Midlife Meditation

Sure, they look far more fierce than meek, but read on to find out how they got there. The occasion for this post: I'm in San Francisco re-taking Doug Goodkin's "Jazz Course," a week-long workshop on how to teach jazz to young children. Doug is a master teacher of the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education. Studying with him has shaped me as an educator, a musician, and a spiritual human being, and this course is a huge part of that. Most programs for jazz education are aimed at secondary and collegiate instruction. The Jazz Course is unique in its focus on children between the ages of 3 and 13. I took the course in 2008, and was inspired to build an entire year's curriculum around jazz. I'm back now, seven years later, with my full Orff certification, dozens of workshops, last week's trip to Ghana, and several more years' experience under my belt. Most importantly, I've got a far greater jazz vocabulary: as much as I knew about jazz (an...

One of the many things that make this relay special: the finishers' medal puzzle. Back in my day, running in a race was a monastic discipline for me. I was on my own from start to finish. Even when I ran in my home town, there was hardly anyone on the course to root for me by name. I got anonymous support from the lovely spectators ("Great job!" "Go! Go! Go!" "You can do it!" and, of course, the always misleading "You're almost there!"), but it really didn't mean much to me. Occasionally I'd see people staked out along a course, waiting for a particular runner with personalized signs, calling him or her by name, cheering a father, mother, son, daughter on in ways I could only imagine. My family and friends were never that organized: if I was running locally, they'd be waiting for me at the finish line, and that was enough for me. Five of my seven marathons were also run as a single man, and in a way, this made...

It's not just the funny hats that are rendering Republicans irrelevant. It started with health care—at least, that’s what the movement claimed. They showed up at town meetings that were seeking to gather a consensus on reforming the American health care system, but they didn’t come to discuss, or even to engage in constructive criticism. They came to shout and scream, to shut down the grass roots part of the process, and they succeeded. They were a tiny minority, but the volume of their protest drowned out all the hopes and dreams of the rest of America. They reacted to what they considered unconstitutional nationalization of corrupt, bloated industries that were bankrupting both individuals and collectives with the mountains of expensive red tape they erected as barriers to the product they were supposed to be delivering. Some of them dressed up in colonial costumes, others suspended teabags from wide brimmed hats, and they called themselves the Tea Party. Over time...

My father's ashes, along with flowers thrown by his grandchildren, sink into the Pacific. 3  For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6  a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7  a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) It's the time for casting away. When my father died December 29, he set in motion a chain of events that will be pl...

"Could it be...SATAN?" Nope; it's all on you, well-meaning church lady. I knew it was just a matter of days. In fact, it was more like hours: I put the Facebook "rainbow filter" on my profile picture (as did at least two-thirds of my Facebook friends), and then a non-rainbowed friend from Oklahoma posted a link to this post by conservative blogger Kevin DeYoung : "40 Questions for Christians Who Made Their Profile Pictures into a Rainbow."  I don't advise clicking the link; chances are good that, if you're reading this, what you find there will make your blood boil (though it's not as if I can stop you--and I did embed the link, didn't I?). I did take a look at the 40 questions, thought seriously about responding to the damned thing by answering everyone of them (including the loaded and redundant ones), but then thought better of it. A few days later, I saw the link again on Facebook, this time with a helpful comment linking to ...

In Texas, it's all big. There are some who will insist that Texas is not a true part of the American South. Its historical identity as, for a brief time, an independent republic, its blended Mexican and cowboy culture, its prosperity relative to most other former states of the Confederacy--there are many reasons to consider Texas more Southwest than South. And yet, Texas was very much a member of the Confederate States of America, and the last slaves to be liberated, two months after the rebels surrendered to the Union, were Texas slaves (an event enshrined in the African-American holiday known as Juneteenth). Texans disparagingly refer to Northerners as Yankees, enthusiastically embracing a patriotism that both celebrates American identity and stubbornly insists on defining it militantly and rebelliously. The only part of the South I've experienced on a personal level is Texas, more specifically, Dallas. That's even more problematic than calling Texas representat...

I have vague memories of sleeping until noon. They're mostly memories of high school--or, rather, of summer vacations during my high school years. In a pattern I've recently learned is a natural part of adolescent development, I stayed up well past midnight, sometimes until two or three in the morning, reading science fiction novels. My parents weren't too happy about me being up that late, so I took to hiding the lamp under my bed sheets. Risky, thoughtless behavior is also a natural part of adolescence: there were a number of times when, after hours of reading, I dozed off, only to be awakened by the smell of a sheet being scorched by the hot incandescent bulb it had collapsed into as I slumped into my pillow. Staying awake that late, and then needing nine or more hours of sleep, I would often stumble downstairs, still groggy, at lunchtime. Those days are gone. I'm not sure when my minimal sleep quota shrank from nine to eight to, now, somewhere between five a...

Across the South, Confederate battle flags are coming down. Wal-Mart has pulled them from its store shelves. Online gaming companies have disabled games that feature the flag prominently. Aghast at the sudden repudiation of their "heritage," Confederacy buffs object that Nazi symbols are not receiving the same treatment, even though they clearly represent the Holocaust, while the Confederate battle flag is about honor, not racism. Try telling that to the families of the nine people who died in Charleston, the members of the black churches that are, again, being burned across the South, or any African-American who has a lynching in his or her family tree. In fact, as has been copiously documented in the last week, the Confederate battle flag rose to prominence precisely because it was taken to symbolize white Southern resistance first to the enforced empowerment of former slaves during Reconstruction and, later, to the battle against granting their descendants c...