Midlife Meditation

Utah's Delicate Arch began forming 300 million years ago. In the way of all things, it will eventually collapse. I didn't see Rosalie's retirement coming. I've known Rosalie since 2005, when an activity she led at a workshop turned my professional world upside down. Here's a little background on why: I studied music education from 1979-1984, expecting to spend my career directing high school (and eventually college) bands. By the time I finished my MS, I was beginning to wonder if band was really the place for me. A year of actual public school teaching spooked me, and I ran back to the academy, this time to become a minister. I was not to give music teaching another try until 2003, almost two decades after I finished my training. From 2003-2005, I was the kind of music teacher I'd trained to be--or, rather, defaulted into being, since my focus in those training years had been almost exclusively on instrumental, not general, music. I taught out of wha...

Art is such a hard thing to qualify. And yet we do it all the time. My earliest preferences were colored by my opinionated mother, who never waffled on anything, and always had a reason for her preferences. This place is better than that place because such and so happened at that place; this TV show is better than that one because its sex jokes are implied rather than explicit; this piece of music is intolerable because it's performed by hippies; and so it went. She could back up every one of her clearly-defined judgments with some bit of information, some personal experience that rendered the conclusion obvious to anyone with a brain. As a child and adolescent, I clung to this binary view of all things. But then along came college and professors whose opinion mattered to me even more than my mother's did. They clearly knew what they were talking about, and mostly what they wanted was for me to keep an open mind about music I initially disliked intensely. This was partic...