Today I am thinking of Miss Neff. She was my high school history teacher and in those days we said “Miss” not “Ms.” She was somewhat of an enigma to me, small, very thin with bird-like features she always dressed as if she might be going to a business meeting later in the day. Maybe she was. I never knew much about her except that, once on her way to school, she had been involved in an accident where a young child was involved. To this day I wonder what happened. But today I am remembering Miss Neff for a particular moment in our World History class, one in which I was paying marginal attention, because all we ever studied was war, right? and I was tired of it and I was a teenager full of myself, of my dreams and of a narrow view of the world.

Miss Neff, standing in front of the room with her clipboard containing her notes resting on her bony hip, was outlining yet another war when she said:”At this same time in history, Mozart was writing music.” My head jerked up and, I could have fabricated this memory over time, but I thought our eyes met in a knowing way. She knew that I was a ‘music kid’ and that my plans were to study music in college. She then went on to name some artists that were creating and some writers that were writing. It was a moment when history became ‘both/and’ and not ‘either/or’ for me. I began to formulate a world view that encompasses all the many connections and complexities of how humans move in the world.

Today, when we are reeling from the news of what is happening in Ukraine, my heart is breaking for the people there. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, all holding a collective breath to see what will happen. Our minds trying to understand what possesses people to do what the leaders in Russia are doing and the feeling of helplessness that accompanies this. The fact of the matter is that we have lived a long time now with one foot ready to send us into the pit of despair. Four years of daily whiplash perpetrated by a president drunk on power. Then a pandemic that sent us into our homes, isolated us from those we love and those daily acts that made up our lives, that brought us a modicum of joy. A reckoning with the ways racism and injustice has been the food of our neighbors , of those whose lives have always been pushed to the margins.  And now war.

This is the moment to own the privilege with which I move through every day. That during all this time I have lived comfortably, knowing warmth and having everything I needed to eat, with resources to re-imagine ways of still being in community with friends and family. That privilege extends to the color of my skin and the resources that are always a click away. 

And yet today, with Miss Neff’s gaze etched in my memory, I am also naming the despair I feel. The knowledge that there will always be bullies and that their need for power and dominance causes others to pay a huge price. History books and sacred texts are full of their stories. While that gaze dusts itself off, I am also reminded that there are good things happening, things are being created, beauty is being born, compassion is being extended, healing is possibility. The both/and of the world still reigns.

So, today I will try to embody the lesson of my teacher and not allow the despair for the world to overwhelm. I will send fervent and gentle prayers to all that is Holy to be present to the Ukrainian people. The helplessness will still be there but I will also do something to remember. Here is a poem by Jane Hirshfield that might help:

Today, when I could do nothing.
I saved an ant.
it must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked 
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer -warm-
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through switftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom-
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could no nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
~Mark Nepo

It was time. In fact, it was past time. My piano was in desperate need of tuning and my beloved tuner is no longer with us so I had to find someone new. After a thorough internet search, I arranged for someone to come and restore the sound that lifts my spirits.

Of course, I had forgotten the sounds that have to happen before the beauty arrives in the touch of the keys. I sat in my kitchen as the tuner worked his magic in another room. The ping and plop of pitches echoed off the ceiling and into the room where I was trying to write. High pitches sounding like cats raking their nails across a chalkboard. Low pitches grating out like belches of middle school boys. Over and over again, until with some finesse, amazing patience and maybe a dose of magic, the pitch slides into the ‘just right’ place. For more than an hour I listened as the technician did his work. Work that astounded me at his ability to endure such scratching and belching until he landed in the home of tonal beauty. 

Captive at my kitchen table as I was, I began to think about how these last months and years have been a little like this tuning. Most of us have felt off, strident in sound, not knowing if we would ever be able to stay on pitch again. Some days we would find a word, an activity, a glimpse of something that would pull us up from the pits of disharmony. Other days, we were just strings plucked by an angry, inept hand. 

Sitting there, I was reminded of another experience of tuning I had a few years ago. I had anticipated walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and arrived expecting a quiet, calm and contemplative time. Stepping onto this stone path modeled after the labyrinth in Chartes Cathedral in France, I was only a few steps in when sounds like I had never heard before began. The huge, beautiful pipe organ was being tuned! If you have never heard an organ going through this adjustment, let me say that it is a primeval-like animal sound until it makes its way into its homeland. As I walked, I remembered reading that “Everything that happens to you on the labyrinth is metaphor.” And so, I continued to walk, surrounded by beauty, watching the unfolding path without being able to see exactly where it led, held in the sounds of tuning…blessed tuning. The experience allowed me to enter into a place of adjusting myself, of reflecting on the places that needed that very turn of an instrument that brought me back to myself. 

We are all still in the tuning stages of this pandemic. Each of us will find our way into a new harmony that has yet to be discovered. Tuning is not pretty. But it is necessary. So, let the patient hand of the tuner be gentle with us all. I trust, and I hope you do as well, that we will find our way eventually.