Category Archives: Ahimsa

Mike Gets It

One of the after school programs where we do the workshop provides a helper, a counselor, a guy we’ll call Mike (since that’s his name).  Mike came in the first time with a drill sergeant demeanor, herding the kids, telling them sternly to stay in their seats and be quiet.

This was not really the vibe we need in the workshop, the first rule is move around to where you’re comfortable, keep moving if you like.  The second is to talk about what you’re planning to do.  

There was a minor clash that first time, the second time was a little easier.  By the third session Mike felt no need to discipline the kids, since they were all busy and involved with what they were doing.  Last week I pointed something out to Mike.

“Damn…” he said, and I nodded.  Four kids were animating at the animation stand by themselves, two moving the things on the animation stand, two photographing.  

“And in the full two-hour workshop another couple of kids would be at the computer editing and working on the soundtrack while the other kids were animating,” I pointed out.   He was impressed.

This week Mike was animating.  Sitting by ten year-old Jacob, the two of them enthralled by a Muybridge sequence I’d shown them,  Mike said “I’ll help you,” and was soon diligently working on a sequence of a running man.

By the end of the session Mike was as giddy as many of the kids sometimes get after a session of animation.

“Lily,” I called out to the girl who was trying to get her book back from Mike, who was holding it just out of her reach, “leave Mike alone.”

And Mike, rather than barking at the kids to stay in their seats, threw his head back and laughed.

Music Sweet Music

At the end of a hectic animation session on too little sleep Thursday, ignoring a couple of the fathers, who were waiting to pick up their kids after the workshop, I assembled the wild little animators around me on the carpet to do the soundtrack.   Loopy, a wonderful multi-track looper app was open on the iPad, a five-way headphone splitter plugged in.   Four kids and I put on the headphones.

I pointed to the clock, it was 4:55.  Not enough time, I noted, we really needed the 25 minutes I was trying to get while they were ignoring my attempts to get the room cleaned up and ready, but anyway…

I had them listen to the beat, which Amza had tapped in to set the tempo for the metronome.  My only instruction:  do something along with the beat when I point at you.  I realized quickly it was best to give each a track of their own, to be able to fade things in and out and get rid of any noise, while preserving anything that might be great on its own track.  It also kept the rest of them quiet and allowed the one making the track to hear him or herself think.  It is crucial to be able to hear yourself when making music with others.

“When I point to you, say how old you are” and I pointed to Amza who rapped out, “I am eight eight eight eight”, and then to Natalie who sang “I am Te-ehn!” and around the circle it went, Kazu, who deadpanned “I am ten” then Auden, “I am eight eight eight eight” and so forth.  Amza then sang a ditty right out of the history of Afghanistan, where his mother is from.  Natalie sang a wild and melodic loop that sounded like “Magical Purpose” sung three times, but which I realized, after 1,000 listenings during overdubs, was probably “Magical Puppies.”  The others all kicked in manic parts, I said goodbye, and they were off.   I stayed behind to finish cleaning up and then took my assistant for a burger.

When I got home and began mixing it down I was struck by the variety, the creativity, the fact that they were all singing in the same key, and none of them did anything that conflicted with the beat.  I was amazed as I began to dub a bass track and some more percussion to go with the metronome that was on the track.  I added an electric piano playing a simple pop chord change.  It was rocking.

Then the devil got into me.  I couldn’t stop.  There’s a piano playing the theme, then a bluesy riff that goes against the beat and the bass line.  It was impossible to resist adding a guitar part, inspired by Stochelo Rosenberg by way of Eric Clapton, then another, then a tenor ukulele.  Every time I listened to the finished track I thought of something else that needed to be added.  And I went back and added it.

Played back against the already frenetic animation, it’s useless as a soundtrack.  Very good to listen to while walking a few miles, as I intend to do presently, but relentlessly hectic, preventing the mind from focusing on what it is watching, turning the animation into a nightmare of over-amped wildness, instead of a cool melange of new and groovy ideas.

Oh, well.  The technique works beautifully, and augurs well going forward, even if not the hopped up use I put this first experiment to.  As I told a kid, who sounded truly shocked to hear it, we learn the most by trying something and failing– and then trying it again.

I know whereof I speak.

Sending a Severed Head by email

Honestly (not really), I wonder what’s wrong with me sometimes.  

I ponder the lack of response I often get and never stop to consider that what I think of as a delightful six second animated snapshot of true friendship and whimsy may actually be a grisly severed head.  

Errors in judgment and misguided thinking happen all the time.  Look at the otherwise highly intelligent people who believe barbaric, destructive things and spend millions to convince others of these repugnant beliefs.  

So I suppose I should be philosophical at the virtually unanimous aghast silence that met this latest emailed monstrosity.  One brings it on oneself when one appoints oneself a spokesman for friendship and creativity in a world that commodifies everything, most especially time.

You be the judge:  http://vinebox.co/u/wsEcbPUF5lE/wdsh1bQVTUo

Maren's monster

 

It’s not about the interest rate comfortable people pay

It’s one thing to nonchalantly pay your 3.85% mortgage on something that you live in, a comfortable home that appreciates in value, is an asset you can eventually sell to recoup your investment, if not also a profit.

It’s another thing entirely to pay mortgage interest four times what the banks are paying, on a house you will never live in, a house full of vermin and every kind of expensive vexation, a house of plague you avoid.  And the repayment amount exceeds your combined income for a decade.

But I’m not here to whine about interest rates on unwisely taken student loans.  There is more important business, like getting you to reading this again, with focus and attention.  To imbibe its truth, and to taste the truth of it, and to think on it a moment.

WENDELL BERRY:  But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers.

The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you.

You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me.

And this can’t be hurried.  This is the dreadful situation that young people are in.

I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience.

And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

And To Be Patient in An Emergency is A Terrible Trial

BILL MOYERS: When did you know you were free? And I ask that because of the poem you wrote, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

WENDELL BERRY: You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.

BILL MOYERS: Then read your own poem.

WENDELL BERRY: This….this was a long time ago. “The Peace of Wild Things.”

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

BILL MOYERS: The grace of the world, take that a little further for me.

WENDELL BERRY: I meant it in the religious sense. The people of, people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as…as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this. “No amount…” This is you. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it … can for long disguise its failure” to conserve the wealth and health of nature. “Eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up … thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.” That’s as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as I’ve ever read and surely if that’s happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say Wendell, please tell me what I can do?

WENDELL BERRY: All right. Well, you’ve put me in the place I’m always winding up in and…that is to say well we’ve acknowledged that the problems are big, now where’s the big solution? When you ask the question what is the big answer, then you’re implying that we can impose the answer. But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

Saving A Life

I was running late for the children’s animation workshop today.  The weather service had put the area on tornado watch, I heard on the radio.  We have tornadoes now in NYC.  One ripped through here a couple of years ago, tore hundreds of trees out by the roots.  There was talk of drenching rain.  I had a call, talked for a few minutes, looked at the clock, realized I just had time to make it, if I ran, and if I also got lucky.  I jumped into the shower when I should have already been on the train.

As the water began to hit the tub I saw a spider down near the drain trying to scurry away, but she couldn’t get any traction with the droplets gathering on the side of the tub.  I shut the water, with the thought that I was crazy, I was already late.  Reached for a piece of toilet paper, coaxed the spider on to it, put the spider and toilet paper on the sink.  Showered.  When I got out the spider was walking on the sink, kind of shaking the water off its legs.  I smiled, jumped into my clothes, put on the heavy back pack and ran down to the subway which I caught with 5 seconds to spare.

Rushing to the workshop, and arriving, dripping with sweat, four minutes before I had to start it, I didn’t stop to think that the ahimsa bit wouldn’t have worked out so well for me and my little friend if the critter at the bottom of the tub had been a cockroach.

A Little Wisdom under the menu

There is a vegetarian Chinese restaurant that we love, on Main Street just north of the LIE.  A few years ago, during some very vexing days, when we sat down to eat there I was struck by an aphorism under the glass my menu had been covering:

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.

I copied it in Chinese with my brush pen and the waitress, like a beautiful deer trying to make herself understood in human language, smiled happily and praised my calligraphy.   I told her I write Chinese the way a parrot speaks, but she was undeterred, pointed to each character, trying to explain its deeper meaning.   I left the restaurant feeling I’d learned something important to remember.  I rewrote the phrase many times over the next few days.

Yesterday, in the midst of new vexations, which grow like weeds in most of our gardens, this was under the glass where I sat:

When doing something, instead of worrying or being vexed about it, we should just be mindful.

A reminder:  we cannot change what is happening in this troubling world while we work:  better than vexation is careful attention to doing the work as well as we can.

Sometimes it takes a long time to see the obvious

There are things we say, thinking they are everything we need to say.   A year or more later, sometimes, we realize there was something important we should have added, but left out.

I’m thinking about this, oddly, as I begin to keep a Gratitude Journal.   I’ve written down about, well, let’s see, 28 things I feel gratefulness about so far, collected last night during a long train ride home.  I hope to form the habit of noting my good fortune, and increasing my ability to see the small miracles that are quite common, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for them.  The love between that child and his mother on the train the other day, for example.  Or the fleeting smile on the face of the tough guy on the other side of the subway car when he saw the same thing I was smiling about, a second before he put his mask back on.

Out of the blue recently I thought of a missed chance to add a sentence or two when I should have, and it haunts me slightly that I didn’t add the important sentiment I realize now was missing from my answer.   Sometimes, in the effort to come to the point smartly, the larger point is missed.

An old friend was in town, a very talented musician and wonderful improviser, someone I love to play music with.   He was moving to the other side of the world, I don’t know if he was truly happy about it, but he was gamely moving to the other side of the world.   It would be a long time, if ever, until I saw him again.   

He and I had a mutual friend, a very good friend for many years, famously demanding and difficult.  This friend was increasingly unhappy as the years went by, and critical, and humorless. His demand for attention, inflexibility and inability to listen made him more and more difficult to be around.   He called at the worst times and always needed to have a long conversation, he always had a long, usually aggravating, story he needed to tell.  He was angry when he was not depressed, and expressed his disgust at a series of betrayals that began to look eerily identical.  He fought about being angry, claimed he was not at all angry.  Although he was extremely intelligent, quite talented and had other good qualities, those things became harder and harder to see.  The relationship became toxic to me and it finally came to a head in the weeks after my father died.  

I’d tried valiantly to have a better friendship with him, over literally several years, long letters, long conversations, but in the end I could not save the relationship.   We brought out the worst in each other and it was time to stop being  constantly reminded of what he considered my failures, hearing over and over about his endlessly repeating betrayals at the hands of virtually everyone he met.  His mother was very understanding of my position in the end and asked helplessly what, if anything, she could do to help him.

My friend the musician was in NY visiting an old friend who has always been an older brother to him.  He and his wife stayed with this old friend on the eve of their move to the other side of the world and while they were in town I was invited to join them for a quick lunch and then, a day or two later, to spend an afternoon walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with them.  

At the end of that nice walk, as we drove up the West Side Highway, my friend mentioned he was probably going to visit this former friend of mine.  They’d been out of touch a long time, he said, but he was planning to drop in.  I told him and his wife that the guy would be delighted to see them, lived in a beautiful place they should not miss while touring America, would surely show them a good time.  

The driver, my friend’s older brother, smiled at me from the rear view mirror and asked me pleasantly why it was I’d stopped being friends with him.  I smiled back and said “Truthfully, I came to realize we brought out the worst in each other.”  And that was that.  I never heard from any of them again.

I might have added that it pained me greatly to have things come to that sad end after decades of friendship, and that I’d tried mightily, and made every effort to improve things.  I might have spent five seconds to impress on them how seriously I take friendship, that I am not the categorical, black and white hanging judge who cuts off an old friend the way saying “we brought out the worst in each other” might have made me seem.   Probably would have changed nothing, but I regret not adding that bit of my humanity as my character was being weighed.

Truthfully, it was long in dawning on me that I was on a kind of trial in that moment.

These two made my day

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Blessings are where we find them.   The gift is in learning to recognize them.
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Yesterday as I headed toward another fairly disjointed and disappointing animation session with six boys (makes me realize how important a coed group is for a good workshop– the girls are more creative and take more chances and it spurs the boys on, and the energy is much better than in this weird little boy’s club– ten is also a far better number than six) I was feeling like crap, physically and emotionally.  
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An affable but irresponsible idiot from a local film school was coming in to shoot the session, against my better judgment, and I’d had to draft a legal paper for him to sign to protect myself if he tries to do anything more with his half-assed student project than submit it for his grade.  I was really feeling up against it, up against everything.
 
On the crosstown train, toward the end of my trip,  a woman sat next to me with her 3 year-old son.  What I saw filled my heart with wonder and joy, it changed my mood instantly and completely and the rest of the day I’d been dreading went fine.   I wrote this afterwards in my journal:
 
Climbed up on
his large brown mother
his small hands reaching
his small bright face tilted up
reaching
kissing the top of her large upper lip,
her nose, her cheek
balled in a beautiful smile
and she kissed his small
smiling face
and he held on as she 
brushed her lips over his profile
and began to sing
softly and kiss him back
as he kissed her
and stroked her face
 
I was reminded
hours later
after telling her
“you two are a blessing
to everyone on this train” 
and as she smiled
another beautiful smile
and told her dumbfounded 
young son to thank me,
as the doors closed and I walked on, 
after colossal patience
with idiot school boys
and listening long
to unhappy details
from an old friend, 
my friend reminded me
 
the lives of the children 
of the wealthy
ain’t no crystal stair neither
and I should keep in mind
the stress, neglect and childhood pain
I might soothe
in them too
 
neither should I scorn
their possibly unlikable parents’
money
which would help ease 
the unbearable worry of poor Sekhnet
who righteously agonizes
over my great gift
for not making a living.

What We’re Doing Here

It’s a mystery, why we don’t greet each day as the unequivocal blessing that it is.  My mother, her internal organs riddled with a million tiny cancerous tumors, was given a few months to live back in 1992; she lived another 23 years.   It is unfair to single her out, but outside of loving opera, and laughing when something was funny, and seeing the dark humor in things sometimes, she did not greet every new day as a blessing.  Unfair indeed to single my poor, dead mother out, because she was by no means alone in this.  I am trying to think of someone who greets every day as a blessing, and I’m not coming up with anyone that I know.

But, look at it seriously.   Everyone has reasons to complain, feel bitter, cheated, to hold on to anger about many things that are truly aggravating.   All this is true, work often sucks, people are often thoughtless, or worse, the world is increasingly distracted, run by greedy, sometimes evil bastards, and it’s hard to get a thoughtful grunt most of the time out of most people, even those closest to us.  Everyone has their list of grievances.  But look at it seriously.  A hundred blessings every day.  Seriously.  

As a young man, delivering envelopes and packages on a bike so as not to take part in a corrupt and hateful materialistic society, I found myself in an elevator that wasn’t moving.  I was paid per delivery and this had been a day of endless delays.  I wasn’t paid for waiting, unless I waited more than twenty minutes.  I’d waited nineteen times for nineteen minutes that day and I was doing a slow burn in the dingy service elevator that sat, doors closed.  The corrugated metal cell smelled of sweat and urine.   I grumbled to an older woman that it wasn’t my day.   She was quick to correct me, “Don’t say it’s not your day.  If you’re alive, it’s your day!”  I nodded, gave her something between a grimace and a smile and eventually the elevator began its slow climb to the floor where I dropped off the important envelope and got a signature on my ticket so I could get paid.

The other night I was sitting outside the 24 hour laundromat as my clothes enjoyed the amusement park inside, spinning wildly in the dryers.  It was a cool night, a delightful night, really.  It had been muggy, but now there was a mild breeze that was the perfect temperature.  I sat in a chair enjoying it.  A woman walked up, somewhat painfully, put her bags down, sat heavily and looked over at me about to complain.  “I was going to start complaining that my feet hurt,” she said and I smiled.   I immediately thought of that old woman on the elevator thirty something years ago.   I told her she decided not to complain when she felt how good that breeze felt, and she smiled, and agreed.   I told her about what the woman in the elevator said to me, she nodded and looked relieved.

I told her the outline of the story of Wavy Gravy’s life, as told in Saint Misbehavin’.  He’d been a poet, extrovert and a trouble maker and had been beaten by cops at several civil rights rallies.  He had his back broken by cops twice.  The second time was really bad, he was laid up for months, the operation hadn’t seemed to have fixed his back, he was in a lot of pain, couldn’t get out of bed, became very depressed.  A friend convinced him to visit a nearby hospital for kids with cancer and to stop feeling sorry for himself, go help some kids with real problems.   He passed a costume shop and bought a clown nose.  He went to the cancer ward and began performing for the kids.  He said a light went on in the world for him interacting with those kids.  He went every day, rehabilitated his back, soon was walking without a cane.  Went on, with a doctor friend, to found an organization that has restored the sight to countless poor people in Asia, Africa, everywhere.   He learned that going to demonstrations dressed as a clown no cop would ever beat on him again.   What cop wants to be on TV beating the crap out of a clown?

“That’s right,” said the woman two chairs over, and asked me the name of the movie again.  I told her and mentioned how much it had inspired me, and then excused myself to see how my clothes were doing.  They were doing very well.