Midlife Meditation

No, but I do love this shirt. And I'm also fond of this one. It's true: I wear that orange shirt a lot. I don't wear the green one quite as often, mostly because it doesn't have a pocket for my phone. But since landing in Portland July 1, I've probably worn one or the other of these shirts at least twice a week, probably more. At this rate, they'll be threadbare by the time I have to start wearing long sleeves, which is a shame, because they're the first garments I've had custom-made for my measurements since probably about 1988. I love the shirts because they fit better than anything else I own, they're incredibly comfortable in the warm weather that's just about to let up this week, they get me plenty of compliments and, most of all, because they remind me of where I was not quite four months ago. I wear them so often that Amy asked me two days ago, as I put the orange one on yet again, "So are you African now?" Har...

Funny; this never happens when I take pictures in America... For three weeks, I've been blogging almost exclusively about Ghana: getting there, being there, coming home from there. Today, I (mostly) wrap it up with a collection of observations that seemed too brief to merit their own posts. Smart Phones are Amazing I've known this since I got my first iPhone in 2009, but as with any technological advance, once you've lived with it for a couple of years, you forget how incredible it actually is--and wonder how you ever lived without it. Two things happened in Ghana that made me stop taking mine for granted: 1) My phone's internet access shriveled from constant to, for a week, non-existent, and then sporadic at best after that, meaning that the phone was only useful as a camera; and 2) using it as a camera, I took pictures of children at the elementary school we visited, an action that was always followed by the children crowding around me to see the picture...

These guys really need to meet: Pat Short of Comedy Sportz Portland and Doug Goodkin, master Orff Schulwerk educator. I move in different spheres: Music education. Orff Schulwerk. Improv. Jazz. United Methodism. Clergy. Outdoor recreation. Running. Cycling. Body Pump. Science Fiction. The Anderson family. Survivors of divorce. Beer. Preacher's kids. Summer camp alumni. Willamette alumni. Trekkies. By "sphere," I mean an activity, occupation, or status shared with a group of people that is a frame of reference for understanding the greater world, and which has a knowledge base unique to itself. Two people meeting each other for the first time who both went to camp as children can reminisce, nod knowingly, find common ground with each other. Many of my spheres overlap. I know a lot of United Methodist clergy, and we share experiences both of our education and work and of simply being United Methodist. Star Trek fans usually have a taste for science fiction in general...

What can I say about Ghana? One does not come here for scenery. It’s pleasant—tropical forests, hills, coastline—but none of these terrains is spectacular. What sets Ghana apart, as I’ve written again and again, is its people. Ghanaians experience the same poverty, primitive infrastructure, public health concerns as any country in West Africa, and they do it cheerfully. Most of them live literally close to the ground: everywhere but Accra, pavement is reserved for major roads. Marketplaces, town squares, village celebration centers have dirt surfaces. In a country with rainy seasons, this can mean a great deal of mud. They take this in stride—they’ve never known anything else—and dance in it, shop in it, go to school in it, work and play and eat and even sleep in it. Living so close to the earth, their cultural mores are earthy. Common bodily functions are nothing to be ashamed of. Privacy is minimal, and the facilities for relieving oneself are often no more than a crack ...

I’m home in suburban Portland now. All the streets, and most of the walking trails, are paved, signed, well-lit at night. There are more stoplights between my house and the Sunset Highway, less than three miles away, then I saw in two weeks in Ghana—and that includes the capital city of Accra. So why, during my morning run through the lovely Washington county countryside, did I feel more at risk than anywhere I ran in that strange foreign country? Let’s start with driver manners: my initial impression was that Ghanaians love their car horns almost as much as New Yorkers. In time, though, I realized they were using them out of concern for each other, warning bicyclist, pedestrians, and slow-moving vehicles that they were about to be overtaken by a faster vehicle. If the people in question did not, or could not, move out of the way, the driver patiently waited behind them until an opening became available. When our bus passed other vehicles, the maneuver always started with a blas...

6-29-14 All good things end. The conclusion of an Orff event is always bittersweet. Whether it is a day-long workshop, a weekend conference, or a two-week levels course, Orff training is an instantly bonding activity. Participants in Orff events are teachers who teach through play, finding the joy in every musical game, every song, every dance, channeling through their teaching and into their students. We learn the same way we teach, playing, singing, and dancing the same activities we will be sharing with our children. This creates a play bond: play with anyone, whether child or adult, and you create a connection. Once you have laughed with another human being, it is very hard to objectify that person. So Orff events are playful, bonding times, and when they end, there is a sense of deep loss. Those we share these experiences with are much more than colleagues, even more than classmates: they are playmates. Being separated from a playmate, as must happen at the end of our...

To experience Ghana in a day, there is just one place to visit: Elmina. Elmina sits on the Cape Coast. It’s a fishing community with a scenic harbor crowned by two historic structures: a castle on one hill, a fort on the other. Parts of these buildings, as well as other buildings in town, date back to the earliest incursions of Europeans into West Africa in the 1400s. Viewed from the castle, Elmina is as photogenic as any place I've been in Ghana (though it should be noted that this has not been a touring experience; in fact, we spent an entire week in one location, focusing on the culture of that site). The harbor and the shore teem with long, brightly painted fishing boats that are rowed out to sea, then brought back by the tide. There are no sales, and all the fishing is done with nets. The lack of modern tools for this ancient trade is typical: when I’ve seen buildings under construction, work was being done with saws and hammers, not a power tool to be heard. Even...

To an introverted westerner who grew up shopping in supermarkets and malls, and finds those places tolerable during low times, but very hard to be in at rush hour or in the holidays, market day is a special kind of hell. In Dzodze, in Ho, in Accra, market day is a time when Ghanaians flood a public square with booths, canopies, tables, baskets, turning the center of town into an extremely crowded shopping center with mud floors, no refrigeration, and little apparent organization. I went to market day in Dzodze hoping to find shirts made of Ghanaian fabrics, rhythm instruments, perhaps some authentic craft items I could bring home as souvenirs. What I found was baskets of fish, some of it smoked, much of it raw, all of it fragrant; live crabs; live chickens; fruits and vegetables; toiletries; used books; CDs; piles of used clothing and shoes; beads; and, the closest to anything I was actually looking for, booths of beautiful textiles. The last led me to consider bar...

6-28-14 The children played and danced for two hours. They had us on our feet many times, singing, dancing and, in the end, joining the dancers as they moved about the courtyard. Now the concert was over, and the brass band from Nunya Academy, after a prolonged time of being greeted and praised by us, and playing games with us (I taught them “Baby Shark”), were finally saying goodbye. “May I ask you a question?” said the ten-year-old boy whose stamina on the trumpet had amazed me. “Of course,” I said. “When do you think you will return to Ghana?” I felt my heart break. The Nunya children have performed for us four times in the last two weeks. Nunya is a school without a building, the dream of Kofi Gbolonyo, a local boy from Dzodze who has made it big in the academic world, traveling to America to earn his doctorate in ethnomusicology and finding a teaching position at the University of British Columbia. While still living in Ghana, he envisioned a music sch...

6-25-14 I can do without a lot. No private room? Share a bed with a stranger? Same food for every lunch, every dinner, for two weeks? No TV except the World Cup? No good beer? Nothing but instant coffee? I’m good. In fact, I’m great. I can handle being without all sorts of creature comforts, and often choose vacations that take me away from all these things. But take away the internet, and oh boy, am I going to get cranky. It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become on this invention which didn’t even exist for me before 1995, and which I didn’t begin using in earnest until 2003. So that’s really just over a decade of living on the web. But live on it I do. Except in Ghana. My first night, at the Hotel Obama, I had a good strong connection, and was able to Skype with Amy. I expected the same for our week in Dzodze, at the White Dove Hotel—and I was mistaken. There was nothing, no way of connecting at all. Even mobile roaming was dicey. I did manage some time at an i...

6-22-14 This morning’s run started like all runs so far in Ghana: I was up as early as I could be, out the door before sunrise, hoping to beat the sun for the entire run. There are only two directions to run from the White Dove Hotel, both going through villages, though there is a junction on the westward route that gives access to a country road. That’s the option I took this morning, heading north past groves of palms, corn and cassava fields, and occasional unfinished buildings (see “Building Boomlets”) and dirt driveways leading to small clusters of huts. I had been out about 25 minutes, almost at my turnaround point, when I realized the drumming and singing I was hearing through my headphones, intruding on the podcast in my ears, was coming from the road ahead of me. I had just rounded a curve, and there they were: a group of twenty runners, all keeping step to a bell and two shakers being carried by runners. That wasn’t all: there was a leader calling out songs, drill sergea...

6-22-14 I grew up in church. Until last November, I spent almost every Sunday morning of my life in church. Even on vacations, I usually found a church, though as I grew older, I felt less and less need for that observance. Church had become a job, and little more. Finally, last November, I resigned from a good paying church job because I just needed, for the first time in my life, to have weekends. I haven’t looked back. With all that said, church is still a comfortable place for me to be. I speak the language, I understand the way people think and interact, and even though I may now find those customs and ideas far less attractive, and find some of them offensive, I know that church is, and always will be, a place I can fit right into, no matter where it is or what its practices are. So Sunday morning in Ghana, knowing we would be attending a church in Dzodze—though strictly for sociological reasons, to see how they made use of Ghanaian music in a western religiou...