I’m exploring Spiritual Emergency as a counterbalance to David Halberstam’s exhaustive exploration of how media giants have influenced modern life.

Mr. Halberstam’s every other sentence reads like this:

He exercised awesome power over four decades, he was the voice of the Los Angeles Times; Harry Chandler had begun it, he had created Kyle Palmer, and in time Kyle Palmer and the Los Angeles Times created Richard Nixon... [Palmer] made careers and he broke them, sometimes the same career.  He chose the candidates for the Republicans, dictated policies, floor-managed legislation in the California legislature, told governors which bills to sign.  He was a journalist and a political writer, but in a real sense he was a kingmaker.
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Apparently, Kyle Palmer spent zero time engaged in the pursuit of his inner world.  Spiritual emergency was not his concern.  But curiously, it seems to be mine.  Some quotes:

What both Freud and Jung called ‘the unconscious’ is simply what we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unconscious of.  It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious... We need not be unaware of the inner world.

One enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a door: through a partition: the curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted...  Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world.  

When we listen (the player is above) to Edward R Murrow’s November 1939 broadcast, we find ourselves in London's underground Central Control Station of its Air Raid Precaution System.  Americans of his day hung on Murrow’s disembodied words.  In well conjured worlds, our minds decouple from literal time and space.

In 1941, poet Archibald MacLeish praised Edward R. Murrow for his overseas radio reporting during World War II.  He said Murrow had destroyed a superstition:

'...the most obstinate of all superstitions - the superstition against which poetry and all the arts have fought for centuries, the superstition of time and distance.'
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

This morning, mired in the laws of physics, I drove 39 minutes and 26.33 miles to Strongsville to ply children with songs and stories.  Once we got going, we abandoned the here and now.  No one stopped me from shepherding forty campers to a river in West Africa where Turtle was teaching Anansi to fish.  

We are children of story.  Are we born en route to untethered regions; do we learn the language of fact only when asked?

Is music innate?  Are humans the only species equipped to make it? 

Look no further than Youtube for some pretty convincing anecdotal evidence.  So eight million people discovered this tiny celebrity before I did.  My grin is just as wide. 

Watch her gears lock into beats she hears in her head; the toddler's grasp of Hey Jude gives credence to the humans-wired-for-music scenario.

Then there's the research.  Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, says certain brain regions are wired specifically to process music.

One would have to look for aspects of music which have no equivalent in speech. This certainly seems to be true of the regular beat or pulse. Speech has its own rhythm, but it doesn't have the fixed metrical quality of music. There's spontaneous synchronization with rhythm in all human beings, even in childhood. You tap with it, nod with it, and even if you don't, the motor parts of your brain move with it. There's an auditory/motor correlation in human beings not found in any other animal.
Oliver Sacks, Wired

The poet Harold Norse is said to have lived ‘in an era in which you were supposed to veil your marital problems or homosexual angst in 10 layers of metaphor.’ (Gerald Nicosia, Time)  

As of today, I understand layers, and metaphor.

My ken is born of a failed attempt to do no harm.  It all started at Garfield Park, home to Chicago’s magnificent conservatory.  There you will find a creature named Mimosa pudica, also called a sensitivity plant (peduca = shy).  Miniature leaves fold inward to your touch.  We were so enamored with Mimosa pudica on our last visit, certain Chicagoans have brought us seedlings that, tiny as they are, behave exactly as their elders.

This morning, prodded by horticultural angst, I decide to tip the ceramic pot that holds the clay one that holds the dirt that holds the Mimosa pudica - just a shy tip - to pour out any extra water I’ve plied the seedling with.  A very slight, exploratory tip - oh!  The contents of the pot are now arranged in the kitchen sink, seedlings on the bottom, covered by dirt, topped with pebbles.

'Songwriters are artists who compress their message into 3 or 4 minutes of elegant, powerful viral marketing we call ‘a song.’ Our world needs honest messages from creative thinkers and doers.'

Susan Weber was the lyric writing judge for the 2009 Cuyahoga County Public Library Generation Next Creative Writing Contest. 

She made the following remarks at the Gen Next awards ceremony before presenting area teens with first, second, third place and honorable mention awards. 

A recording of her remarks is available above and on the library's website.

Text of Susan's remarks:

Love.  Rejection.  Sacrifice.  Family.  Discovery.  Longing.  Doubt.  Humor.

All these, and more, speak to me through lyrics I’ve been privileged to explore for this year’s Creative Writing Contest.  I hesitate to call myself a judge, but one thing I’m very good at is listening.

Early in my songwriting career, I sent some lyrics to a songwriter in Boston whose work I greatly admired.  To my surprise, he wrote back, with some advice.  “You obviously have a great love of songwriting,” he said, “and a prolific pen.  I suggest you perform your songs in front of people.  They will tell you what works, and what doesn’t.”

So I did this.  Before I was a seasoned performer or songwriter, I got out there with my songs.  And you know what?  My audiences not only taught me what worked (and what didn’t) - they inspired me to get better.

But way before you get in front of an audience, you listen every time you invent a new song.  You listen to your feelings, your ideas, your desire - whatever is telling you to write this song.  And when you see the lyrics take shape on the page, you listen again.  Songs are for hearing, not reading.  So you need to put words together that your tongue likes to pronounce.  And of course, we know that finding all the good words can take time.  Metaphors and hooks and rhymes can get tangled up and messy - before we know it, the spark of inspiration is lost in the process.  So we need to edit.  Sometimes I think of editing as a comb.  I comb through my lyrics, taking out the knots.  (not this, not that! We’ll keep this...) I don’t stop until there are no more knots.

Here is an author who understands flow.

'I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Indeed, The Elegance of the Hedgehog bears witness to the efficacy of Ms. Barbery's altered state.  As I read, I scratched myriad rich quotes in a notebook.  But a novel tells its own story; out of context, words can lose their sheen.  Talking about a story, unless you are a very good ventriloquist, is hard to do.

Risking this, let me quote the protagonist, Renée, as she contemplates a Japanese masterpiece.

The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup - this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion; is this not something we all aspire to?  And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?

I wonder if it's true, that a culture keen on acquisition and scalability handicaps its artists' sense of the ephemeral.  Can pure beauty walk this earth of concrete and billboards without becoming some means-to-end, cheap trick, fast talking ad copy?

Babies can’t think outside the box because, for them, there is no box.  It’s all inside - everything.  That’s what I gather from a Boston Globe look Inside the Baby Mind. 

Thanks to mccn for sending it my way.  It turns out, ‘babies take everything in: their reality arrives without a filter.’  Babies are naturals at some of the flow characteristics we’ve mentioned here.

Person in flow: completely involved in what we are doing - focused, concentrated

Baby:  utter absorption in the moment

Person in flow:  A sense of serenity - no worries about oneself and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego

Baby:  incredibly aware of what's happening - experiences are very vivid - not self-conscious at all

Because of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex, babies lack the ability to filter.  They absorb whatever comes their way, voracious egalitarians.

And flow is not just the province of babies and creatives.  Consider the study of adult brain states when captivated by a work of art.  Scans of viewers engrossed in a Clint Eastwood movie showed patterns of activity where their prefrontal cortexes were suppressed, similar to those of jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation:

The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry.
Jonah Lehrer Boston Globe

You don’t have to be making something yourself to experience flow.  If the art is engrossing enough, you can get your flow on from the peanut gallery.

This might explain why a listening audience can infuse live performance with flow-on-steroids, amping up the unwound state of mind for creators and receivers of music.  We are enabling each others’ childlike openness to new experience.

A Laker’s fan to a radio man on how he feels about his team:

“I get so excited, I got butterflies down my neck!”

Poetry in picturesque places gives me a longing for life, well within and far beyond reach.

Mary, a mother, wife, friend to all, passed away this week.  She was to me a distant acquaintance whose life, I thought, would purr along into peaceful old age.  She was a true mensch.

We know there are all kinds of people, right?  On the one extreme you have the teams-of-one variety, who suck the living daylight out of you to focus it on them.  Longevity teaches you to move to warmer climes.  Which doesn’t take too long if you’ve met a class act, like Mary.  Such a person lays out a blanket big enough for you and all your weary bones; you stand there dripping on her generosity; she beams at you from someplace peaceful, ego free.  And the light she brings is everywhere.

You carry this to the next place, and the next, and in the course of time, you learn how to be a more hospitable soul.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a lovely film in many ways, the old-young boy asks why people have to die.  “So we know how much they mean to us,” the answer comes.  This is cold comfort.  Given a choice, I’d rather bumble along with my loved ones, imprecisely prescient of their preciousness than, suddenly enlightened, find them gone.

So much for Hollywood treacle.  I don’t want death, or Hallmark, to line my cloud with silver.  But death is, I think, in some careful ways, a gift.

The school year is winding down.  The day custodian is using up his vacation time, so Roger’s been called off his regular 3 pm shift at Amherst Elementary to handle the day.

‘Don’t mind me if I’m cranky,’ says the compact gentleman, no taller than a fourth grader.  ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

The man’s grin belies his claim to crankiness as he goes to fetch a flatbed cart to haul my gear.  We truck out to my car where he calmly grabs my heaviest stuff and we begin to talk shop.

‘You got a Martin guitar in there?’ he asks, eyeing my duct taped case.  I’m not surprised at all to hear my school schlepping partners talk about the music they subsidize with the day job or, in this case, evening.

Roger, from Kentucky, pronounces acoustic ‘a-cue-stic’ and says he plays a little guitar, a lot of mandolin and even some banjo.  His wife is a keyboardist and he plays in 3 or 4 bands with and without her.  We talk sound equipment, Martin vs. Taylor, performing for non-existent audiences and the built-in ones at church, a favored venue for Roger.  I don’t think he says ‘perform’ - he’s a player; music is his instrument; listeners are a bonus.

As metal doors clattered open before me, with visions of penetrating Darth Vader's lair, I slipped my car full of puppets, ladybug accoutrement and guitar into the dungeony garage.  I'd already circled several black granite behemoths in search of their epicenter, this Early Childhood Enrichment building.  It made sense, really, for the bankers to keep their progeny locked in the safest vault of the best fortified gated realm I'd ever close encountered.

After two security check points, several phone calls, a signed affidavit, one visitor's pass and three doors that sprung mysteriously open as I approached, I made my way to the well appointed story room, set out my effects on the beige leather couch and waited for the children to arrive.  Considering my tax contributions had helped fund a $45 billion bailout of this very bank, I felt right at home (sort of).

This very morning, driving through tree lined, mansion-appropriate boulevards, I wondered at my sense of well being.  With giant insects adorning my tee shirt, ladybug necklace and freshly washed hair, here I was, jazzed up on chocolate and some quality time with my amp.  I was happy.  My question: does a person living in one of these gigantic houses feel gigantically more at peace with her world than I do?  Is there a direct correlation between the two, and if there is, how does it feel to be any happier than this?  I wondered if waking up in the morning felt monumentally better to these castle dwellers than to me.  Just curious.