Esperanza Academy Summer Music Camp

I spent last week at Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center in Byfield, MA with the entering 5th grade class of Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, MA. Esperanza is a free tuition Episcopal School for girls (mostly Latinas, in grades 5-8). Everyone sang and played percussion. We had a blast learning music, building community, and tossing out words like loquacious and parody (I know you're wondering how those particular words came to be chosen).

I wrote about this project at the beginning of the year here, and between the school and the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, the keepers of Adelynrood, everything came together and exceeded my expectations. I learned a lot, the girls learned a lot, and hardly any children were harmed, although we did unintentionally scare one. I also tried my best to lose a few of them at the beach, but every time I counted they were all still there, asking questions like: "Miss! Are there fish in that water? I'm not going in if there are fish!" That particular question called to mind the W.C. Fields joke about water, which would have been highly inappropriate to relate to 10 year-old girls. Besides, if I'd told it, none of them would have gone swimming, which is, after all, the point of going to the beach.

Every morning my alarm was set for 6:58 AM, but I awoke at 6:15 to the sound of four or five girls standing outside my room, their stacked heads peeking through the doorway, asking "Is she awake?" followed by a loud "Shh, she's still sleeping!" After the third time hearing the same call and response, it seemed only right to reply "She's awake." They'd come on in and tell me about the bug in someone's hair, whose hair sticks up in the morning like antennae, who was being mean, who was still asleep (not for long), who missed their mom or dad, who was hot or cold, who had almost fallen out of bed in their sleep, whose foot had miraculously appeared outside the covers, and who wanted a padded bra for Christmas (these kids are planners). Then they'd disappear and giggle their way to the next room. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. One of my friends said the giggling is even better than prayer. I agree wholeheartedly.

A couple of the girls have infectious laughs and are happy morning people. I am not a morning person, but since I got home, I've been waking up very early. On the first day home after camp, I missed them. I also missed checking on them at night to make sure they were in their beds and trying to go to sleep. There's nothing like that last bed check (the fourth or fifth) when they are all sound asleep. Adorable.

I woke up this morning at 8 AM to that peaceful, easy quiet that wasn't an option last week, and kinda missed the racket and the giggling stacked heads. As I ate breakfast, there was no one to say "Sit here!" or to ask "What are we having for lunch? or "Will we have a snack? What will it be?" or my favorite: "Do we have to do music again today?"

We learned the usual notes, rests, scales, time signatures, key signatures, drummed some drums, practiced listening, learned to sing rounds, echo songs, some harmony, learned how to use a hula hoop, played games, had a campfire, made s'mores, went to the beach, where we saw the HMS Bounty replica in Gloucester Harbor; took a tour of the C.B. Fisk Organ Factory, played the organ and piano at St. John's Episcopal Church in Gloucester, laughed a lot, cried some, got over it, ate way too much sugar and other weird stuff (1c. ketchup on 1c. rice?).

I became an expert remover of splinters. Why I was the only adult capable of removing splinters remains unexplained. Next year I'll have to requisition a splinter removal kit.

Two of the girls wrote songs and sang them for us. A bunch of them love to sing and would join a choir if there was one at the school. Another wants to learn piano, and has the patience and focus to do it. My bedroom was directly above the piano, and I heard her patiently exploring the black notes for about 25 minutes, letting them ring, combining them and listening. I sneaked downstairs about fifteen minutes into the improvisation to see who it was, because it was quite beautiful and musical. Anybody wanna buy some piano lessons? Drop me a line. These kids were all musical, and I'd like to help keep it that way.

I am so grateful for my colleagues Mark Nelson, Carol Doran, and Caitlin Bixby, the advisor to the 5th grade class, and math teacher. Kathleen at C.B. Fisk, Inc. Designers and builders of organs led a great tour with help from Mark. The girls loved it. I'm also grateful for all the Companions at Adelynrood, especially those who helped us during the week: Louise (without whom I would have died), Ruth, Emily, and Marge. I cannot thank them enough. Kate, Carolyn, and the kitchen staff offered gracious hospitality and patience while surrounded by running, laughing, starving girls.

We prayed every morning and sang all day long. There was a Service of Intercession on Wednesday and we sang. The Principal dropped by for an afternoon (we sang for her, too), and on the last day, the Headmaster came and sang with us. He can sing. The girls were surprised by this, and also terrified of him (heh heh heh).

As the Headmaster and I were walking out after the singing, I suggested that we could do it again next year, possibly make it one day shorter and lose the beach day. He countered with "I was thinking of two weeks, and we can bring the whole school." I told him I didn't think I had two weeks in me, and he said maybe ten days, and that we could add some academics so it wouldn't be so much work.

Ahem. Even though I can see how ten days might be no different than two weeks, I'd love to.

Books Fill Me Up: Relationships and Flow

This is a list of mind and boundary bending, truly excellent books I've been reading. Other books have been read, and reread (because everyone needs a few desert island books), but this is the pile that's about to fall over and hurt me. There are more on the Kindle, hanging in the pocketbook on a doorknob, but they're not in danger of falling over and killing anyone like the pile I'm tellin' you about now:

Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu - This is a total revision of the classic translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, with Toinette Lippe, who has worked her magic wand and catapulted this translation to the top of my Tao list (next to the bed). This one's got total FLOW (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), makes me happy to read it and wakes me up. What more can a girl ask? In case you haven't read the Tao Te Ching before, the nutshell version of Lao Tsu’s philosophy is simple: "Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is." Good luck.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, will change the way you think, and the way you think about thinking, and was one of last years "best" books. Brilliant read, and fun. Kahneman is a psychologist who happens to have won a Nobel Prize in Economics. Thanks to Donald Schell for sending it.

Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze is one of the most uplifting books I've read in a long time. Wheatley is the author of Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. From the back of the book: "In this era of increasingly complex problems and shrinking resources, can we find meaningful and enduring solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations?" Wheatley and Frieze take us on a journey to seven very different communities in seven different countries that are doing just that. Also check out Wheatley's The Berkana Institute. The newsletter archive shows what they've been noticing and naming. Oh so worth a trip.

Music Quickens Time, by Daniel Barenboim, who is the founder, with Edward Said of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a group of Israeli and Palestinian musicians. "Music is not separated from the world; it can help us forget and understand ourselves simultaneously. In a spoken dialogue between two human beings, one waits until the other has finished what he has to say before replying or commenting on it. In music, two voices are in conversation simultaneously, each one expressing itself to the fullest, while at the same time listening to the other. We see from the possibility of learning not only about music but from music - a lifelong process." Yes.

The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction, by Rebecca Z. Shafir. This book is already more than ten years old, and I found it in a Goodwill Bookstore last week in FL. A practical guide to transforming your ability to listen. Excellent and fast read. A lifetime of practice after that, though...

The Tao of Sound: Acoustic Sound Healing for the 21st Century, by Fabien Maman, who is a founding father of vibrational sound therapy. He operates Tama-Do (Way of the Soul"), the Academy of Sound, Color, and Movement. If you'd like to see what the impact of acoustic sound has on human cells and organs, as well as how this might help you to ground your soul in the seasons, this is the book for you. Amazing.

New Songs on Ancient Tunes: 19th-20th Century Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy from the Richard Fabian Collection, by Stephen Little is a book I finally had to break down and buy because I missed it. I spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco last August, and there was a copy where I was staying. Every day I would read and look through this book, and I could probably read it a dozen times before I die and still not learn everything it has to teach about brush painting, Chinese history, beauty. Some days I just look at the pictures. It is more than enough. Stunningly beautiful, great essays, weighs a ton and only about 600 pages long. Deep bow.

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, by Lewis Hyde. I love this book in all it's unwieldy beauty. It was twenty-five years old in 2007, and has has two other subtitles: "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" and "How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World" - I like that it kind of defies categorization. If you're the creative sort, and fancy poetry and critiques of capitalist culture all at once, this is the book for you.

Each of these books is worthy of at least one blog post, but today's your lucky day. Go out and see for yourself! More soon. The pile just fell over again, grr. I'm lucky to be alive. Use the comments to tell me what you're reading, I'll have a free surface soon.

Entering Life's Rhythms: Drumming a Way into Sacred Time

I wrote this article for The Witness magazine in March 2001. WARNING: It's long. I'm posting it here because I was thinking of my indebtedness to Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect and the brand new Healing at the Speed of Sound, who has end stage pancreatic cancer. He encouraged me at a very low time in my life, and turned me on to the world of music and healing. He was also the person who suggested that Ruth Cunningham and I should sing together, which we currently do as the eponymous HARC.

Entering Life's Rhythm's: Drumming a way into sacred time

God set the sun to rise and set every day, and put the earth into orbit. The moon makes it around the earth every 28 days or so, the locusts come back every seven years, Advent comes before Christmas, Lent before Easter, Sunday before Monday, and work comes before play -- a really bad idea. We eat, sleep, and brush our teeth, our hearts seem to pump without any prompting, and many other events and phenomena seem to repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals through time. We start out riding tricycles, graduate to bicycles, and, if we're lucky enough to reach enlightenment, we get to view it all as one big interconnected unicycle. Through it all, we are rhythm.

The first thing we recognize on this earth is the vibration of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries, and later on, the sound of our mother's heartbeat and breathing while we are in the womb. The ear being the first sense organ to develop, somewhere between the fifth and sixth month of gestation, we begin to actually hear these internal rhythms. By 28 to 30 weeks, we can also respond to both the internal and external rhythms (by kicking or changing our heart rate). After we are born, there aren't many opportunities for such a nice rhythmic massage.

Rhythm is the most powerful organizational tool we've got. Since the ancients, rhythm has been used to mark communal events. The earliest drummers were women, using frame drums for liturgy. Look what rhythm did for King David, and the Benedictines; we're still hooked on the psalms. Armies still use drums to boost morale and energize tired troops (maybe if more people drummed, we wouldn't need wars), shamans use rattles like white noise, to scatter thought, and there's nothing better than Motown or the Poulenc "Gloria" to clean by; believe me, a clean house is a successful revolution. Rhythm has been used to celebrate, to warn of a storm coming, to ensure a good harvest and to accompany farm work. Dancers clap, stomp on the floor, make mouth noises, wear ankle bells or use their bodies as percussion instruments.

So what is it about rhythm that energizes us? What is the hypnotic effect that can happen with any kind of music, from the beginning of "She Loves You," by the Beatles, to a Bach fugue, to the latest sounds coming from the DJ's booth above the dance floor? The scientists say that it is the nature of rhythm to turn on the switches in the limbic system (or what used to be called the "visceral" or "reptilian brain"). The adrenaline starts to surge (bringing up our emotions and feelings), the information is then processed by the neocortex, and we are moved in myriad ways. Or something like that. I can never pay attention long enough to figure it all out; I get distracted somewhere around "She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAHHH..." In her book, When the Drummers Were Women, Layne Redmond says: "Scientific studies have shown that our moods, emotions, thoughts and bodily processes are rhythms of chemical energy. The Puerto Ricans call this fundamental rhythm that marks how we walk, talk, and interact tumbao. It is an expression of the totality of our personality." The verb tumbar means to knock down, to knock over, and is used figuratively in the sense of mixing somebody up, taking the senses away from you, or messing with your whole sense of being.

Rhythm can also calm and soothe us. It's no accident that one of the basic forms of meditation consists of counting the breath. If you're trying to get the kids to sleep, lullabies work like a charm by helping to slow the breath, relaxing them, and sending them to never-never land. Think of the tune "Silent Night," and breathe with it. We are all made of the same stuff. We all breathe the same air, the same air that people have been breathing since the dawn of time. I like to think that all of my favorite people have breathed the same air throughout history. Make a date for you and your breath, and put it in your book. Take a moment, find a quiet place to breathe, and think of all of the people whose air you are sharing.

Rhythm is more like dancing than knowing. We don't have to control or even be aware of what's going on for it to have a profound effect on us. It's our body that hears where to go next. When my uncle was in the hospital a few years ago for an angioplasty, the nurses were worried that his oxygen levels weren't improving a few days after the surgery. They were watching his monitors, and as they watched, his oxygen level rose to normal. A nurse asked, "What are you doing?" He said, "I was just lying here singing John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in my head." She said, "Well, keep singing it, because your levels are great." The body hears where to go next.

I first began drumming around 1990. I had a Djembe from Ghana, in West Africa, and had been told that it was used to invoke the divine spirit and its healing power. Then, while on vacation, I was in a beautiful park in Ithaca, N.Y., with some friends, picnicking on the lake. A man walked by and said "Drums for Sale." I couldn't believe what he had in his arms: four rectangular boxes with slits of various lengths and widths cut into the top that looked like tongues. I called him over and asked him to show me these "drums" he had made, which he called "slit drums." The sound took my breath away. I needed a slit drum. He volunteered that he had "more in the van," so I went for a peek, and found one that I really liked. I proceeded to drive my friends crazy all the livelong day, banging away on that drum.

I started to do some research on slit drums. According to Adrienne Kaeppler (in Mickey Hart's Planet Drum), "Slit drums ... are believed to represent ancestral voices which encourage the living to dance into a state of communal ecstasy in order to banish personal preoccupations and bring those dancing into communion with collective forces passed on from the dead to the living and those still to come."

Whoa! One world at a time, please! But I do need to banish personal preoccupations, who doesn't? Wondering about those collective forces, I looked up "spirit": geist, ruach, geest, spirare, esprit. Why had I never noticed that they all either mean ghost or breath as well as spirit? What else was I missing?

I decided to check out the effects of the drum on myself first. I started with the heartbeat rhythm, because it is the thing we all share. I found I could drum myself right into a trance if I kept the beat at about twice my heart rate. Years later I learned from Don Campbell (author of The Mozart Effect and expert on music and healing) that if you drum a simple eighth-note rhythm at 120-140 beats per minute for more than three minutes, it balances the brainwaves, and you start going into a trance. (Kids and people with blood pressure problems, do not try this at home! Talk to your doctor first. There are very real physical consequences when you mess around with your natural rhythms.)

The heartbeat is still the first rhythm I teach in drumming workshops. Along with our breathing, it is the most fundamental aspect of our lives, and just one of many basic things we do not pay attention to. It's also simple to learn, and anyone can do it. Close your eyes, place your hand on your heart or wrist, and feel your heartbeat. If you have trouble, don't worry, you're not dead yet. Imagine the rhythm of your heart. Now, begin to vocalize the rhythm with your voice. When you feel comfortable sounding out your heartbeat, try playing it on your drum, using your hands or a mallet. Try it for five minutes, and see if you don't feel both relaxed and energized.

The point of using the heartbeat is so that you can begin to get acquainted with your internal rhythms, and also to help you feel more relaxed. Try it with a partner, facing each other. It is a good exercise to enhance listening skills, concentration and intimacy. With your eyes open this time, each begin to play your own heartbeat rhythm. You will soon find that you are in synch. This synchronization is called entrainment, the force that brings two or more bodies vibrating with similar rhythmic cycles into alignment. Go into a music store, and strike an A tuning fork, and all the A strings on all the guitars along the walls will begin to vibrate in sympathy. Place two pendulum clocks in a room and come back a day later, and they'll be in synch too. Sit in a drum circle and lay out for a second, and your drum will still vibrate. That many things happen without my "help" was a huge lesson.

Drumming has been a positive revolution in my life. Like most of us, I grew up in that either/or, right/wrong worldview. Let's just say I did not flourish there. I see more possibilities on the margins, and luckily, in a drum circle, everyone's on the margin. The people who come to a drum circle are the ones who are supposed to be there, to energize the spirit and explore unity through music. No words are needed. If you are six or 90, broken or whole, happy or depressed, tuned in or out of touch, blind, deaf, lame, too smart for your own good or not too bright, a democrat, republican, anarchist or atheist, you have a place in the circle. You are a part of the community. Rhythm is a universal language, and you are the rhythm. I like the image of a circle, because it speaks to the mystic in me. In a circle, everyone is equidistant from the center. There is always room for anyone to come and go. All the members are equal in the circle, each with a voice that can be heard by everyone else. Everyone takes turns leading the transitions to new rhythms. The kind of music that is made in a circle is based upon that circle's relationship with itself rather than any externally imposed expectations.

Since I've been practicing drumming without a license, I have witnessed drumming cure headaches and relieve the pain for a woman with a brain tumor. I've seen the faces of many lighten and radiate the joy that was secretly lurking. I've seen bodies that were stiff become fluid, and people who are shy come out to play. I've seen angry people find a place to work it out. People have told me of their lowered blood pressure and of their reduced stress and anxiety. I've also seen how giving people a rhythm that they're not ready for looks exactly like test anxiety. There's a lot of shallow breathing and tense faces; heads go down, people get timid, stop listening, and withdraw from interaction.

I used to be affected by the rhythms of everything and everyone around me. It was distracting and depressing. I felt out of "synch." We often say that when we're getting sick. Trying to play to another's rhythm isn't healthy if the cost is ignoring your own. Drumming has enabled me to hear my own rhythms amid the noise and haste, helps me to find and maintain my balance, and helps to keep my blood pressure down. The increased awareness of my breathing has helped me to throw away both cigarettes and asthma medicine. Drumming has also enhanced my ability to listen, increased my level of patience, helped to work through grief and frustration, and given me a much more relaxed and positive outlook on life, because of its unique ability to ground me and bring me into the magic place of sacred time.

What We Need Is Here

More often than one might think, a simple tune is the perfect vehicle for people to learn how to negotiate, re-mind, and re-claim the gifts and skills they already possess. What We Need Is Here is the most perfect simple song I know; its five small words pointing to the heart of gratefulness. Written by Amy McCreath, What We Need Is Here sprang from her reading the poetry of Wendell Berry.

The Wild Geese

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

By Wendell Berry, from Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

I've been teaching Amy's song for a couple of years now, and although I don't use it the same way every time and the people are always different (even when I use it twice with the same group), it always elicits beauty and astonishment as people experience themselves falling into a group growth mind-set they hadn't noticed, believed existed, or paid much attention to. I hear about it a lot, after the fact. Here's the latest shout out from Michael, who attended a retreat in Idaho:

"I've been talking quite a bit about the experience. I taught the choir "What We Need is Here" just to see how they would respond to stepping outside their comfort zone with harmony and in learning something without music. I could not believe the response. The harmony and movement were amazing, and they ended together automatically. The looks on their faces were priceless.

I have been trying to get this group to understand their talent for a long time. I've told them repeatedly how the music they say they can't sing is not beyond their ability but simply beyond their comfort level. I think they are starting to get it, thanks to what I learned."

Someone once said, "Most things aren't difficult, some things are just unfamiliar."

I say we know things we don't even know we know, and if we quieten ourselves, listen deeply, and allow ourselves to play with one another, we begin to hear them, and they will become more familiar and useful to us. As loving people. As a species. Even in a room full of people.

Thanks to Michael, his choir, and all the people at the Idaho retreats; to Wendell Berry for the last three sentences which remind me that abandon is a place we might be able to access in a group, that how far we go depends on our ability to cultivate quietness of heart and clarity of sight. Special thanks to Amy McCreath who has an uncanny knack for discerning the most important words and setting them to songs that turn out to be both simple and truly expansive. A fine gift.

Tune copyright Amy McCreath. If you'd like to use it, please ask.

Bread, Roses, and Esperanza por Todos

I'm just beginning work on a project with The Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, MA, a middle school for girls. Holy synchronicity, Batman! It just so happens that today is the 100th anniversary of the Lawrence, MA textile strike, which you may not remember, but which, coming shortly after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC, was an important catalyst in the history of labor rights, especially for women. Lawrence, MA was a big woolen center, made so on the backs of the workers who averaged $8.76 a week for a 56-hour work week. Yup, read it and weep. $8.76 a week is about 15.6 cents an hour.

In January of 1912, the great State of Massachusetts, ever progressive, changed a law and decreed that 54 hours was the maximum number of hours women and children could work. Yes, women and children. When the companies reduced the hours to 54 to comply with the law, they also took away the 31 cents (on average) that workers would lose due to the reduction in hours. Yeah, you read it right, 31 cents! 31 cents was worth striking for, and 20,000 people went out, yelling "Short Pay! All Out!"

The strike spread significantly and lasted ten weeks. The strike committee was a democracy, and had 56 members, representing 27 languages. My favorite factoid from the strike is that the committee had a substitute committee lined up in case they were thrown in jail. Ultimately, the work week was reduced to 50 hours,

The following poem was written by James Oppenheim and published in December 1911 in American Magazine. It quickly became an anthem for the labor movement and is still sung today, to one of three song I've been able to trace. The original setting was by Caroline Kohlsaat, there is an Italian tune called "Pan e Rose" by Arturo Giovannitti, which is used by the Italian Dressmakers' Local 89 of the ILGWU (International Ladies garment Workers Union), and there's a tune by Mimi Farina from the 1960's which was recorded by her sister Joan Baez, which has always been one of my favorites.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
-1911

"It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous," wrote labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse. "They are always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their mouths to sing."

Can't have too much marching and singing, no ma'am. You cannot have too much of that.

So, back to Esperanza. I hope to help these girls tell their stories and sing, and together we'll figure out how to work with and honor the gifts we've been given. We'll see how their stories are woven into the fabric of the larger community narrative and we'll all learn a lot. Can't wait.