments that count on tourist trade, and you may very well be spirited away to a silk factory, pearl market, or other consumer opportunity that was not mentioned on the day’s itinerary. I’m not saying that these excursions aren’t enjoyable – they are, but you need to know what you’re getting into.

This particular Teahouse had nothing to do with the actual eating-establishment teahouses we encountered, and is actually a large organized entertainment for western tourists. It’s a large structure with many rooms, including several that are dedicated to demonstrations of the traditional preparation of various kinds of tea, and a kind of “tea tasting” demo. You are greeted by the “Ni haos” (hellos) of a huge gaggle of gorgeous young women, all decked out in pink traditional-looking silk costumes. They are very charming and funny, and give a very entertaining tea-brewing and tea-tasting presentation, in which you are shown the traditional and quite complicated methods of preparing cha. After, you are given the opportunity (of course) to buy the teas that you have tasted (which you do, even though they are basically price-gouged for the tourists.) You are then whisked into the main store (more shameless consumerism), and then escorted downstairs for a meal. Just as you’re about to partake, music starts, and to our surprise, it’s a floor show, complete with costumed dancers doing various ethnic dances, songs, etc. It’s a little bit Disneyland, and a little surreal – but if you just go along with the game and accept that it’s all aimed at the western tourists, (which you are, after all), it’s actually quite entertaining. (And the food was very good.)

We would then have been whisked away to the Pearl market, but the Band Director wisely explained to the tour guides that we all had an important concert that night, and it was extremely important to give us all an opportunity to rest. I personally also needed some time to absorb all the experiences – it was, in hindsight, an awful lot of input for one day.

Beijing, 5.28.2008: The Last Concert

The final concert of the tour took place that night, in the People’s Liberation Army Military Band Hall in Beijing.
You know, it would have been easy, as an American Buddhist with several Tibetan teachers, to be a little freaked out by playing this particular gig. In fact, when I first found out that I was going to China, I told one of my Tibetan teachers that I was having ambivalent feelings about the trip because of the politics. He told me that I shouldn’t be concerned with the politics; that I was “not playing for the Chinese Army,” but that I was playing for people, for sentient beings, and all sentient beings want to be happy, and all people want to be free from suffering. And, to the extent that music can lessen people’s suffering, at least temporarily, playing music for people was a good thing to be doing, anywhere.

Well, my dharma lesson turned out to be this: hello, you are playing for the Chinese army. More on the dharma lesson below, but first, the tale of the concert.

The tour organizer was clearly excited and not a little nervous about this; he was dressed more formally than the other concerts, and he told us that there would be various dignitaries there, and some very prominent Chinese musicians. He was obviously quite concerned that everything be perfect.

The hall was big, but not huge. It was beautifully kept, as you would figure for a military band hall, and it was acoustically by far the best hall we played in. It’s a fantastic performance space. They put an ambient mic on our small acoustic group, as usual, but we barely needed it – the sound carried really well. They had coffee and snacks backstage for the players.

Just as we had done in the 2nd and 3rd concert, we three Irish music persons played out in the lobby before the concert. We drew a very large and appreciative crowd, including one guy who video’d the whole thing on his cell phone. As happened on the other evenings, many people asked about the instruments; they were always especially interested in the wooden flutes.

There were a lot of musicians in the audience. One of the notables was a very gracious older woman who, it turned out, had been the first woman to hold the rank and post of Conductor of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band. Another was the current conductor of the PLA Military Band. The “Small World” award for the evening went to an older American ex-pat who came to the concert by himself. He introduced himself to us and told us that he used to teach at a large University in the Midwest. When he found out that the three of us in the Irish group were all affiliated with Big Flat Place University, he told us that before he was in the Midwest he had taught for many years at a university that is a 3-hour drive away from us – next door, by Texas standards. Now what in hell are the chances of that? One American comes to the concert, and he used to teach at Neighbor of Big Flat Place. As if that weren’t enough, he and Coop started exchanging names of mutual acquaintances, and they discovered that the fellow had known the father of Coop’s best friend. Six thousand miles from home…

The concert was a great success. The students and faculty performed brilliantly, the audience was enthusiastic, and there was a lot of good energy flying around. The audience loved the Irish set, and clapped along enthusiastically. The band did their two encores – the Stars and Stripes Forever, and the PLA March. However, this time they invited the director of the PLA Marching Band to come up and conduct the UK Band for the PLA March He was a very dramatic conductor and he went for it, and the crowd went crazy.

Afterwards, our tour guides told us that the concert was very emotional for the audience, and that during the PLA March in particular, there were tears in the eyes of many of the audience members. I understand. How can we overestimate the power of music to bring people together? From my point of view, I was still playing for a bunch of individuals – people who want to be happy, too, and don’t want to suffer. God knows many members of that audience had recently suffered, since we were told that most of them had spent the previous week pulling dead bodies out of the earthquake rubble in Szechuan Province. Sure, they’re soldiers -- is the average American soldier responsible for some oil baron’s decision to start a war in Iraq? We aren’t catering to policymakers here – we’re playing music for men and women, probably yanked out of high school either because they had to do compulsory service or because they had the talent to play in the military bands, and now they’ve been pulling bodies of children out of demolished buildings. You damn betcha I’m going to play for them. You know, when I got back to the US, I had the opportunity to tell the same aforementioned Tibetan teacher about this experience, and how we had in fact ended up playing music for military people as well as civilians, and about the fact that many of them had spent the previous 2 weeks doing earthquake rescue. I told him that it reminded me of exactly what he had told me, and what the Buddha had said – that all beings suffer, and all beings want to be free from suffering. He told me that this was indeed a very great dharma teaching.

After the concert, we were given a huge banquet in the Military Band’s Mess Hall. We were seated at various tables. It was the usual set-up: communal food placed on round revolving serving trays (and the food was excellent.) In addition, on each table there were 4 or 5 large bottles of Chinese beer. But wait – one each table there was also one bottle of (you guessed it) some kind of white baijiu, Coop’s so-called Chinese Bang Bang. He and Coyote instantly introduced this to the percussion and brass guys, who choked it down (several times), defending their manhood bravely.

Well, this party got very merry very fast. There were two things we didn’t know until later: 1) This is the hooch the Chinese soldiers give to their young recruits as a sort of mild hazing, and 2) our Chinese hosts were probably shocked that a large number of the American females drank it too – apparently that’s not polite company behavior. Oh well. I can’t choke down the stuff, so I was sober as a judge; and no one else had to do anything more complicated than sleep on a 13 hour flight the next day, so all was well.

In all, the night was a great success, and a great way to end this extremely unusual voyage.

Postscript

The story of the journey home is pretty straightforward. We were totally exhausted.
We left from the new International terminal at the Beijing airport, which like Shanghai was huge, incredibly modern, architecturally fascinating and impressive. We got through ticketing and security without much hassle. Coyote, Coop and I spent most of the wait in the Starbucks, which was very nice (and where else could you get a Red Bean scone, but a Starbucks in Beijing?)

The flight was long and incredibly uncomfortable. We were in the LAST seat in the airplane, and the flight had several periods of pretty considerable turbulence. Thank god for Dramamine. (I took a second hit somewhere above the Pacific, and I don’t even remember last leg of the flight.) We got to The Big Flat PlaceThursday evening.

We were home.

Gambapalooza

Some people have normal midlife crises. They buy cars, go back to school, change careers, or have a disastrous affair with some tyke. I, on the other hand, decided to learn how to play the viola da gamba.

I am blogging from the Viola da Gamba Society’s annual Conclave -- essentially a music camp / workshop devoted to the viola da gamba. I did not know this before I came here, but the VDGSA has been in existence for 45 years (!), which means over a decade before early music became fashionable for Baby Boomers in Birkenstocks. And yes, there are a lot of Boomers here like myself and my slightly older colleagues, but there are also a fairly respectable number of players who are half that age – very encouraging, since one of the most frequent laments in the early music world is the preponderance of grey heads both onstage and in the audience. (Actually, that’s happening in this country with a number of different kinds of music; a topic for another blog post.) There is also a huge range of participants here in terms of playing level: professionals (most of these are the teachers), semi- and “pre” professionals (such as advanced students), extremely proficient avocational players, amateurs at various levels, absolute newbies, and the occasional person like myself who is accomplished at some other kinds of music-making but tabula rasa on the viol. As a pretty limited player, I’m finding it to be extremely intense work, but quite enjoyable as well; and since my brain is fried at this point, I have put down the bow and picked up the laptop to muse on the different factors that brought me here.

First of all, I have this job, you see, part of which entails directing a university early music group. Quite a few of them are instrumentalists, and although I can play several instruments with varying degrees of skill, most of my formal training has been in the singing department. About 15 years ago I did take some gamba lessons from Wendy Gillespie, a highly-acclaimed virtuoso on the instrument who teaches at IU. I don’t remember much, but it was a beginning. At Big Flat Place University, we have several viola da gambas (or viols, as the English call them), and willing players to take them on; but there is no viol teacher at our school and, unless there is a seismic shift or some Texas oil tycoon suddenly becomes obsessed with early music, hell is likely to freeze over before we get one. So I must get these folks started on the rudiments of the instrument, and it would be very nice if I could demonstrate the rudiments instead of just yakking about them. It would also be nice if I could explain to them – most of them are cellists and string bass players – some of the details of bowing, phrasing, and performance practice, and get them started, so that when I get the money to have a pro come in to do a workshop, they get the maximum benefit out of it. So why not learn the rudiments myself? I mean, really, despite being an Irish music fellow-traveler with a DADGAD guitar, I think I am supposed to be an Early Music Person.

So why haven’t I done it until now, especially since I actually have “practical” reasons? Well, it was partly the expense and partly the commitment of time, but there’s also a little Calvinist devil, courtesy of about 8 generations of ancestors, who has been renting a room in my head since I was about 2. The following dialogue has been looping:

Little Calvinist Devil: Why do you want to screw around with some new instrument? Every moment you spend practicing an instrument is one step farther from finishing your doctoral work. And if you do persist in this folly, why not just get better at the instruments you already play, since you’re not particularly virtuosic on any of them?

Dharmo: Puhleeze, Devil, that’s not a midlife crisis pursuit. That’s sensible, like jogging and putting skim milk in coffee. Instruments we already play have Baggage – and I don’t mean the airplane kind, I mean the therapy kind. Don’t you remember? You packed about 5 of the bags yourself.

Little Calvinist Devil: You have no discipline and you will always suck. The Incubus who rents the room next to me agrees, and he’s a Catholic for God’s sake.

I’ve decided that my ultimate response to this dialogue is “there is no virtuosity, neither is there lack of virtuosity; neither is there a gamba, nor is there the absence of a gamba.” The best way to get rid of demons is to confuse the crap out of them. The truth is, I’ve wanted to play this instrument for a long time. When I was at the Early Music Institute I used to joke around with my colleagues and say that “in my next life” I would play the viola da gamba. (Indian classical music and uilleann pipes are also fairly appealing, but appear to require more than one lifetime.) You’d think that a good Buddhist would just let it go at that. The problem is, there is no guarantee that the next life will include opposable thumbs. So, in the event that my next life might be spent as a Formless Energy Being or an otter (hang on – I believe otters may have opposable thumbs), I decided what the hell, why wait? If I want to learn something new, let’s learn it now, or at least put some imprints on my mental continuum so that I can learn it faster if I find myself with human hands again.

There is nothing like a virtuosic consort of bass, tenor and treble viols; and the solo viol repertoire is also gorgeous. If you have never heard a viol consort or music for viola da gamba, I refer you to any recording by Fretwork, Hesperion XX (or XXI), Jordi Savall, Phantasm…there are many more, but that’s a place to start. Also check out the soundtrack to the film Tous les matins du mond.

Another appealing aspect of the viol is the people who play it. There are a good number of people here who obviously have known each other for years, and yet they also seem extremely willing to reach out to the new people they see. The first night, a former president of the organization came over to my table at dinner and invited me to join his table because “no one at Conclave has to eat by themselves.” It may seem like a ridiculous generalization, but when I started the Early Music Immersion part of my life, I noticed within a fairly short amount of time that I really, really liked virtually all the gamba players I met. Seriously folks, there’s a reason why there are stereotypes associated with certain instruments, and the viol seems to attract a large number of highly intelligent, literate, multi-talented, musical, capable, good-natured, mostly-level-headed and witty people. This last one is especially noticeable – they are all pretty good- humored, and a surprising number of the gamba players I have known are just plain funny and entertaining people. I just spent the evening at a fundraising auction with over a hundred of them, while they auctioned off donated items ranging from a stuffed toy rabbit made of fabric with musical notes all over it, to a two-week stay at someone’s lovely house in London, and they somehow raised almost five thousand bucks while everyone laughed their asses off for two hours. This just does not happen in all organizations (of course, not all fund-raising auctions place their coffee urn next to six bottles of alcoholic flavor-enhancements, either… but my point still stands.) I have always found that the viol players were a blast to hang around with. And I think I know why: although there is a certain amount of solo repertoire for the instrument, it was conceived as a consort instrument – it needs other people to play with. In other words, it’s community music, best appreciated while playing in community with other players. It doesn’t require a conductor, and while there are virtuosic pieces for the super-accomplished players and soloists, most pieces are written for several players to play together for their own edification.

So here I am. There’s lots of great music being played here every day, including wonderful faculty mini-concerts. The Early Music world being relatively small, there are a number of people here whom I know, many of whom I haven’t seen for some time. My classes are being taught by incredible players who also have excellent pedagogical skills and are generous enough to still be willing to spend time with relative beginners. And all of the classes I’m taking are going to greatly help me communicate with the viol players in my own Collegium, even the classes that spend time on rather specialized technical issues that are a little beyond my present ability. I can’t really do much in the way of subtle articulations when I am still trying to figure out where to poot mah wee fenghers, but I now know how to ask my Collegium viol players to match their articulations with the singer’s consonants, for example, even if I can’t do it myself.

I am also getting an excellent lesson in killing the Big Ego and swallowing one’s pride; I would recommend that all music teachers try something like this every couple of decades. It is very odd to look at a single line of music that you could sight-sing with one eye closed or instantly dash off on the piano, and listen to yourself making clam chowder out of it because your left hand is going Where the Hell is Middle C, your eyes are reading Alto Clef, and your right bow-hand is sending memos to the brain such as What Is This Diabolical Implement and Why Am I Holding It.

It’s also wonderful, once in awhile, for a professional musician to undertake some musical activity purely for the love of it. That’s why I climbed up on the piano at age 3 and plonked out “Silent Night” by ear; and ultimately, despite all the above practical rationalizations, I think it’s the real reason why I am plonking out the alto part of “Innsbruck Ich Muss Dich Lassen” by ear 50 years later. An instrument with no “baggage” – what a concept: music with no expectation of specific results, no pressure to get Really Good, or be fashionable, or get some blasted PhD in it, but music that’s played just because of some ineffable heart-connection that leads you to want to play it. And I played it today. I got through a piece in my “How to Practice” class, and during my “Viola da Gamba Dojo” class I actually (one time anyhow) got all the way through the alto part of Innsbruck on a tenor gamba with 7 other people, and no one cared if my tone sucked or if I was a beginner. Gassho!

China Trip Notes, Chapter 11: The Great Wall of China (5.27.2008)

There’s a whole genre of travel books that have titles like “Fifty Things to See/Do Before You Die.” I have a list like that in my head. My list is much longer than 50, and some of them have always seemed far more accessible than others. I started checking them off when I was a little girl, starting at age 12 with “See New York City,” and have slowly but surely gone through quite a few.

One of the more exotic items on my list was to “Stand on the Great Wall of China.” I never took this one very seriously, even though it was sincere, because I never dreamed that it would ever happen. It was on the part of the list that contained things like “talk to John Lennon” and “see Earth from space” – not bloody likely.

Which only goes to prove that You Never Know.


The Great Wall of China is the world’s longest human-made structure. Built as a fortification to protect China from Mongol invaders, it is 4000 miles long and was built between 221 BC and the 1600’s. Great controversy existed for many years over the notion that the Great Wall could be seen from space. This idea was pretty much pooh-poohed by science, but in 1994 this false-color radar image was taken by the space shuttle. So I guess it depends on whether your definition of space includes the low orbit of the shuttle, and whether your definition of “see” means “with the naked eye.”

Long a contender for the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Wall finally made the list of the Seven Wonders of the World when that list was recently re-created to reflect things that are still present in the modern world (as opposed to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one of which, the Great Pyramid of Giza, is still extant).

The tour guides brought us to one of the restored parts of the Wall, a section known as the Juyong Guan Pass, in an area known as BadaLing.



The first thing to understand about the Great Wall of China is that it’s not a smooth path on top of a giant Wall, like one finds on certain Stone Age fortresses in places like Ireland. It’s actually an endless stairway, with steps set at uneven heights – much easier to defend from above, I imagine. Having had a stonemason Dad, I can’t even imagine the labor involved in carrying the bumpteen hundred zillion rocks that were hauled up the hills to build this thing. (One of the brighter bulbs among the band students declared - cue Bart Simpson accent - “I don’t get it. It’s just a wall.” Here, son – you carry these rocks up and down the hill for a few months, and tell me again that it’s just a wall.)

For those of us with the physique of the Pillsbury Doughboy, that steep, rocky stairway is quite the challenge. If I understood correctly, that section of the wall rises eventually to 800 meters above sea level; but I don’t know where it starts, so I can’t give you an exact estimation of the ascent. All I know is, Coop, having been a serious climber who’s gone to the top of Rainier in Washington and Cotopaxi in Ecuador, jaunted up to the top like a goat, while I damn near needed a heart transplant by the time I got to the top and back down again. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

In truth, I did a pretty good job of pacing myself, having some idea of what I could and couldn’t do. I was exhausted before I began, and as I mentioned, I was having digestive troubles that day, so I didn’t try to do anything foolish. I rested when I needed to, and tried not to be bothered by all the 20-somethings ripping past me. I also took the time to stop at each one of the lookout posts and survey the landscape, which was mind-boggling: from the high points, you can see into Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, if I understand what I was told. The weather was beautiful; clear and dry, and while it was definitely warm, it was much (much!) cooler than the Yangtze river basin where we had spent the earlier part of the trip. The wind was very strong, and whipping dust occasionally. Some people were whining about that, but 80 dry degrees with the wind whipping dust around is Sunday picnic weather in the Big Flat Place, proving that the perception of all experience depends on the mind experiencing it.

As I climbed, the exhaustion and exhilaration combined to make it a rather numinous experience. Vivid memories of other travels kept welling up in my mind’s eye: standing on the Salisbury Plain staring at Stonehenge; driving across the North American continent with the other members of our medieval band; playing medieval music for packed houses in the Netherlands; staring up at the giant trees in California’s Muir Woods; getting a tour of the Romanesque churches in Cologne from my teacher and friend Ben Bagby; laying eyes on Taos Mountain for the first time; walking over the cobblestones of Gradoli, near Lake Bolsena in Italy, where my grandmother was born; staring at the Brueghels and Caravaggios in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, while tears ran down my face; standing with Coyotebanjo on the stone-age fort at Dun Aengus, on the Irish island of Inis Mor, staring across the sea to the Cliffs of Moher and feeling as old as Elrond. And Coyote was there now, too, standing there patiently waiting for my 53 year old legs to catch up to him, standing on the Great Wall of China. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude and wonder; I’d better keep trying to “generate merit,” as the Tibetans say, because I sure have drawn a lot of good karma out of my cosmic bank account. As stressful as this trip had been, on this day, the Universe reminded me that despite whatever hardships I’ve had, and despite the sorrows that Samsara brings to us all, I have had a pretty damned cool life. And that moment, my friends, was worth the entire journey.