What is Alive? The Budding Animist in Me Speaks His Mind

That an idea could be alive, willful, sentient, is probably the most liberating piece of information I’ve encountered in a very long time. This notion derives from the supposition that life is not the province of animals and plants but rather is an energy force that animates through attention. When I attend to another person, life is generated in the dynamic attention of our beings. Our relationship becomes an entity in itself, responsive to our intentions, our desires and our attentiveness. We can caretake relationships with the same nurturance that we would give a child. We can also neglect relationships and they can wither. The relationship is a living entity. The manner in which we mentally and emotionally consider our relationship to another, can either support the vitality or drain the health of that organism. This organism created by one’s attention to another is both dependent upon and yet independent of the ones attending. It exists as a life force even when neither party is thinking of the other. It lives on its own, and can perish if neglected. Can we live with a level of commitment to how we attend to our world that is commensurate with the idea of myriad life forms born through the quality and focus of our attention? What happens when we live with such care and commitment?

I first came upon this notion while teaching piano privately, with an emphasis on improvisation. In the early stages of this idea’s emergence, I would routinely ask my students to imagine a lonely deserted island of people all thirsting for art and beauty, and suffering miserably from a dearth of such creative expressions. I would ask my students to imagine that, one day, all the people on this desolate island have been called together in a glorious amphitheatre boasting a magnificent sound system. The people are seated, eagerly awaiting a performance. They are silent with anticipation at the promise of some taste of music, something they’ve been deprived of for a very long time. I would tell my students to imagine that the piano at which they sit is somehow directly connected to this far-away amphitheatre filled with people who are hungry for a taste of artistic beauty. “These people are the perfect audience; imagine that every note you play matters,” I would say. “Believe that every ounce of your personal, musical expression will fall upon thousands of appreciative and attentive ears thirsty to take in every drop of your sound without judgment.” I would challenge my students to always seek to play with a level of commitment and responsibility appropriate to such an imagined situation, with this consistent level of discipline and uncompromising focus. At some point over the years of my teaching, I began to change this story, simply asking my students to imagine that the music they played was itself a living thing; that every song was a conscious entity born to their hands, that the moment they touched the instrument a life form entered the world. Such a life could grow healthy and strong with the proper disciplined attention, or it could become ill and unhealthy through our neglect or inattention. The vitality of its very life would be entirely dependent upon the quality of our commitment to it. If we attempted to own a song, it would resist such possessiveness, if we tried to use our playing to impress others, the music would detach from the inspired source of our creative expression, if we neglected it with inattention, it might literally die in our hands. Neglected songs can die a violent death. What level of attention would we musicians play with if we considered every musical rendering to be alive?

Moving away now from music, what if we create life constantly through the quality of our attention and the interplay between subject and object? What if the true nature of ‘life,’ concerned relations between things seen, things attended to, things considered? And I am proposing, to be clear, that something literally ‘comes to life’ between subject and object, and that that thing is vitally alive, infused with a cosmic and miraculous energy moving like wind; forceful, present, if unseen.

We look with awe at the sunset and then that colored sky itself is alive in this dance with our attention. It lives, and that thing which lives ‘knows’ it is the object of appreciation. What if every moment of our existence were an act of creation? If this were the true essence of life, how would we choose to live? How would we attend to our relationships if we understood them to be life-forms in their own right?

I believe we must expand our notion of what is ‘alive.’ We limit life so often to mere physical essences having clearly defined boundaries, such as birds, trees, or people. What if life were not bounded in this way at all, not limited to the edge of my skin? What if life were born in our attention, in the interaction of subject to object, in that relationship? What if such a life-form really did continue to exist even after I turned my attention elsewhere? What if the idea I now hold of my deceased grandmother were a part of, as well as a continuation of, that physical form she once occupied? What if we keep our ancestors alive through our stories about them? Tribal people understand this to be the case. And they understand that mountains are alive and that the ‘spirit’ of a mountain represents a force greater than the ideas collectively held about the mountain. Animistic traditions are based or much more subtle notions than the simple statement that ‘everything is alive.’ Life is an energy, and in a way it is a fusing of energies into something that becomes willful, conscious, aware, intentful. The multitude of cells cooperating to form my body represent a coalition of energies, and “I” now become alive. I train my hands and my mind for many years to manipulate sound waves in complex interactions, and suddenly I play a song on the piano that touches you deeply. I bring into our world in that performance a new life. I guide it gently, intentionally, honestly, in an unbiased way if I can, and then it speaks its language of this Universe, which is a language of love.

And what about ideas themselves? What if ideas are in fact alive? What if everything I am writing here, this idea I am sharing about what it means ‘to be alive,’ this idea that attention creates life, what if this idea I am sharing is alive? What if you the reader –in your response to, attention upon, and interaction with this idea- become its co-creator? What if our ‘togetherness’ around this idea has in this moment birthed and sustained the idea in a way, and what if it is here not just because of either of us, but also in order to touch each of us with its beauty, its playful promise, its wistful dance through our hearts and minds in this moment? What if it has that much intent and goodness, all on its own? The songs I play on the piano do not really come from me. They come through me. I know this well. If I dare to intrude upon the moment of improvisation as a musician with thoughts, goals, intentions or other ‘cognates,’ I immediately know it because the song aches and moans and shivers and weakens in my hands. I back off and try to just let it become what it is. That is the most honest and heartfelt music. The same with ideas. I am a trained ‘thinker,’ scholar, idea scout, thought tracker, and I try my best to let these words move through the hands and mind without too much interference. The idea I have been writing about here, is so fresh that I am very inexperienced at surrendering to its emergence with the same competence as I do with music.

The gifted David Abram helped me to enter the dance of these ideas in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. I’ll close this post with his words:

“How many times has it happened, in the course of going about my work, that a potent thought will make itself felt at the edge of my awareness –an insight whose rightness I can sense even before I know its content- yet when I turn to fix my attention upon it, I find that it has already vanished, leaving only a vague flavor or trace?...The frustration entailed by such phantom thoughts had disrupted my youthful confidence in my own ability, as a philosopher, to reflect upon matters with some accuracy. But I was now beginning to realize another possibility: that ideas had their own lives independent of mine. That indeed some vital ideas were like creatures wholly unaccustomed to human contact, wild notions whose robust elegance and vigor required that they keep their distance from those who might strive to define or domesticate them.”

The Limitations of History, The Magic of Nature-Based Ways

The Problem with Written ‘History’

The ‘historical record,’ the collection of information presented as our shared ‘history,’ presents at least two interesting problems for Moderns. Prior to the written word –something which began in earnest with the ancient Hebrews- the agricultural peoples of Europe and the Middle East and the nomadic tribes-people who came before them- imagined ‘time’ to be a cyclical process. Just as seasons turned each year and the sun rose and set each day, as the moon waxed and waned in a predictable pattern, as breath entered and left the body, as the human heart expanded and contracted with each beat, and as living things were born, grew, aged, and passed on, all things were conceptualized as part of a ‘cycle of return’ (see Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return*). The invention of writing, and, in particular the introduction of written history, rapidly transformed time into a linear process whereby some thing ‘began’ at a far-away point in the past, and events have since ‘occurred’ just once along a timeline that reaches up to the present.† So the first problem with written history –for a brain that is evolutionarily and cosmologically keyed to cycles- is that history is sequential and linear, and events are static and unique in time and place. However ‘fact-based’ and ‘logical’ this appears to us Moderns, it is juxtaposed against an evolved human psychology which is predisposed to interpret time in a cyclical fashion, with all events recurring over and over again in eternal cycles. If human universals have any relevance –and what we know about tribal cosmology bears this out- a concept of time that is linear and sequential is not ‘organic’ to the way that nature-based humans conceptualize time. For 99% of our self-conscious existence as a species, time has been regarded as cyclical, not linear. Our Present World viewing of time as a sequence of events that have occurred across a linear map of history –however factually consistent with popular views of the universe- alienates us from the cycles of nature, from the predictable birth, death, and rebirth that happens most obviously through the annual seasons. Our own relationship to this seasonal movement through birth, growth, death, and rebirth –in the absence of a cosmology in which we humans participate in cycles of renewal and rebirth- can generate a great deal of anxiety about the meaning of life and about the consequences of death. Whether ignorance is actually bliss, we Moderns would do well to consider the psychological consequences we have incurred by imposing a linear conceptions of history on a brain that evolved with a predisposition to imagine cyclical conceptions of time.

A second concern emanating from a linear view of history is that it sustains a cultural model framed by ‘historical facts.’ We Moderns tell ourselves that we have arrived at this moment in time and have built our ideas and conceptions upon a concrete and factual sequence of historical events that have occurred in a particular way. This is the story we tell ourselves. If we consult the written record, so the idea goes, we can learn all about our ‘past.’ The problem here is twofold. First, historical ‘facts’ are a collection of interpretations, usually written by elite, literate members of ruling classes. If modern Historiography (the study of the methodology of the discipline of history) has taught us anything, it is that written history is laced with fictional interpretations stemming from faulty memory (at best), and intentional deception (at worst). A second problem is that, as an activity, both the composing of historical narrative, and the recounting of written history, are largely rational, linear, and logic-based activities. As such, they are a predominantly undertakings of the left-hemisphere of the brain, and given their prominence in defining who we are, they tend to perpetuate the under-valuing of our right-hemisphere capacities for intuition, creativity, supposition, and mythical ideation. The cultural dominance of a linear perception of history not only alienates us from a meaningful participation with cyclical nature, but also reinforces the very cognitive tendencies that lead us to devalue half of our mental inheritance.

The Hemispheric Proclivities of the Nomad

For 99.9% of our long social history, human growth from infancy to old age depended upon an ongoing interaction with wild, living nature. Our healthy psychological and emotional unfolding was keyed to a subtle stimulus that the organic forms provided. A notable consequence of our current separation from this stimulus is that we have been without this critical ingredient to healthy brain development. As a result, certain more natural tendencies of the mind -evident among contemporary tribal peoples and part of the cognitive repertoire of all ancestral peoples- have been largely denied to Present World peoples. In particular, Moderns do not so readily and regularly quiet the cognitive left hemisphere of the brain; the thinking mind. We do not intuit subtle essences, garner messages from the winds and streams. We do not breath in awareness of our connectedness to all things living, and live in a constant state of graceful balance with the order of life. We live instead with incessant brain chatter and a deterministic commitment to rational, linear thought. We are distrustful of the intuitions and mythic readiness of the right hemisphere. This more mythical mind is activated during prolonged contact with wild nature. A human living as a nomadic hunter-gatherer must move through terrain with a pronounced sense-based awareness. For nature-based peoples, the smells, movements, and sounds of the natural world are keenly observed in an all-at-once fashion during many much of the day. Successful food gathering, animal tracking, weather prediction, landform evaluation and many other activities require an active sensory focus and a quiet cognitive mind. The nomad spends much time in this moving meditation through terrain. This is a right brain activity during which time the neural capacities of the left-brain for speech-based thought are quieted.

The Insights of a 'Nirvanic' Scientist

While the linear, cognitive mind is a remarkable adaptation, it is not the only mind. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who suffered a stroke in her left hemisphere, recounts that experience in a lucid and compelling book entitled My Stroke of Insight. She describes the world of the right hemisphere, the intuitive, creative, emotional center of the brain. With her left hemisphere essentially incapacitated by the stroke, she could neither understand speech nor generate speech, yet she describes herself being very conscious and aware of her life. She could not assemble linear thoughts, and yet she understood that there was some hidden secret in the quieting of the linear, cognitive mind. So illuminating was this experience, that she says she fought death, lying on her hospital bed, so should could heal from the stroke and recount her experiences to others. Her will to live was driven by a desire to spread a message gained during those dark moments in the hospital bed. As she recounts in one of many speeches she has given about her experiences, this one recorded for TED, an online archive of talks by first-rate thinkers,

"On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body…The right hemisphere is all about the here and now. It thinks in pictures. It learns through the kinesthetic movement of our bodies….Our left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks serially, methodically…Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. The left hemisphere takes that collage of the present moment and picks out details... It categorizes and organizes that information, associates it to everything we’ve learned in the past, and projects onto the future all of our possibilities. It thinks in language, the ongoing brain chatter that connects the me of my internal world to the external world. It’s that little voice that says to me ‘I am’ and as soon as it says this, I become separate.

This is the part of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke…When the chatter of my brain completely stopped, I was captivated by the energy around me. I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body. I felt huge. My left hemisphere then came back on line and said, ‘Hey we got a problem, we got a problem!!!!!’. But then I would return again to the place I call ‘la la land.’ When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life…I was suspended between two worlds….I just wanted to escape…I felt enormous and expansive like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free…I found nirvana. I remember thinking there would be no way to squeeze the enormity of myself back into my little body. But then I realized that I’m still alive, and I’ve found nirvana. And if I can find nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is still alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at anytime. And that they could purposefully choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover…It took me eight years to completely recover.

So, who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are, I am, the life force power of the universe…at one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, Neuroanatomist. These are the ‘we’ inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.” –Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight. This excerpt is from her very popular videotaped lecture on TED.

May we step again into a world where flaring nostrils, bifocal vision, hyper-sensitive hearing, and deep appreciative awe for the majesty of our bountiful earth are not relegated to secondary status, step-children under the shadow of the brilliant if suspect renderings of the cognitive left-hemisphere that has so much dominated our lives and ways. May we become more balanced, more awake, more conscious. ~End

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*Current projections about the Big Bang being an outward expansion of time and space that will eventually slow and collapse, only to explode outward again in an unending multi-billion-year pulsing of Big Bag and Big Collapse, points to a primary cyclical phenomenon at even the most macrocosmic level of the physical universe.

†In A Post-historic Primitivism, Paul Shepard writes, “The hidden truth of history is that the more we know, the stranger it all becomes. It is human to want to know ourselves from the past, but history’s perspective narrows that identity to portraits, ideology and abstractions to which nation states committed human purpose. True ancestors are absent. The meaning of our lives, of nature, of purposeful animals, of simple societies, of everything in this past is in doubt. We do not feel our ancestors looking over our shoulders, or their lives pressing on our own. Once we have shaken off that mythic immersion and put on the garment of dry history, we are unable to shed the attachment and skepticism that define the Western personality.”

Some Ideas about the Language of Music as Expressing Our Human Essence

What is the essence of the human being? What is that quality that we feel when we think of someone we know well. I am sure that my ‘sense’ of this loved one is not the sum total of all the words they’ve spoken in my presence, or the things I’ve seen them do. Maybe we call this their ‘personality,’ that essence we feel when we hear their name, see their face, or imagine their company. Maybe personality is that intangible and yet visceral ‘thing’ which makes them who they are to us. There is something constant about this ‘personality,’ this image or essence.

I have a dear friend. Nearly all of the hundreds of hours we’ve spent together were during musical performances in small jazz duos or quartets. He plays the saxophone and does so amazingly well. More than most other musical associates, I consider him a friend as well, though we rarely get together except to perform. Luckily, we’ve done that regularly for almost 20 years. About 17 years ago, we played four nights each week for almost three years straight. After that, we had some regular duo gigs that happened at least once a year for a dozen or so years.

I very much like this man, this friend. I like his mind, his kindness, his humor, even some of the irascible aspects of his nature. I have always enjoyed his company and we have wonderful conversations, focusing almost always on music.

Jon has been very sick lately. He has cancer and has been sick for about three months. He has cancer in many places in his body. He had two large tumors removed from his brain about ten weeks ago, and there is cancer in his lungs and liver, along his spine, and in his bones. Lately, we talk almost every day and I see him every week.

Jon has lived a fairly reclusive life, and has sustained himself through teaching music privately. He has had hundreds of students, and from all accounts, he is a superb teacher. His life as a performer has never taken off, really. This has always baffled the many more successful musicians who have had the privilege to play with him, because there are so many less talented players making good livings as performers. The president of the local musician’s union in Los Angeles, an alto saxophonist himself, once heard him play and said “I’m speechless.” A two-time Grammy Award winning pianist who performed with him once said, “I wish I could play like that.”

In an effort to spread Jon’s amazing music, I have been emailing solos of his playing to a few dozen people every day. I found these solos on cassette tapes that I amassed during a quartet run Jon and I had about 15 years ago. At that time, I owned an expensive Sony Professional recorder and, as a budding jazz pianist, I was determined to capture my best playing on tape. I was never satisfied with the things I recorded of myself, but I held on to all those hundreds of live gig tapes.

Then, when Jon got sick a couple of months ago, I pulled out the tapes and began to assemble excerpts of Jon’s solos. At present, I have a half-dozen CDs in my car, each packed with Jon’s wonderful playing. Each track, now with added EQ and reverb, fades in when Jon’s solo starts, and fades out at the end.

For two months now, I have been listening to Jon’s solos over and over. I commute to and from work, about 30 minutes each way, and spend most of the time enjoying my friend's beautiful playing.

Last night I had an epiphany. I had been listening on the way to work that morning and realized that an aspect of Jon’s solos had a quality of reaching for something intangibly beautiful. I felt a tremendous striving for artistic perfection. I could hear that striving somehow in the music. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, but I loved it in a new way. These solos had become so familiar to me that I knew ever turn, every breath, every descent, every twist, every rare growl. Suddenly, on yesterday's morning commute I heard something incredibly human about his voice as an artist. I could only call it a 'striving,' some supremely human act of reaching for higher truth. It was simple and profound, ancient and new. It felt primordial, deeply human, without precedent, and yet something utterly ubiquitous. It was my first glimpse of something very logical and communicative in an art form that has always been purely mystical for me when I am in that state of simple emotional appreciation. Now, as I was driving to school, I was hearing something much more concrete, though I wasn't able to describe beyond calling it a 'striving for beauty' in my friend. I listened to several solos during that half-hour commute, and they all had this exact same revelation for me. Each note, each turn, each improvised melodic line was a kind of reaching for an illusive beauty.

On the way home, I called Jon and we talked for about 15 minutes. I tried to express to him what I had been hearing in his playing, but I knew I wasn’t being clear. I think 'striving' kept sounding like 'unfinished' or worse, 'imperfect.' We chatted a bit more, laughed, reminisced, and then I got off the phone at the base of the mountain road up to my house. Up the winding canyon, I listened to his solo on the song 'Tenderly.' Now, something completely different emerged out of this improvised music.

I suddenly began to hear the essence of my friend. That intangible quality that makes a loved one a loved one, that unique imprint, or 'image' we have of who this person is on an essential level -I heard what such an essence sounds like, for the first time in my life. Jazz no longer sounded like jazz, it sounded like a language that my friend was speaking clearly, articulately, and beautifully about himself and about all of us. It was clear as day but it wasn't words or even cognition. My friend's 'personality' -that indelible mark they have made on me because of who they are- this 'quality of being' of my friend had perfectly and completely spread itself across a two-minute sequence of vibrating air waves called an improvised jazz solo, and what it had to say was profoundly illuminating to me.

Maybe it was because we had just spoken and some part of him was close to the moment. I have studied this music of improvisation, I have known intuitively that it is a language, but I never heard it like I did last night. I listened to Jon’s playing, to his voice, to his ideas, to his expressiveness, and suddenly, in a genuinely epiphanous moment, I HEARD my friend Jon, everything about who he is on some very essential level. Just as I have an image of his personality as a friend, which transcends whatever he says and does, and is just the essential ‘idea’ I have about who Jon is, this man I adore, now, suddenly, I heard and saw my friend clearly in the language of his personal music, this culmination of years of study and dedication ~all delivered in a moment of time through this unique musical language.

For most of my life I have apprenticed myself to the mysterious sounds of jazz with rapt attention and a faithful devotion, trusting implicitly the intent behind this liquid art form, although I was often puzzled at how it could carry so much meaning, being mere vibrations of the air. But spoken language is also just vibrations of the air, with the deeper meanings of our words concealed in the complexities of grammer, phonemes, vocabulary, and syntax. The brain deciphers the language when it has established a working knowledge of these rules. The infant does not understand the content of language as mother speaks her musical words to the very young baby, telling this child about the diaper that is being changed, or the shirt being pulled over the head. Yet there is something captivating in the tones, the resonance of voice, the heartfelt utterings that come through loving words and a richly nuanced face. The infant makes prolonged eye contact, and it seems that part of a mother’s flood of lilting words seeks to keep those new eyes just so captivated. It’s as if the mother knows that the longer the child watches intently the facial and vocal subtleties of the speaking mother, the more fully connected the two will be and the more readily the child will be able to learn language. And this is so. Within months, the utterings of the mother prompt logical responses in the still pre-verbal child. The infant who cannot yet speak can comprehend more and more. It is the intense focus of the mother and child, their absolute trust in the process of shared communion that allow seemingly random syllables to eventually carry enough meaning so as to align the infant’s mind, to initiate the Universal Grammar that gives the baby its capacity for speech within a year or two of birth. In the beginning, an infant does not grasp the ‘content’ of the early speech directed at it, but can recognize the ‘intent’ of that speech. Newborns are fascinated with the lively chatter of the adults who speak to them with that instinctive motherese so universal among humans. They feel the emotion imbedded in that sing-song, rhythmic vocalization. They feel appreciated and loved, because such affections are the principal impetus to such a strange adult way of talking. Infants are mesmerized, entranced, and captivated by motherese, and the brain actively responds by continuously analyzing and, eventually, ordering these utterances into sensible content that can then be reproduced by the child as small phrases and words within just months of their birth. This relationship between attention, language, and learning are central to our human way of being and expressing ourselves. And vocal language is not the only form of communication.

It seemed to me that last night I had deciphered the language of music, and HEARD what it was saying about my friend, and then about all of us. Jon's essence was IN THE MUSIC. These wildly precise sets of sound waves, these vibrations of air, blown through a sugar-cane reed and a brass instrument smelted from the earthly minerals of zinc and copper, these sounded expressions from a man who has devoted countless hours to refining this very moment, makes a music which has no justification nor explanation really, and yet which was supremely beautiful in both its intent and its content. How has the universe created these organisms known famously as homo sapiens, these gifted tool makers and artists, who discover laws of musical sound, fashion elaborate instruments from the most chemically complex materials, thereby extending the capacities of the human voice, then train for a lifetime simply to vibrate the airwaves just so? Improvised music is an active art. It leaves absolutely nothing behind but impressions upon the listener. Why would we do such an inexplicable thing if not to express some deeper truth about who we are?

I felt for a brief moment yesterday that I had broken code, heard the language of Jon's music for both its generous beauty and for its deeper message. I felt certain as I listened to 'Tenderly", that I had come to understand how this music is about expressing the language of the universe. It is the language of life, and of love. It is what makes us human. We are drawn to create beauty like moths to a flame. This language finds modest expression in each of us as our ‘personality,’ that thing which other people are attracted to and love about us. As a teacher of children, I have the fortunate ability to see that essence in every child, and I adore them all for this essence, no matter how challenged they may be as people and classmates to each other. The most difficult child, I adore the essence of them, because it is unique and brilliant, and somehow quite good and refined. I am more selective with adults. There are many personalities which wear an external veneer that I don’t respond to so positively. With time, I would like them too, but alas, we have limited time and tend to spend that time getting to know those adults who are the easiest for us to like.

Jon’s music, his solo on Tenderly, it spoke to me in a language that I fully understood for the first time. It spoke to me about the essence of my friend Jon, about all his goodness, all his humanity, all his humor, even his fear and anger. And all the qualities of Jon, as they came through in the sounds of a very well-trained artist, are ALL BEAUTIFUL sounds. In this refined, creative, intuitive, artistic form of exult, I could see the most brilliant, lovely, and subtle essence of our humanity as it conveyed the unique truth of my friend Jon, pure and complete. The dark and light maneuver through glorious sound together, and can only be good and beautiful. That is all we are.

We are here on this earth, at least partly, to find the creative, intuitive means of expressing the essence of who we are, in a language of the universe that is both mysterious and yet accessible. Our personality carries it mostly without effort or training. Then as we grow and mature, we seek to find our 'calling,' our 'destiny,' that place where the intuitive and creative capacities will join forces with the disciplined mind to let us express our deepest truth, our essential light, as an art. It is our birthright to create, to perform, to express, to give of ourselves like this, outwardly to one other.

Artistic expressions –and mind you, language, speech, a generous disposition, a smile-filled being, a meaningful occupation delivered with passion, these are art forms as much as music- are what we humans do to communicate the higher language of love and truth that is at the core of our being. We are part of a life force which seeks to create beauty through us, with us, because of us, in order to be us.

How We Misunderstand that Vastness of Human History: One Recent Example

In my 5th grade classroom last month, I showed students a 1.7 million year old hand axe that I acquired at an auction many years ago. This tool was made by homo habilis, an ancestor of modern humans. I used this artifact to represent the end point on a timeline we were to construct that morning, a timeline that would illustrate how long humans have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. In addition to visually and dramatically representing our long tribal past with a 500-foot piece of yarn stretched across a field, I also wanted to make the point that our modern social studies books ignore the large bulk of human history. I make the case that we ignore the past because: (1) it is hard to fathom big numbers; and (2) beyond stone tools, fire pits, and cave paintings, we tend to think that there is little to impress us about these early humans. Prior to the relatively recent bronze age, there are almost no examples of monumental architecture like the Egyptian pyramids to attract the attention of scholars and tourists. Many people think the pyramids are 'old', but on our 500-foot timeline, in which one yard equaled about 10,000 years, the pyramids were only 18 inches from the present. The voyage of the Mayflower was less than two inches away. At a full yard away from the present moment, we already have entered into the vast era of human prehistory during which time we lived as nomadic, tribal, hunters and gatherers. The timeline that my 26 students and I excitedly stretched across Mariposa Elementary School's vast grass field used up an entire 170 yards of bright red yarn. At one far end was our beautiful stone tool, while at the other was the present moment. We marked several other key points, including the discovery of fire 800,000 years ago. Then we climbed up the nearby hill and looked down at our creation. The bright yarn was clearly visible. Clustered at one end was the voyage of the Mayflower, the agricultural revolution, and the Egyptian pyramids. They were all within the first yard of the timeline. At the other end, fully 520 feet away across the field, was the stone hand axe of our tool-making ancestors. Everything in between represented thousands of generations of nomadic tribal ancestors. Civilization, including the pyramids of Egypt, just happened 'yesterday' on this timeline.

Ironically, a reporter and photographer from a local newspaper were at our school the day we made our timeline and they photo-graphed our class at work. When the article came out, and a photo was published on the website, I was not

surprised that -much like the textbooks I had been lamenting to my students- the local reporter misrepresented and sadly underestimated the vastness of human prehistory that our lesson was striving to reveal. The caption read, "Paul Astin, a teacher at Mariposa Elementary School of Global Education in Agoura Hills joins his students as they create a timeline of events back to the Egyptian Pyramids." Granted, the reported never interviewed me to see what we were doing. I imagine that for most people, any timeline going 'way into the past' probably goes back to the Egyptian Pyramids, right?

A few days later we diagrammed this same timeline, adding the famous Laetoli Footprints of Tanzania, made by another human ancestor, Australopithecus. These very human-looking footprints from 3.75 million years ago extended our timeline backwards in time to well over 1,100 feet in length.

Until we humans can begin to grasp the expanses of time during which our ancestors lived in direct contact with wild nature, sharing rituals of celebration for the earth's cycles of regeneration, creating stories and myths to guide their lives through the terrain of space and mind, until we grasp the relative spans of time and see how recently we emerged from this home in a tribal world, we will continue to struggle with the reality of who we really are.

The Three Abandonments of Youth

In Present World, two vital and interdependent age groups –youth and the aged- are socially marginalized from one another through a cultural and even physical isolation at the two extremes of the adult lifespan. Instead of elders who, through relationships and mentoring, guide youth across the threshold to adulthood, we witness an abandonment of youth, dismissed en masse as hormone-crazed narcissists, delivered to impersonal and developmentally inappropriate middle schools, stowed away for years in a culturally-created cargo bay of ‘adolescence’ while society anxiously awaits their eventual emergence hopefully intact, all this, coupled as it were, with the consistent neglect of those members of society best equipped to guide and mentor youth, those grey-haired retirees viewed as no longer capable of ‘meaningful’ work, long-lived elders with stories and lessons untold, shelved without obvious use or purpose, dumped in prison-like retirements homes, or sitting by the dusty window as they await some dignified death.

In addition to the isolation produced by our school structures, young people today experience another set of obstacles to establishing authentic connections with adults in Present World. While the agricultural revolution ended our nomadic lifestyle, and with it the ritualized support structures for youth inherent in tribal initiation rites, young people in agricultural times continued to receive mentoring through trades apprenticeships. In fact, early adolescents remained very closely tied to adults and mentors until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s produced massive cities where urban living and alienating factory jobs replaced extended-family farm life and mentor-based, small-town craft apprenticeships. In these new urban cities, an adolescent culture was born distinct from adult culture. Divergent generations emerged as separate and isolated horizontal social layers, and youth fought the increasingly alienating façade of ‘progress’ –a cultural frame in which they felt consistently abandoned- through ever more distinct and dangerous rituals of self-initiation. Together with the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution represented a kind of ‘second’ abandoning of youth.

Today in Present World, we are in the midst of what may constitute a third revolution, and a third abandoning of youth. Certain features of the Digital Revolution (aka The Information Age) have further alienated many adults from contemporary youth. As young people have adopted new technological language and new sets of digital skills, they have become the ‘digital natives’ in an adult world of digital ‘immigrants.’ Some of these adults are actually functionally illiterate when it comes to digital technology, and only a small fraction of parents and grandparents manage to approximate the levels of digital literacy of their children. As young people immerse themselves further into the growing digital world, especially into the new social networking media that has appeared in the 21^st Century (constituting what is commonly called Web 2.0), the adult world has become further isolated from the world of young people. For much of the 20^th Century, adults were openly critical of the clothing and musical tastes of younger generations. In much the same way, many adults in Present World are quick to dismiss the new social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) and are staunchly unwilling to become students of these trends, applications, and social phenomena. There is a collective disdain among certain segments of the digital ‘immigrant’ adult population, expressed in books such as The Digital Amateur, where best-selling author Andrew Keen accuses Web 2.0 of promoting, “digital narcissism, this embrace of the self.” Yet unlike the traditional outward symbols of generational differences –be they clothes, pop music, or street lingo- the hardware, software and the cultural changes brought about by the Digital Revolution are not passing trends. They are here to stay, integral features of a still-blossoming Information Age. When adults shun technology out of dismissal, fear, or misunderstanding, while at the same time criticizing technology trends or youth involvement in technology, this only creates further alienation between adults and young people.

Another potentially divisive element within the Digital Revolution worthy of note is the fragmenting of youth into sub-cultures. As access to choice within popular culture has expanded exponentially, with unlimited online music genres and artist, thousands of radio stations and cable television channels, and niche-based online social communities, young people no longer need to share pop cultural preferences with same-age classmates or neighbors. A dozen teenagers plugged into iPods on the school bus might be listening to playlists that have nearly no overlap in content. They may be members of niche-based online communities that have nothing in common with one another. Thanks to the unlimited choice provided by the internet, ‘culture’ for youth is no longer determined entirely by geography. As a result of this heterogeneity of tastes and preferences among youth, many adults cannot even assemble a clear picture of youth culture in order to engage it in a meaningful way.