Traveling with Crows

Beginner's Mind

I have learned to tolerate beginning again when it comes to running.  I urge my old legs through the first mile and wish for a better feeling, like the feeling that I have ever run one mile before in my life (I have been a runner for over twenty-five years), but now as I get older, the first mile goes by, and I still must tolerate the beginner's mind, the frustration with how hard it is.  After forty-five minutes in the rain in the 41-degree temperatures, I feel good.  All over.  Blood and lymph have rearranged.  Lungs have cleared.  I remember that I can do this, something not many people my age would choose to do.  That feels good, too, beside my dog, trotting back across the footbridge.  I must keep moving.

But the task of beginning something altogether new is humiliating.  I could not for the life of me play ukulele in the key of B this week.  I got no good sound out of those strings.  I felt I could not play the ukulele at all, and that's because beginner's mind is so hard.  Yes, my fingers do not work.  Yes, I have not yet learned to coordinate my hands.  It's not the physical that is holding me back, though -- it is the mental effort needed to have patience with myself.  Beginner's mind seems harder than any single task.  When I try to force my fingers into the shape of the B chord, my brain feels like it will fall out.  I serve myself under intense fire and passion, trying to engage my fingers with my will and move into something beautiful.  Like magic, I want it all at once.  This is not the truth of the beginner.  The truth is, it may be some months before I like my own sound.

We have rain.  Almost enough rain to call it normal, almost enough rain to begin a spring season.  We have spent days inside listening to the steady drive of it outside.  It does not matter at all what I think.  It either rains or it doesn't.  The rain is good at raining, and it sounds beautiful.  I turn to tune the instrument again today, after my run, after the internal lecture on patience.  Steady, now.  My friend and teacher, James Russell, reminded me, "What's hard is still hard."

"Even if you're good?" I asked him.
"Even if you're good."

Making a Wish

Raven croaks in the tree above

bare branches

while below and yet above me

on a lesser branch

quietly

there is the eagle.  What if

I had not looked up?

What if

the raven did not croak?

Later that day, I turned back

toward the new-falling rain.

Rainbow.

Schwarzenegger and Rain: The Locomotive is Coming

I was on the couch enjoying my coffee yesterday when the Governor delivered his State of the State address.  We're half a dozen inches behind seasonal here in the North State, which supplies water for hundreds of miles in California.  I had just come back from San Diego, driving the whole length of the state, passing signs in agricultural fields that read, "Dust Bowl Created By Congress," among others.  When Schwarzenegger promised to end the "war on water," I wondered if he was going to do a rain dance.  He admitted, "Our economy cannot grow without water. Our population cannot live without water. It is our state's lifeblood." Right now, we need at least fifteen feet of snow to fall on our mountains in order to fill our fields, and we're not even halfway there yet, though we're halfway through the "rainy" season.  In a full-on drought of finances and rainwater, California struggles on, but the governor managed to make me feel good about it.  Most of the hype about his speech has criticized him for just this particular quirk, that he was "Arnold being too positive"; the rest of the hype (see Los Angeles Times article) focused on how he had reversed his decision on Obama's healthcare platform.  I thought I understood Arnold's speech, but I came away from the hype realizing that I had not truly heard the man. Somehow, I understood him to be stating that California needs more return on the dollar from federal programs, including health care; I understood him to say that he had reason to be positive, and he backed up his argument with statistics and more hype from Time magazine; and I understood him to be promising the impossible, better drinking water for California, better education.

Let it rain. Not one organization has assaulted the governor enough for his education fix, tying standardized tests to teacher performance. When class sizes push 35 students or more, academic research shows that student performance falls. No teacher can overcome crowding in the classroom. We need rain, and we need to decrease class sizes. We've got too many people in California, and we cannot support them. Driving home from San Diego, I was happy to escape to my mountain home, but every year that I do, the push northward reveals new housing and development. Our great state has limited pasture. Smart as we are, there is not much we can do about that.

In my final sip, I felt a little bit satisfied that Governor Schwarzenegger had at least mentioned two key points: he wants to protect higher education in the state budget and reduce prison spending; he is concerned about veterans returning home from Iraq and their mental states.  These issues are related, but only those of us who work at the three major institutions, prisons, higher education, and veterans' affairs, would really appreciate that. What he didn't say is this: Federal spending on mental health treatment for returning veterans would not only reduce suicides, it would reduce crisis response teams and violent events on our campuses and would reduce the incidents requiring the incarceration of returning veterans. But he cannot do anything about federal funding of veterans' affairs, either. California is interdependent with the rest of the nation. That's what I heard.

Deering and Stone

On the freeway in San Diego, California, between the Deering Banjo factory and the Stone Brewery, I knew I was nearing enlightenment of the beer and acoustic music flavor. I have become a born-again singer-songwriter, banjo flavor-lover music nut. Back in the early nineties in the Ozark mountains, and the old-timey banjo flavor left my ears ringing. No one would have guessed that fifteen years later, I would spend my spare time traveling to great bluegrass shows where the banjo-player makes the afternoon sky brighten with surreal light and sets you down beside snowmelt-running water, or that on New Year's Eve I would thrill to a tour of Deering Banjo before my lunch and microbrew. This renaissance of my life interests in due entirely to Tony Furtado, whose show two years back in Mt. Shasta stilled my heart, and The Infamous Stringdusters, whose show in Davis left me spellbound. The Stringdusters are due back north here in a few weeks, and though my hometown is three hours from Ashland and the show is midweek, I am going to try to get there.

I live in Redding. A folk guitarist and good friend here bought a Deering banjo and took me to see Furtado, and that began my journey. Since then, I've spent afternoons under tents at the Colusa Fairgrounds with banjo, guitar, bass, mandolin, and fiddle players. I'm prepared to do more bluegrass festivals and roadtrips this year. I'm just listening. Yes, it is high time I tune up myself, but there's no way I can meet the score of the people I enjoy. I'm sampling, drinking it in. The next 'dusters show is coming up soon, in Ashland. Like Springsteen, the 'dusters give and give and give, a high energy show with unparalleled musicianship and unforgettable lyrics. Music and poetry and the ethereal hum.

This is the story of the bluegrass roadtrip.