Noise

In last week’s post, I asked the question, Can I dance when I don’t like the music?  My reply was that, with resolve and strength of will, dancing to music I don’t like is not only possible, but necessary for a joyful life.  That thought does sum up my own experience, and it is valid, but only to a point.  My post failed to address a key issue.  I’m surprised, actually, that no one has pointed out that missing piece.

It’s all well and good to talk about dancing when there’s music, whether one loves the music or not.  The only reason I have music to dance to is that I won the birth lottery.  I was born to parents who wanted me, who loved me, and  who sacrificed so that I would be safe, thrive on good food,  and have access to competent medical care.  Their selflessness meant that I had an encyclopedia at home before my school purchased one, that I taught myself to type when I was twelve, and then did the same typing exercises all over again when I was fourteen at school in Grade 9.  I learned to play the piano thanks to their vision, read books that never would have shelved in the school library,  and benefited from a great home environment and a chance know my extended family.   So I always had music.  Was it always my favorite?  Of course not.  But the option to dance was always there.   The birth lottery paid dividends my whole life—I had a university education and a satisfying career, the chance to raise a family, contribute to my community, and travel.

What about people who don’t have music?  What about people who must live in noise?  Because the opposite of music is not silence.  The opposite of music is noise.  Many people lose the birth lottery.  Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times  writes eloquently on the subject in "3 TV’s and No Food: Growing Up Poor in America" (and other countries like Canada by extension).   These people might have to climb out of abject and cyclical poverty.  They might live in neighborhoods or families that face addiction issues.  They might not have money for good food or books, and they might be starved for support and a leg up.  Some people do manage to dance in those environments despite the noise.  They make their own music, or they blot out the noise.  They have more strength of character than I could ever muster.    Many, though, are swallowed up in the din.

As a winner of the birth lottery, my life moves to music.   That good fortune carries obligation.   At some point, in ways large or small, I must  act to silence the noise for people who need music in their lives.  As my mother preached to us, "From those to whom much has been given, much will be expected" (Luke 12:48).  Or, as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s mother preached to her, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” (Methodist tenet).  My intention to quell the noise for even a few people continues to be a work in progress.

I do, however, own that opportunity is a function of the accident of birth.  Birth luck is the foundation of accomplishment; it determines whether noise or music accompanies life.  If I have the choice to dance or not, then I need to pay that forward and provide some music for others.

Dance

I pull over in front of the school.  In my impatience, I even forget to signal.  The driver behind me, gracious despite my erratic move, doesn’t honk.  I glance at the School Bus Zone sign.  No yellow curb,  and, it’s two o’oclock in the afternoon.  So I’m safe for the two minutes I need to jot down the aphorism I spied on the school sign a few metres back.  We can dance when we find music that we love.   Okay, I think.  Self-evident, really.  How can you disagree with that?  The larger question is, though, Do I want to dance only when it’s my kind of music?

Of course,  it’s easy to dance when there’s music we love.   When a favorite song comes on, my feet begin to tap, my torso sways in time, and my fingers drum on the table.  I don’t jive so well, but when Len Gadica plays the first chords of "Come Go With Me" (The Beach Boys), I am already up and moving, singing "Dom dom dom dom dom /  dom be dooby / dom whoa whoa whoa whoa."  Maybe I even look like I know what I'm doing.  At least, I am one with the music and my partner for those glorious minutes.

Life can work like that, too.  Some people call it being in the zone.  We find ourselves in a context where the planets align—our abilities, our training, the people who surround us, the workplace mood, and a sense of accomplishment, all come together.  Magic happens.   David Whyte, in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimmage of Identity, cites an analogy to the swan from an Austrian monk.  On land, the bird has an ungainly waddle.  He doesn’t "cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better.  He does it by moving toward the elemental water, where he belongs.  It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence."   To be transformed,  then, "You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life."  In other words, you only need to find music that you love.  

I have experienced periods of that kind of synergy (see Antidote blog post).  The thing is, I want to dance all the time, or at least most of the time, not just when I have music I love.  Not just when I am in my elemental waters, or when all the planets align.  It can take a long time to find the music you love, or you might hear it only intermittently.  What about the rest of the time?   Life is too short to dance only once in a while. 

So, a few decades ago,  I decided to dance no matter what the music.  That was the first step, the decision itself.  I wouldn’t let my environment or circumstances determine my outlook.  I would paste on a smile if I had to; I would will myself onto the dance floor even if I didn’t like the music.  In the end, those efforts have paid off.  I have preserved my joy.  I don’t care what day of the week it is—Monday, Friday, Sunday, no matter.  Each day brings delights. 

Another pivotal attitude reset was the realization that I am the critical factor.  The dancer, not the kind of music, makes the dance.  As a friend of a friend said to her daughter who wanted to change schools, "Remember, wherever you go, you are there, too."  I can dance if I want to.  Maybe if I dance, others will dance, too.  I don’t need an invitation.  I’ve come a long way from the high school wallflower days.

It’s been helpful, too, to insulate myself with a Star-Trekkian magnetic field that repels negativity.  Most of the time, the field protects me.  It can thin a little in vulnerable spots, though.  At those times, I catch myself going beyond healthy personal reflection for growth to hyper self-criticism.  I have to remain vigilant.  Breaks in the music feed make dancing very difficult. 

Music we love does heighten the pleasure we get from dance. It might even help us attain heights we never thought possible.  Conversely, music we don’t like doesn’t have to limit us.  We can decide to rock out no matter the conditions.

Reinforcement

I lounge on the deck in the cushioned Adirondack chair,

coffee on one arm,

Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle on the other,

engrossed

in summer’s end

as much as in the story.

Through my transparent sanctuary,

I notice my husband 
wandering around the patio,

poking in the shed,

peering around the swing,

circling the table, 
eyes toward the ground.

"What are you up to?" I ask.

"I bought a can of white paint.  Can’t remember where I put it."

"Studies show that  breakfast with your wife on the deck enhances memory," I offer.

He stops, looks up.  
A warm slow smile softens his face 
and lights his eyes.

"Well, let’s test that theory out."

He brings coffee and a muffin,
and settles into the empty chair beside me.

We chat:  

about the new fence

and his outdoor projects,

my coaching contract,

our refugee family,

our children.

The paintcan bell of the real world tolls for us both,

even on this glorious morning.

He gives in to its summons.

I succumb to temptation

(the only way to deal with it)

and steal a few more minutes.   

Has The Glass Castle shattered?

As I read, he saunters by, grinning now,

paint can in hand, this time.

"Where was it?" I ask.

"In the shed, on the small table."

"Conversation reset your brain," I suggest.

He laughs,
one more coat of connection layered on
our own glass castle.

Helpfulness

This blog has called my name for two months already, and for two months, I’ve resisted its summons. Sometimes, the preoccupations of the day suffocated the cry.   Other times, I couldn't string together coherent thoughts.  Thank you to those who visited anyway during my absence.  I’m so grateful.    Now, it’s time to give voice to the ideas I scribbled in my notebook in stolen moments during that time.

So, what’s been so important during July and August that I couldn’t make the time to write?  Why couldn’t I muster enough energy to machete through the undergrowth of my reflections and arrive at a clearing worthy of expression?  My only explanation is that my focus over the past two months has been outward.  The denominator common to all fronts—instructional coaching in the professional domain, refugee support in the social justice area of community work, volunteer recognition and music preparation in parish ministry sector, and helping hands for the family as our daughter and son-in-law welcomed their first child—was helpfulness.  

Helpfulness, I have been reminded throughout the past two months, is a dance.   Not a solo  act, though, that relies on inner forces like focus, for example, or response to music; memorization, maybe, and physical strength and flexibility.  Not even, either, a line dance, where you dance alone with others.  Rather, helpfulness is a waltz. You move in time to music and in response to the cues and steps of a partner, so that the entire experience is memorable and enjoyable for both people.  In that context, over the last few months, I learned some things about helpfulness.

·      Communication is vital. 

It’s important to chat with your partner throughout the dance.  Be clear about your purpose and your state of mind.    I thought I should own up to our daughter and her husband that my joy in being there for a few days was not only altruistic.  I had to acknowledge my selfish motives, too—the time with a grandson that I will see only every six weeks or so, and my desire to establish a close relationship with him.  I thought they needed to know, as well, that whatever perspectives and experience I might share, I thought of them as information, not advice.  All of us have valid and considered reasons for our actions.

·      The music drives the experience. 

The context of proferred help is key.  In my professional duty, my role is to respond to the needs of the teacher. The teacher identifies the desired outcome, and my job is to help that person get there, through probing questions, specific feedback, modeling, and the identification of potential resources.  Helpfulness is never about me.

·      Less turns out to be more. 

Before our refugee family arrived, I heard a follow-up interview with refugees who had been in Canada about six months.  One of their challenges, they admitted, was fashioning a relationship with their sponsors that led to their independence.  What a key revelation for me, and for our committee, as we try to support and facilitate our family,  not hover over them.  The right combination of support and pressure, a coach friend of mine always says, is the core principle of her work with teachers.  That’s a mantra that applies to refugee sponsorship as well as education.  Helpfulness must respect the wishes and the autonomy of the people to whom I am lending a hand.

·      Let go and enjoy. 

I’ve never considered myself a great dancer.  I can dance with my husband because he’s very patient, I dance with him more often than anyone else, of course, and he’s a free spirit who is never limited by what tradition or habit have dictated the dance steps ought to be.  Whereas I might point out my missteps or my awkwardness, he just loses himself in moving to the music.  Though being conscious of one’s own actions and words does enable helpfulness, the profound satisfaction and joy, I am learning, come from zeroing in on the relationships and the larger purpose.

·      Know when to stop. 

Before your feet hurt, before you’re counting the steps to the end of the dance, before the exaltation of moving with another person to a beat that won’t be denied fades, call it a night.  Helpfulness, too, has its tipping point, after which our services can come across as obstruction, interference, or worse, imposition.   As educator and researcher Gary Phillips (I think he's the one who uttered the phrase I heard decades ago at a teachers’ conference) has said,  When your horse has died, it’s a good idea to get off.   The trick is to be aware when your help is no longer needed.

Now, as the waltz ends and the band’s introduction promises new rhythms,  the needs in my sectors of involvement resume and mutate, informed, I hope, by the insights I have gained.   Ready to embrace the next steps, I feel refreshed and grateful for what I have taken away while I thought I was giving.

Affirmation

The moment is surreal.  After seven months of organization, a few members of our parish refugee sponsorship committee and I huddle in the arrivals area of  the airport.  When I spy our family at the top of the escalator, I want to shout out, Welcome!  Instead, I smile and wave, and my heart swells with the gift of a vision realized. I also think of the contrast between all the goodwill and effort that have made this event happen, and the darkness of the Trump acceptance speech the night before.   

On January 31, 2016, our committee informed  our congregation that the refugee project was a go.  We expressed to them that we needed money and that, should they care to help, we had placed envelopes in the vestibule of the church.  Three months later, our congregation had given almost twenty thousand dollars.  In April, two hundred people, many from the larger community, attended a steak night that added almost three thousand dollars more.  Imagine.  We asked for donations, and we were overwhelmed.

At the same time, we requested help with household furniture and items.  Once again, the parishioners responded.  Items poured in—a sectional, linens, a desk, stereo systems, TVs and stands, area rugs, whatever we needed.  Our purchases were limited to incidentals and pillows.  One day, I found a bag of new towels destined for our refugee family by our front door.  Our furnishings coordinator was inundated with phone calls.  Could you use a vanity?  What about a sofa bed?  A committee member moving away donated many of her furnishings.  One Sunday, we informed the congregation that the home we had rented for our family was completely furnished.  Although it wasn’t necessary, we added, we could use a lawn mower, a small deep freeze, and two youth bicycles.  Within twenty-four hours, we had all those items.  People just kept giving!

At the end of May, we received news that our family was on its way.  Time to rent a home.  The landlord, a member of our parish, cut the committee a deal on the rent.  When he heard that one of the members was a young adult, he decided to dry-wall the basement and build an extra bedroom.  He installed a new water heater, replaced the eaves troughs, changed two basement windows, painted the main floor and the basement,  recaulked the bathtub, and changed the faucet and shower pull.  What a transformation!

Calls to the committee for cleaning and installation went out.  A cleaning crew was already in full swing when I arrived at the appointed time on day one.  Some cleaned windows, others freshened up kitchen cabinets, revived the wood floors, and dug into the heating grates with toothbrushes.   A week later, for day 2, more than fifteen people with three trucks among them transformed the house into a home.  Some loaded and unloaded furniture.  Others configured the rooms, installed curtains, organized the kitchen and the laundry room, made beds, and supplied the linen closet.  When we were finished, there was a recycle bin by the fridge, a small white board and bulletin board on the fridge door, with pins and magnets, and a fruit bowl on the table waiting for news of the official arrival.

Still, though, people weren’t satisfied.  They added more area rugs to the downstairs bedroom, and a clothes rod and shelving to a downstairs closet, and simply made things pretty.  The house looked like someone was already living there.  Indeed, a family was living there—they just had not arrived yet.

On Friday, they did.  After twenty-five years in a refugee camp, our family can really begin to live.  They are grateful.  They will help us build our city, our province, our country.  They enrich us; they don’t threaten us.  Our parishioners represent the antithesis of the dark message Trump and his cronies inflicted on the world on Thursday evening a week or so ago.  Rather than just talk about family values and Christianity, our parishioners live it out in their actions.  They look outward, not inward.  They are generous.  They show the world what’s possible when a group galvanizes to make a difference.  They affirm what is best in the human spirit.  As our family walked toward us, I thought how Donald Trump and his supporters cannot be more wrong. 

Intimations

A dragonfly swoops into the patio,

alights on the side of my knee. 

Its feet anchor on the folds of my pants.  

Its wings flutter and spread for balance,

like a fragile trill on the tip of a musical note. 

We maintain this odd equilibrium,

the dragonfly and I,

in a bizarre companionship.

From me, it asks nothing more

than safety and a stable perch. 

No conversation,

no ideas,

no creativity,

no answers,

no vigilance of language or gesture,

no energy.  

 

Just being.

Just being me.

We commune,

the dragonfly and I,

for more than ten minutes,

content in the momentary symbiosis,

my time an insignificant thank you

for the innumerable mosquitoes it has consumed.

I must coax it away, in deference to my day’s agenda. 

Finally, as my fingers disturb the folds,

the dragonfly zigzags off,

leaving me quieted and serene.

(High)Road

True confession--I am ashamed to post the meme on the right on anything that can be read by others.  It represents intolerance and an entrenched world view that contradicts everything I know about Canada.  I’ve seen this meme many times on various social media, and it's past time to speak out.  

Most often, the words are slightly different.   “America” is politically incorrect, it reads, and “God bless America.”  If I look at the meme closely, I can see that the words Canada and everyone are in different fonts (Who says, "God bless everyone" anyway?  Even Dickens' Tiny Tim says, "God bless Us, Every One"!); my conclusion is that a disgruntled Canadian agreed with the American version and altered the meme to express some angst. 

The Canada I know is better than this meme.  The Canada I love is a society that is a model for the world.

The Canada I know is neither politically correct nor politically incorrect.  My Canada shows respect for all people.  In the Canada I know, language honors peoples and cultures; it doesn’t degrade them.  As a nation, we recognize that long-standing phrases that served some groups well for generations are no longer appropriate in a society that is conscious of the power of implicit messages to empower and uplift.  We change our language willingly as a result of growing understanding of the hurt certain words have caused and a desire to move forward.  As I have said in another post, political correctness masks negativity, while respect is genuine.

In the Canada I know, the people who want to say “Merry Christmas“ say it.  That phrase expresses their reality, and they are comfortable with it.  They accept, as well,  that many Canadians observe Christmas  as a secular feast, not a religious one.    They understand that, among those for whom Christmas is a holiday in December,  newcomers to Canada make up only a small number, and that most  have lived here for generations, even centuries, no matter whether their origins are European, Asian, African, or Middle Eastern.  It’s just that society is  making an effort to be inclusive.   Why?  Because it’s 2016.

Christianity has never been the defining worldview in our land for all people.  For millenia, Christmas was unknown to First Nations, whose Creator manifested its presence through the land.   For a time, as European newcomers came to dominate that land, their religious practices became the norm in Canada.   Non-Christian newcomers and long-standing non-Christian or atheistic citizens lived with  the way things were.   The Canada I know evolves.     My Canada can live with using “Happy Holidays” in broad, official contexts so that everyone can feel at home. 

For the same reasons, the people in the Canada I know who want to trust in God will do that.  Those who want to be blessed by their God will invoke that deity, and those who want others to be blessed will pray to their deity for that blessing.  All of us can live with that.  Those who do not believe in any deity won’t.  Official activities that take occur in places that welcome everyone, like legislatures, government buildings and offices, public schools, and public hospitals, as well as the official symbols therein, must be secular.  Religious blessings and prayer cannot be imposed on the general public.  They are a matter of personal choice.  (I accept the presence of personal religious symbols worn by people working in those establishments or frequenting them, like the Sikh turban, the Christian cross or rosary, or the niqab, for example). 

Canadians have always honored their military.  We have always been grateful for the sacrifice our troops have made to safeguard the freedoms we enjoy today.  The Canada I know continues that tradition.  My Canada has laws in place to protect those freedoms, so I know that people can make their home here and maintain those traditions of their homeland that are congruent with Canadian law.

The Canada I know is a welcoming place.  It has welcomed more than 25,000 refugees since the fall.  Individual Canadians have donated millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of items of clothing and household goods, and thousands of volunteer hours to help newcomers adjust to their new home.  They also understand that a good number of these newcomers would rather be in their own land; strife and persecution in that country threaten their very lives, and that’s why they’ve come here.

The Canada I know undertands that a few people living in the past don’t define a country or a religion.  My Canada knows that our country is built on the people that have always been here and those who have come from all corners of the world to create the society they could not construct in their own land.  Canada is a grand experiment that works.  All of us, no matter what our origins, live together in relative peace.  Do we squabble once in a while?  For sure.  Still, though, we show the world that different races and cultures can do more than coexist in peace; they can thrive. 

The Canada I know takes the high road.  This sign defames everything we stand for.