Weeds and Wheat and Suzuki Camp

My sermon today at West Cummington Church


Elle and Jay and I spent the week at Suzuki Camp, lugging our violins, soccer ball and a gigantic cooler full of snacks into the air-conditioned sanctuary of Easthampton High School. Shinichi Suzuki’s breakthrough was the realization that music is a language, and like any language acquisition, can best be learned from a very early age. As we learn to talk before we learn to read, so young musicians can learn to make music well before they learn how to read music; hence the stereotype of Suzuki kids playing Bach before they enter kindergarten. But Suzuki’s most appealing legacy is his insistence that music creates a beautiful heart, and that “tone is the living soul.” We parents support the kids in their practice primarily by ensuring that they create a space for these qualities. And we teach the children—or more accurately, they teach us—that music is the most direct and clear language of feelings there is. Children from every country in the world can gather together and play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or "O Come Little Children" and perfectly understand each other. We can play with joy, with sorrow, with anger, with humor, and (more often) with a mix that cannot be named by words.

It’s been my experience of reading the gospels that Jesus’s parables operate in a similar post-verbal way, that the language of the parables, as with Zen koans, is designed to override our logical brains and hit us in the same emotional solar plexus that music hits us in. As Steve said a few weeks ago, Jesus was a shock jock. The stories he tells are intended to jolt us out of our regular patterns and think in a new way, away from dualism good/bad, black/white, to seeing things in a third way, having to do with inner experience rather than a set of rules and regulations. Like all his “Kingdom of Heaven” passages, we need to start with the present moment. And that means we need to include the body.
But what happens when we’ve heard a passage so many times that it just seems like wallpaper? What if we think we know what it’s about? Love your neighbor as yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just as with music, some great song might lose its appeal when played 24/7 on the radio station (or Pandora, or Spotify, or every single day in Suzuki practice.)

Last week, Steve read us Jesus’s parable of the sower who sowed his seed in four different places: rocky ground where it could not take, shallow soil where it started to grow but couldn’t make it through the periods of hot sun, among the weeds and brambles where it was choked, and finally in the good soil, where it grew and yielded a hundredfold. When the disciples ask why he speaks in parables, Jesus quotes Isaiah, saying
“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

And then he emphasizes that if they can hear, see and understand, they can be healed.

So, when I first heard this passage, at age 14 years old, playing Judas Iscariot in a production of Godspell (Godspell is basically the gospel of Matthew, with a lot of 70s music and dance numbers,) I was filled with remorse. I was the seed on the rock! I was the seed in the shallow soil! I was the seed who got strangled by the weeds! It never occurred to me that I was also the seed that fell into good soil. And it never occurred to me that––as Steve said last week––Jesus would often respond as an observer rather than an authority figure. So that when Jesus says “Those who have ears hear. Those who have nothing will have less. Those with an abundance will have more,” he was not endorsing this; just articulating a truth.

I want to approach this weed and wheat parable through a similar lens. I think a lot of us come to these parables with the attitude of, “OK, I am going to figure this out. I am going to listen and get it right! I am going to be good soil, damn it! I am going to pull out all the weeds. I will be vigilant.” And so we meditate, we pray, we do good deeds, we cook meals for friends in the hospital, we practice our listening skills, we compost, we use organic fertilizers, we drive Priuses. And then our friend gets cancer. Our partner leaves us. We get bitten by a tick and our brains don’t work any more. We lose a child. We lose our faith. Our soil turns rocky, or scorched or weedy. Why? Is it our fault?

No way. We are powerless over all these things. I know this when I witness other people in their tragedies, but when the seed falls in the wrong places in me, I still think “It’s my fault. I should have had softer, deeper, weed-free soil." But I am the soil. God made this soil! I cannot weed myself! The conditions aren’t always up to me.

I know and work with a lot of addicts, in recovery as well as addicts who are out there, dying, making their loved ones miserable, and these parables remind me how hard we are on our addicts. We try to control them, rope them in, force them to listen. If only you would listen! If only you would be like that recovered person over there, who followed directions. Just Said No! We put chains on their feet, we do urine tests, we make the conditions of their freedom so narrow in the hopes that we can keep the weeds out. Because our hearts break every time they use, and we think the solution is ever more control. But this last parable, the wheat and the weeds, gives the lie to this. We’re not the ones who get to rip the weeds out. That’s God’s work, and much of the time, it doesn’t get to happen in this lifetime. Those parts of ourselves that are weedy are often so entwined with the parts of ourselves that are big, wonderful, heartful, hilarious, loving people that we would destroy ourselves if we were able to uproot our weeds. And sometimes those aspects of ourselves that we find weedy are really useful to other people. I have a friend who is extremely organized, and she always sees the way to get the task done. Alongside of that gift, she can be kind of bossy and controlling––a trait she sees in herself and hates. She wants so much to be serene and mellow. But when she’s serene and mellow, nothing gets done. We all like it much better when she’s bossy and controlling, even though it makes her unhappy.

It’s also dangerous to try to do the weeding for someone else. How do you really know that weed isn’t wheat in disguise? (The word in the Bible is “darnel” which is a kind of weed that closely resembles wheat, by the way.) In another case of “Everything Nerissa Knows She Learned from The Beatles,” I’d like to point out that John Lennon’s aunt Mimi hated John’s guitar so much that when he finally got rich and famous, he made her a plaque that read, “The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make your living with it.” Now, what if she’d succeeded in weeding out his bad guitar habit?

We’re all this way; a glorious mixture of weeds and wheat. If I weren’t so spaced out and unfocused, I’d never write songs, let alone get up and sing and play guitar. If Bill Clinton weren’t such a womanizing swine, he probably never would have gotten elected. If my kids weren’t so opinionated and obstinate, they would not be the strong, healthy, passionate people they are growing to be. And if Suzuki practice weren’t hard, boring, repetitive, frought with discord, my kids wouldn’t be able to stand up with fifty other kids and play “O Come Little Children,” let alone the Bach Bourrée.

In the Tantric tradition, there is a story about a demon named Rakta bija, whose name means Blood Seed. He is really bad. But every time one of the gods tries to chop his head off, every drop of his blood creates a new Raktabija—kind of like a dandelion. Pretty soon, the world is overrun with Raktabiji—terrifying demons! Finally, the gods call Kali, who is the most fearsome goddess of all. She wears a necklace of skulls and has big vampire teeth, and she comes into town riding on the back of a lioness. She lifts her sword and chops Raktabija’s head off—and then she sticks out her enormously long tongue and drinks up all the blood drops before they can hit the ground.
It is in turning toward our demons, our weeds, our addictions, our most shameful places, taking them in to our core selves, that we begin to heal. Remember, Jesus was all about healing, getting us to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, understand with our hearts––oh, yeah! It’s a body thing!––so he might heal us. We can’t heal the body without the body. And we can’t just cut off the offending body part.

So what about the fiery furnace? Is this hell? Is this damnation? Again, in the yogic tradition that I study, fire—agni—is an internal feature (often having implications of digestion). When we take our weeds and wheat in at harvest time—when we get to that place where we can look back at our experience with our seeing eyes and hearing ears and understanding hearts, with honesty and compassion—and I’d add, when the conditions are right (bonfire season=wet, not when we’re in California in forest fire season) we really can burn up the weeds and feast on the wheat. When we look back on our lives this way, everything gets used. We make amends for the harms done. We learn from our mistakes. Yes, we all want to be light and bright, positive and happy all the time. It doesn’t work that way, at least it doesn’t for me. My work is not to reject myself when I’m less than light and bright, but to take those parts in, with love and compassion, learn from them, digest them, use them as compost, and then use what I’ve learned to heal others, if I have experienced some healing.

And boy, do I need healing. I have to say, this passage speaks directly to me as a Suzuki mom, where my role is to go with the kids to their lessons and group classes and play ins, and most significantly, be their practice coach every single day while they practice the long list of tasks their teacher gives them. This means I am sitting for an hour and half a day with my two kids, asking them to do what is occasionally boring, repetitive work, certainly as boring as weeding a garden. Play "Twinkle" again. Ok, now with your pinky like this. That was great! Now do it with a tall head. The practice goes well when I can be playful and creative. Pinky! Jay is working so hard! Help him out here! Sometimes they come to practice with joy and enthusiasm and we laugh and I dance the minuet like Martha Washington, or Elle just plays something so well the hairs on my arms raise up, or Jay suddenly gets that he can play “Long Long Ago" as if he’s Idina Menzel from the Frozen soundtrack. And sometimes all of us cry in frustration, someone throws their bow on the floor, Elle stomps out of the room, Jay falls into his wet noodle position, I storm out of the room and resolve to quit this idiotic practice that will certainly, definitely kill their love for music.

But I hear over and over an over again, from grown up musicians, “I am so glad my parents made me practice.” Or “I wish my parents had made me practice.” There are some musicians who are completely internally motivated, but just as many are not, or are not so at first. I have no real faith, most days, that what I am doing with and for my kids is the ultimate best. I don’t know if they’re going to go in to psychotherapy when they’re adults to deal with their PTSD from having to play Bach Minuets till their heads exploded. That will have to be dealt with at harvest time, whenever that is.

Whenever that is. It might come sooner, it might come later. I started the week resolved to quit because Jay was so impossible and said he hated violin. The week ended with Jay declaring Suzuki Camp an “infinity” on a scale of 1-10, and telling me he wanted to play every piece through Book 8 (he’s on Book One.) Elle said she wished Suzuki Camp went for four weeks instead of one. And I got to see that the biggest problems with our practice had to do with me and my insistence that we do things the “right” way. I think my job is to help them weed out their bad alignment and wrong notes, when it’s really just to create the space for them to explore what their teacher has given them.

And The Kingdom of Heaven is here and now. It’s not “when the kids get into Harvard on a music scholarship.” It’s certainly not “when the kids play the Bach Double.” As Jesus says at the beginning of our text, "This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like: weeds mixed with wheat. We sort them out later.” It’s this moment: Elle concentrating so hard on her orchestra part. Learning how to deliver a punch line she learned from a joke told to her by two older kids. Jay running in his soccer cleats down the long corridors of Easthampton High School because he’s figured out his schedule and knows where to go to get to his next class. Elle handing out notes of appreciation to her friends, saying good job on your piece at the recital. Jay handing out flowers to his teachers, and kissing his fiddle goodnight. This, to me, is our weedy, wonderful Kingdom of Heaven.



Texts:
Matthew 13:12 “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables:
“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’[a]

Matt 13: 24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”
******
40 “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fiery furnace, so it will be at the end of the age.41
*******
Mulla Nasrudin decided to start a flower garden. He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers. But when they came up, his garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers but was also overrun by dandelions.
He sought advice from gardeners all over and tried every method known to get rid of them but to no avail. Finally, he walked all the way to the capital to speak to the royal gardener at the sheik’s palace. The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the dandelions but Mulla had tried them all.
They sat together in silence for some time and finally the gardener looked over at Nasrudin and said slowly, “Well, then I suggest you learn to love them… I suggest you learn to love them.”

Too Many Pots on the Stove

The last thing I should be doing right now is posting a blog. So maybe that's why I need to do it.

I am navigating the world of ebooks, to self-publish my 2008 title How to Be an Adult. The first time around, I had a deal with a local publisher to format the book. This time I am trying to figure all that out myself. Also, I am trying to write songs, and learn the 3 songs I've written so far this year, in time for Falcon Ridge. And I want to publish songbooks to go with our CDs Rock All Day/Rock All Night, and with our CD The Full Catastrophe. For the latter, I have a vision to put together a collection of essays on motherhood culled from this very blog. And I am deep in revisions of The Big Idea, my novel about a family rock band.

And even writing this, I am having trouble breathing.

I know I would be a lot more sane if I simply picked one project at a time to focus on and stopped trying to rotate the hot pans on the stove. But to let any of these projects go feels like death to me.

Add to all this a work schedule and a family schedule that's kept me extremely happy and occupied to the tune of not having a day off since Memorial Day. So on Saturday, Tom sent me to Williamstown, my ancestral home and the birthplace of my band (we got our start at the Williamstown Theatre Festival) for about 22 hours. What did I do? Sat in air conditioning and worked on all my projects. I sang through my new songs, recorded them on GarageBand for Katryna; worked on laying out How to Be an Adult and uploading it to CreateSpace; typed in a new first scene for The Big Idea; walked to the Co-op to eat dinner from their salad bar; and in the morning I went for a run to the graveyard where my grandfather and his family are buried.

Today I spent the day at Elle's Suzuki Institute, which meant I followed her around and took notes, avoided my iPhone, stretched my back a lot and listened to countless kids aged 5-14 playing a huge range of the Classical music canon. It's been beastly hot in New England––and everywhere I imagine––and no one is in an especially good mood. As I made a commitment this year to shake my bad moods, this didn't sit well with me. But the more I tried to "snap out of it," the more unpleasant I found the entire experience. And I kept asking myself, "Why am I not feeling the magic I always feel when I'm here?" Because for the past 3 years, Suzuki Camp has been one of my favorite places to be. I am usually a sucker for the whole package: the play-ins, the awesome teachers from New York, Maine and Boston, the lunches on the lawn, the antics during group class, the camaraderie of both kids and parents. But today, I was just bored and uncomfortable and sick of “Perpetual Motion.”

I'm sick of my own work too, at times. And sick of myself and my inability to pour my everything into just one project. I wish I had a boss, or a life coach, or a really tough friend, or my sister to tell me "Drop this and this and this and focus on that." I wish sometimes that someone would make me choose.

In the middle of the day, after lunch, the whole campus troops over to an old church where kids have their recitals. Over the course of a week, every kid in the camp gets a turn by him- or herself on stage to play a solo. Elle is playing something called “Gavotte from Mignon” by a composer named A. Thomas. It's cool–– and sounds the littlest bit like the theme from NPR. But today she wasn’t playing, so the two of us sat with another family, turned our programs into fans, and took turns fanning each other while we listened to the 13 or so kids get up and take their turn. Some were good, some were beginners, most had that stereotypical Suzuki Glaze in their faces that made me doubt the method way back when I thought I had a choice about my life. That was before Elle grabbed me by the hand at age 3 and dragged me to our current teacher, Emily Greene and insisted on studying the violin with her. And pretty much, until today, I haven't looked back or regretted any of it. Suzuki has given a lovely structure and flow to our lives, and I mark my days by the CD we put on for the kids to listen to in the morning, and the check boxes on their weekly assignment sheets as we go through our practice items together every day (Suzuki says, "We only practice on the days we eat.") As I listened to the kids play, I felt listless and hot and despairing. Completely uninspired. My new songs are ok, but they are all over the place. There is no core to them, nothing that links them together in any way. I can't see our next CD. I have no idea in what direction to write.

The last kid to play was a 12 or 13-year-old boy. He put a chair down on the stage and sat down with his cello. The director of the institute, who doubles as the piano accompanist, left her post; the boy began playing a movement from the sixth of Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello: the Allemande in D. He played with his eyes closed, as though he were as much a listener as a player. After a minute, I poked Elle who was busy fanning her neighbor. "Listen to this," I whispered, and she did, sitting up in her pew for the rest of the eight-minute piece. The room held the music tenderly: the bruised sentiment of a man who had recently lost his wife. I was absorbed into the music, forgetting about my own artistic woes, forgetting about my big problem about how to get out of my bad mood, forgetting the heat, forgetting the glazed faces. I rode the current of the music. And when the boy pulled that last lovely D out of his cello, I rose to my feet and applauded, tears spanking my eyes.

The rest of the day I was more present for what I love about Suzuki and this camp in particular. Elle took a fiddle class with a remarkable teacher named Sarah the Fiddler who explained to the kids that the great thing about fiddling is that when you make a mistake you get to incorporate it into your playing and figure out why it works: which is basically my modus operandi. Then there was orchestra, where the amazing Tyson somehow gets a group of kids who sound like they are each playing the “Star Spangled Banner” at a different speed to pay attention enough to him to get them, by the end of the week, to sound coherent. And he does this without ever yelling. I knew the day was a success when I told Elle it was time to go, and she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Is every single other kid at this whole camp going home too?" I said yes. And only then did she say, "Well, OK" and followed me out the door.

Maybe this is what being an artist in midlife is all about: moving the different pots around. Maybe it’s about doing the thing that calls you in the moment, even if different things yell at different frequencies. As I wrote a few months ago, it’s become clear to me that my mission is not, after all, to write some memorable songs that will outlive me and be sung by kids 100 years from now on the back of school busses, or whatever it is they might be driving. My mission is to have a good life and to spread around some of whatever it is I’ve been taught so that others get some of the goods as well and get a chance to live as well and joyfully as I have lived. Process over product has been my motto of late. So this evening I played with my kids. We got wet, and I picked a bouquet of flowers from my garden. And instead of working on either of my books or trying to write a new song, I wrote this post. Tomorrow I will pack our cooler and violin and music stand and we’ll go back for another day of Suzuki, and let my own projects simmer on the stove.

September Garden and Life is in the Practice

I look out at my garden these days and drink it in, knowing that by Saturday morning it will likely be gone. All that work in September. Worth every bit for these morning viewings from the couch in the new kitchen. St. Francis in the foreground, Kuan Yin in the back. But still, it breaks my heart that in a few days the pansies and impatiens will be gone forever, and the cone-flowers and hydrangea will wilt and brown.

Jay has had four violin lessons and one group class. It’s so strange to see how different two children can be. After years of telling friends that my kids were more alike than not, as violinists at least they show their proclivities. Elle’s bow-hold was right-on from the start; Jay grabs his fat marker in his fist and doesn’t comprehend that one does not wield it like a sword. We are supposed to be clapping out each of the six Twinkle variations to our new teacher’s words, but Jay wilts after one-half of one, where Elle dashed ahead, graduating from her Twinkles in less than nine months. I take his fists in my two hands and tap them together for claps, but he says, “Dis gives me a stomach ache.” And more painfully, “Dis is my body and I get to do what I want!” Who can argue with that?

In Paul Tough’s new bestseller How Children Succeed (which I am supposed to be reading but haven’t started yet, but I did listen to half the This American Life piece about it) he argues that the skills most necessary to teach kids are self-control, to learn to focus attention, and to delay gratification. The exercises our teacher gives us are all about these skills. We start with a bow in which Jay says, “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” or “Good evening,” depending on what time it is. We listen to the Suzuki Slow Twinkle CD and clap along, as I said above, and we listen to the Twinkles up to speed while he sways back and forth, his feet in playing position and his box violin on his shoulder. Then we do “Up Like a Rocket” with his pen-cum-bow and his bunny bow-hold. He wants to make up his own lyrics, but his teacher insists on hers. Delay gratification. He wants to make his pen go horizontally for “back and forth like a choo choo train,” but his teacher makes him keep it vertical. Self control. He ends each practice with “Thank you for the wonderful lesson,” and a bow. Nothing to complain about that. It’s teaching him good manners.

So why is this all so hard for me? Because he doesn’t always want to do any of it, and I feel foolish, frustrated, helpless, and most of all like a Tiger mom. A failed Tiger mom at that. We set up his foot chart (a 20″ cardboard with construction paper cut outs of his feet positions) and it can take 20 minutes for him to get in rest position and bow. Before he can do this, he has to fall on the floor a few times, balance on one foot and go, “Whoa! whoa!” and wave his arms around, ask for a drink, decide he has to pee, take off his shirt, roll up his pants legs, look out the window to see if Gulliver the Cat has come over, look out the window to see if his dad has biked home yet, set up his favorite cars to watch the practice, go get his ducky to watch the practice, count the marbles in his marble jar and then fall on the floor crying and insisting he hates violin and never wants to play again.

And we haven’t even picked up the actual violin.

Elle’s teacher Emily Greene says that whatever you are dealing with in terms of family dynamics will come out in the violin practice. As an author, and a teacher of writing, I notice that whatever is hard for me in life is hard for me on the page, and so it goes with my students. If a student doesn’t know herself, it is hard for her main character to be known. If a student is impatient and in a hurry, her scenes will skim by. If a student is fluent in the language of emotion but slow to take action, her scenes will be rich studies of humanity but lacking plot. And if a person cares more about being liked and well-thought of by teachers and other authority figures (but not little boys) and is the tiniest bit afraid of confrontation, violin practice sessions can turn into the Clash of the Titans.

Today I wised up. I looked at what we were being asked to do and decided to do exactly the minimum amount needed to make both of us feel like we had some kind of productive practice. Jay can’t make it through even one Twinkle, either in the swaying exercise or the clapping one. Our teacher doesn’t know this because I haven’t told her. Instead I have brought her practice sheets covered with stickers (and let’s be truthful: the stickers are for me, not Jay. I am the one who puts them on and gets a big hit from seeing them taking over the yellow lines of the paper.) But I will go in on Thursday and tell her we need to slow down, even though progress seems snail’s-paced to me as it is. And this morning, I got down a shaker of non-pareilles which I used to bribe him to do each item on our practice sheet. I had Jay bow, do one Twinkle variation for swaying, one for clapping and his "Up Like a Rocket." It all took five minutes. I hugged him and praised him and he bowed deeply. “Sank you for a wonderful lesson,” he murmured.

He may or may not continue with the violin. He may be a perennial or an annual. What matters is that he get this space each day, this moment of my full attention and love (which includes structure, boundaries, firmly holding the line) the way I have my moments with the pansies and St. Francis every morning.

Practicing it Up in the Garden

My niece, with her band, has recorded her first single, which she wrote, sings lead on and plays bass on. It's a rocking song called "Speak Up!" and my kids just got their mitts on a CD of it.

"Speak up, stand up/Don't let anyone tell you what to do..." sings my 6-year-old daughter, along to her beloved cousin's vocal. Her little brother Jay mimes playing the descending bass line. We've listened to the song four times in a row. I am blown away by the confidence, the mastery, the reedy sweetness of the eleven-year-old voice. And, to make matters even more delightful, the song is about music itself, and the deliciousness of coming into one's identity as a young musician:

"In music there are no lines to cross/In your own song you are always the boss."

Tom and I just came from a Suzuki parent class, a two-hour affair held for all parents of Suzuki kids of all instruments. I felt tearful--in a good way--by the end of it. Other parents shared their reasons for taking on what is the equivalent of a college class (and we're talking about just the parents' role here!):
-"It gives my son confidence and something he can be proud of."
-"It teaches my daughter that if you practice something, you will get better."
-"If I am there to guide them, it keeps them from laying down the wrong neural pathways," -"This is an opportunity to give my child the ability to master something."
-"She whistles the themes of the music all day long!"

Interestingly, none of the parents said, "Because I want my child to be the next Joshua Bell." Everyone present was more interested in process than product. In fact, the teacher (Emily Greene) even referred to playing the violin as a by-product of the method. The real fruits are compassion, frustration tolerance, self-control, appreciation of beauty, self-esteem and a closer parent-child relationship.

I am all for all of this. And the above are the reasons I show up day after day to the practice sheet our teacher makes and insist Elle pick up her fiddle and play her repetitions of "Allegro" and "Witches' Dance," even when she responds by becoming boneless and falling onto the floor. But I would add to the list: a life-long relationship with music.

We parents also went around and shared what is hardest for us about Suzuki. Most said the conflicts arising around practice. I added that for me the biggest fear is the thought that plays in my head when Lila doesn't want to practice and I am making her: I am destroying her love for music!

Why do I have this thought? Because sometimes I hear from other rock musicians that they were forced to take music lessons when they were kids and they hated "that classical sh*t." (Of course, they went on to become professional drummers...) Or because my father said he hated having to practice his cello growing up (of course he plays guitar now, all the time, whenever he can get his hands on it, and no one makes him...) Or that my daughter herself says, "I'm sick of practicing!" (But if I tell her she can quit, she immediately goes running for her instrument.)

Music is hard. There's no getting around the fact that in order to play half decently one has to put in some hours. And most musicians have some kind of internal struggle with practicing. (Some don't. My friend Pete Kennedy told me he still practices 3-5 hours a day, and I can't imagine he "makes" himself do this. His guitar seems like an appendage of himself.) But anything worth having a lifelong relationship with takes time and perseverance and has hard spots. Somehow we (I) get the idea that music should be all pleasure. Nothing is all pleasure. Everything that matters in life takes work: getting to see a great view from the top of a mountain. Having an incredible relationship with another person. Writing a beautiful poem. Painting a picture. Creating a garden from a patch of weeds.

"At the outset of lessons, neither parent nor child counted on the struggles that can often come between them during practices. First lessons often start after children have seen other children performing – or perhaps playing games in group class. The parent-child duo takes up an instrument with beautiful images of working together happily to produce delightful sounds. There’s usually a honeymoon period, but before long, parents begin to realize that the work of practicing resembles gardening with your bare hands more than arranging fresh flowers in a vase. (And don’t be fooled: even the parents who appear that have practices as graceful as an ikebana also run into a thorn now and then.)

"An important truth from gardeners can help parents who practice with their children: you can’t tug on a play to make it grow. You have to trust the process. But there’s nothing wrong with fertilizing, watering, and generally caring for a plant. That’s what gardeners do. Parents need to do it as well. In the process of tending beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetables, gardeners also encounter weeds. And pests. They also get some dirt under their fingers. In their own way, so will parents.” (from "Building Violin Skills," Ed Sprunger)

This beautiful quotation from the Suzuki teacher, violinist and psychotherapist Ed Sprunger hit me where I lived yesterday when Emily read this to us. As a writer and a teacher of writing, I realized the universality of this thought. You can't tug on your writing, either. You can't tug on your relationship. You have to leave space for the serendipitous, like your 11-year-old-budding-rock-star niece lighting a fire under your 4-year-old pre-Twinkler. For as soon as he'd finished listening to his cousin's single (5 times in a row,) Jay, who just had his first lesson last Thursday, grabbed his tiny 1/16th size violin and started playing her pop song's rhythm on the E string.

Busibombs

"Mama, what are busibombs?" my six-year-old asked me tonight, making a delightful mondegreen out of the number one term the grown-ups in our family offer the children when explaining why we can't do whatever it is we all wish we could do––"busyness." I suspect we'll be referring to busibombs for years to come, though part of me hopes we come to our senses sooner rather than later as busyness is truly the scourge of our times. She asked the question because we were tossing a number of busibombs around and concluding that we were probably too busy to do them.

"Busibombs" are delectable events that get lobbed into the midst of our already full-to-the-brim existence and send us sprawling against the walls, only to pull ourselves up, resentfully and sleepily, too stupid to do anything right, but too attached to let go of any of amazing treats exploding out of this crafty pinata of a missile. Today's busibombs include a new teaching opportunity, an invitation to play music at the church we are almost always too busy to attend, the desire for our youngest child to start cello lessons this fall with accompanying scramble to find the time to add this in, a gig in Vermont on the same day for which our son's birthday party had been scheduled, and the fantasy of trading our truck in for a Vanagon so we can car camp on Cape Cod and Yosemite.

By now you have probably read the recent New York Times piece on busyness. If you are like me, you will be too busy to read it. My favorite line is, "More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter."

My first response was "Amen, brother!" And I would have chortled and nodded my head, too, if I had read this ten years ago. I was like the author: someone who had figured out how to make a living working about four hours a week, not counting the time it took to get to the gigs that paid me to live like this, but since that travel time was perfectly pleasant, who cared? Even if you amortized my salary over the travel time and performing time, I still made off well. I used my travel time to read, write, correspond, see the country and my far away friends, have adventures, and best of all, just stare out the window of the airplane, car or van. I certainly had plenty of time to write my novel and my songs, and even the newsletter that went out to our fans and the occasional email which had not yet taken over my inbox. Somehow I also used to have time to run 6 miles a day, and do yoga and Pilates three times a week. And I wrote three pages of brain-drain in my journal first thing in the morning. And I read novel after novel, lining them up under my bench seat in the van as though on a shelf. And I napped. Oh, how I napped!

Then I examined my own life today and I stopped chortling and noticed bitterly how the guy has no kids and appears to be independently wealthy. He has no clue, I muttered. Today, it's a huge feat if I even open one daily email from the New York Times. I rarely check Facebook, I never watch TV and read almost only audiobooks. This is very bad for anyone, but especially bad for writers and artists who need time to read and reflect. Why do I let myself get this busy? How did this happen? Who can I blame?

The current epicenter of busibombs is a week-long Suzuki camp where my daughter is a camper and I am the music enrichment teacher, though even if I weren't teaching, I'd still be exhausted as parents are expected to be fully present and awake, taking notes on their child's lessons and classes, going to parent lectures, attending (without smartphones) daily hour-long recitals. On day three, one of the master teachers told us parents that she and the other teachers were all horrified at the lack of polishing and refinement our kids pieces evinced at these daily recitals. "They don't need to be perfect," she said. "But they do need to try to be perfect."

I had genuinely mixed feelings about this. No one loves to listen to a Bach concerto played woodenly or with multiple stops and starts, but to my mind it's worth the stumbles to witness the process, to see kids get up in front of their peers and demonstrate their hard work. Also, as a professional musician, I happen to love the moments when we--or my peers-- mess up and keep on going. The music is so much bigger than the musician. I know that we are going to forget lyrics, I'm going to play the wrong chord or speed up phrases here and there, but ultimately, the show is about so much more than the musician's artistry or lack thereof. It's about courage and honesty and reaching for beauty. When I see kids attempting Bach or Brahms it sends chills up my spine, even when their efforts fall short of perfection. So I quietly disagreed with the teacher, and also noted that I can ask more of my child. Sometimes I don't push her on the refining aspects because I am in too much of a hurry and too busy to take the time, to weary to have the fight.

That night when I came home, my husband said, "It's a hot day. Let's go to the beach and bring a picnic."

"Sorry," I said. "We have to practice violin."

He looked at me as though I'd just suggested we build an igloo in our front yard. "But she's been playing violin all day! It's summertime!"

I leaned against the counter, knowing if I didn't do some deep yogic breathing in that moment, I might explode--and not like a pinata.

"The teachers require it," I said through gritted teeth.

"So?" he said.

"So I want my daughter to go to camp tomorrow prepared. They have a concert on Friday."

"It's Wednesday," he said dismissively. "She can practice tomorrow."

I wanted to cry. How could he not get it? Were we that far apart? What was wrong with the nuns who educated him? Didn't they teach him to strive for perfection?
And then I was crying. My two kids came and hugged my legs anxiously as they do whenever I cry in front of them.

"You're challenging my every tribal assumption!" I wailed.

And he was. My father regularly woke at 5 and was out of the house before we got up. He'd return at ten and kiss us softly on the tops of our sleeping heads. On Saturdays, he and my mother would drive for hours to compete in professional level tennis tournaments, rush home to shower and go out to a party. On Sundays they'd wake early to prepare for "Junior Worship," a music and Bible story program they ran at our church. Sunday afternoons were family time, but we spent these playing competitive family tennis and going out for dinner, the self-appointed judges of the area-wide Perfect Pizza contest. When my sisters and I woke on weekday mornings, we'd inevitably find my mother head in hand, elbow on the kitchen table frantically grading her high school students' history papers and preparing for her classes. Certainly we were told we did not need to be perfect. But the assumption that we'd better spend our waking moments trying was mixed deeply into the very plaster of our walls.


Tom relented and we made a quick swap: he'd be my practice ally that night if I agreed to go to the beach the next. I agreed (though I made my daughter practice Thursday before the beach.) "We can't right all our parents wrongs," I said. "But we can try. I wish someone had pushed me musically when I was her age."

Tom looked at me funny, and nodded, perhaps as though I were an Alzheimer patient. The next day when I repeated this to another parent at the camp, he said, "But you wouldn't be the artist you are if you'd become a virtuoso."

These busibombs, they come by phone, by email, in the heart of a child bursting into the kitchen with some new plan that sets my carefully worked-out scheme off course; and then we follow it. As we crouched in the cool water of the lake on Thursday, the sun just beginning to set behind the trees, our kids splashing and yelling at us to watch their new strokes and their latest daredevil feats, I sighed and took Tom's hand. "You win," I said. "This is the thing to do. God's here in this lake. We're going to wake up exhausted tomorrow, but this is what we will remember. Thank you."

Shiva, Shakti, Seeger, Suzuki

Today in yoga class, our teacher Amy Reed, talked about the dance between Shiva (our bare, pure awareness) and Shakti (the ways in which we harness our awareness to engage with the world.) The two are always at play with one another, going back and forth. Some times we are more introverted--more Shiva--observing the world as it goes by, just noticing, not getting all hooked up in the story. And at other times, we are plunging in, seeing where the holes are that only we can fill. "Blessed are those that play, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," wrote Emily Dickinson. As a musician, I think about Shiva and Shakti all the time. Musicians need, primarily, to be listeners before they ever strike, sing, pluck or blow a note. We need to observe what the others are playing, or even what the silence is compelling us to. And then, at just the right moment, we engage. We come in. We join the symphony, the chorus, the jam, with the part that is ours and only ours to share.

All of which makes me think about my new career as Suzuki Mom. If a year ago you had said, "Hey, Nerissa. What is your biggest parenting nightmare?" I would have said: any situation that would put me in a position to force my daughter to do something on a daily basis. Make that one thing "music" and we move from nightmare to horror show. How could forcing a child to practice for a half hour a day breed anything other than resentment? I would resent her for not wanting to practice, and she would resent me for...well, for being me. Queen of the Daily Practice (be it unloading the dishwasher, writing a song per day, running, yoga, making gratitude lists-whatever if might be, you can be sure I will be compulsive about it. This is not so bad when it's just me we're dealing with, but I feared exposing someone I loved, especially one of my children to this facet of myself.) When the phrase "Suzuki" was mentioned, I cringed at the vision I saw before me. Me barking, "Stand up straight! Bow hold! Bow hold!" My daughter in therapy twenty years later, telling some long suffering analyst how her love for music had been drained out of her one Twinkle variation at a time.

Besides that, I had made a career for myself espousing an alternative approach to traditional music education. "Music should be fun! Just make a joyful noise! Dance like Snoopy! Sing loud and don't worry about the on-key part! Shake an egg to the music! Technique schmechnique!"

I didn't grow up with Suzuki. I learned to play piano when I became literate, which is to say I was discouraged from the kind of exploration that all kids lucky enough to have a piano take on: fists on the piano, arms on the piano, one-fingered chicken scratch on the piano, poking out the melodies I heard around me. I was taught in a structured way, to identify those black ant-like marks on a clef with the corresponding white and black keys on the keyboard. I was yelled at to practice, but always by someone in the next room.

And yet, I became a Suzuki mom. Here's how.

In September 2009, when Elle was just three, Katryna and I were booked to be a part of a Pete Seeger Tribute at the Academy of Music in our hometown, Northampton. My parents love Pete Seeger; their second date was a Seeger concert, and they discovered their love for each other over "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream." They came to town, and before the show, we got take-out from Paul & Elizabeth's restaurant. As we exited Thornes Marketplace, Elle spied a busker on the street playing a fiddle. She'd seen a violin a few weeks earlier in the Elmo version of "Peter and The Wolf."

"Mama!" she shouted pointing. "I want to play that!" I didn't take this too seriously. Since "Peter and the Wolf," she'd also decided to play the flute and the French horn. I'd had to explain to her that she was too little for woodwinds or horns (one needs a certain amount of lung power not usually achieved till the age of 8 or 9). But I knew little kids could play the violin, so I said, "Well, you can if you want."

We proceeded to the venue. Backstage, the promoter introduced us to Emily Greene, a friendly looking woman holding a guitar. "Emily teaches Suzuki violin," mentioned the promoter.

"That's funny!" I said. "Elle just said she wanted to play violin."

Elle started jumping up and down and attached herself to Emily's legs right about then, and so I took her number. I looked up and said, "Good luck tonight. What song are you playing?"

She smiled and answered, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Emily sent us a packet of information that terrified me so much that I kept it on the far corner of my desk for the next nine months. Suzuki parents were expected to practice with their child for a half hour a day, listen to a CD daily, and attend with the child not only a weekly private lesson, but two monthly group lessons! Not only that, we were expected to read Shinichi Suzuki's book Nurtured By Love and join a group discussion to talk about how it might shape our world view. As Katryna and I were on the road almost weekly doing gigs, and cramming to write our book All Together Singing In the Kitchen (a how-to and why-to raise musical children) I just didn't have the time, although it did occur to me in a guilty kind of way that maybe--just maybe-- being a Suzuki mom could inform my writing.

But Elle persisted. For nine months, she asked me steadily when we would start to play the violin. So in June, tiny violin in hand, we marched up to Emily's studio.


Right off the bat, Emily put us at ease. We didn't have to practice a half hour--only five minutes at first. We had some simple tasks: listen to the CD, hold the violin, make a "bow hold." Elle wasn't even allowed to touch it to the violin. And we were given a chart and some stickers. Every day we did these things, we got a sticker. My inner perfectionist was gratified.

And so was Elle. This, I thought, might just work.

Recently--well, since giving up caffeine--I have noticed the pause in between Shiva and Shakti, the moment before the partners take hands for the dance. And this is a good thing for me. I tend to act without thinking; to leap before I look. Taking the time to really think about Suzuki was unusual for me in that sense. But I believed that if I had let Elle go forward right away with the violin that I would have burned out and given up before the practice could take hold. And while I might be able to do that to myself, I felt I couldn't do that to my child. And so when we finally went forward, I made a deal with myself, similar to the deal I made when I became a parent. "I will do the best I can, and I will make a lot of mistakes. I will not be great, but I will be good enough."

This attitude, when I remember to maintain it, works very well in terms of our practice. We don't practice every day, but we never do less than five days a week. I do get impatient, but I have yet to threaten to burn her dollhouse. (See previous post). And when I do feel my temper rising--when she throws her rented violin on the floor in frustration, when she hits her brother with the bow, when she purposely plays the pieces twice as fast or three times as slow as they're supposed to be played (I recognize that these crimes might seem wildly divergent to you, but to a musician, they're all about the same)--I sometimes, OK, often, raise my voice. And then the image comes back of the poor tortured twentysomething in the analyst's office cursing Mommy Dearest. And that's when I get to soften, as we do in yoga when we find ourselves trying too damn hard. And I say, "I am so sorry. Let's take a break. Let's cuddle." And she puts down that tiny violin, crawls into my lap and we sit. We listen. We observe. And when we are ready, we pick up the violin again and play.