Midlife Meditation

Turns out I’m not as advanced as I like to think I am. Teaching elementary music, it’s easy to forget that the main reason I appear to be so good at the skills I teach is that I’m a grown-assed adult who’s studied these things, while my students are children experiencing them for the first time. When I teach my body music unit, it usually only lasts for one or two classes before I run out of material, but that’s plenty of time for children to marvel at the speed and complexity of the rhythms I can play on my body. Similarly, as we drum and learn about African musical culture, I’m the expert in the room: I spent two weeks in Ghana four years ago, after all, so I know some stuff. That’s the confidence I brought to the International Body Music Festival, which ended yesterday (for me—I’m midway through the 36-hour odyssey of my journey home, so what day it is is a relative thing). It took just two workshops to put me in my place, and remind me that some people h...

I don't love the camera. This goes back to my earliest memories of being photographed. Pictures taken of me in my infancy are typical baby shots: a happy, smiling, inquisitive child utterly ignorant of the significance of the metal box in my father's hands and its ability to capture my image on film. But from the moment I became aware of what the camera was for, and why it was always being pointed at me and (by then) my younger brothers, my face lost its ability to smile naturally for a picture. Making myself smile for a posed shot, I could always tell there was something wrong: my eyes were too wide or too narrow, my mouth not open enough or frozen in a death grin, my nostrils flared like Wolverine sniffing for a supervillain. Try as I might, I just couldn't relax and let my face do what it would normally do if I was enjoying an episode of Batman, reading an elephant joke, or singing "On Top of Spaghetti." School pictures came out terribly, as I knew they...