Guitar Solos That Made Me Cry

I love guitars.  And I really love a good guitar solo.  In the history of recorded music there are so many good ones.  We could argue all night about which are the best or the most important.  But I want to take a more personal angle.  You would no doubt write a very different list, but for me, these are the guitar solos that break me down and start the water works.

            A guitar solo is a funny thing.  Commonly sandwiched between verses and choruses of sung lyrics, it’s time for the singer to step back and let the music shine.  A good guitar solo comes in many forms.  Sometimes it’s a primal, pre-cognitive scream.  Other times it’s a homey, back porch hug from grandpa, all pipe tobacco, flannel and Old Spice.  But no matter what shape it takes, its wordless language speaks to the deepest part of us, that part so few things ever reach.  In “Yellow Ledbetter”, an outtake from the first Pearl Jam album Ten, singer Eddie Vetter invokes Mike McCready’s guitar solo with the words “Make me cry.”  Indeed.  Here are the guitar solos that make me cry, even now, after all these years.

            I have to start with David Gilmour’s iconic, whammy bar infused Stratocaster manifesto at the end of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”  This is as good as it gets.  A rich, gorgeous tone, long fluid lines, ice hard flurries, and long shafts of tonal light reaching deep into the chasms of the unconscious – this is what all electric guitar solos aspire to be.  Gilmour doesn’t play over the song – he inhabits it.  This is the mistake so many lesser guitarists make.  They see a guitar solo as an opportunity to stand out and shine.  But Gilmour knows better.  He knows that a guitar solo is a chance for one pair of hands to lift the whole song into transcendence.         

            There are many outstanding Neil Young guitar solos, but the one that really gets me the most is the one from “Words”, the last track on his essential album Harvest.  Like so many other Neil Young songs, this song is a meditation on the cost of fame and the strange isolation that world adulation creates.  With its loping time changes and syncopation, “Words” is one of Young’s most sophisticated arrangements, yet it still retains its rustic recorded-in-a-barn charm.  In the middle he builds up a slow solo on electric guitar over a bed of bass, drums, piano and pedal steel.  Some critics have compared Young’s guitar work to Coltrane, and no other song makes the point better.  The halting, stuttering stops and starts of his lines perfectly embody the uncertainties of any life, let alone the life of a young man on the cusp of wealth and fame in the patently insane world of pop music, a life Young has never comfortably embraced.  His confidence in the midst of awkwardness becomes our own.

            For sheer minimalist brilliance, let’s turn to guitarist Keith Scott’s work on Bryan Adams’s power ballad “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” from the 1991 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves soundtrack.  Scott and fellow Canadian Adams met in 1976 and began recording together.  They’ve been together ever since.  In this solo, you can almost feel the trust they have for each other, the way Scott lets each note hang, waiting patiently for the song to shift beneath him.  This solo is a perfect example of one of the most difficult things for any guitar player to do – nothing.  Wielding silence and emptiness as masterfully as sound and fullness make’s Scott’s solo one for the ages.

              At the age of fifteen Neal Schon landed a job as a sideman in an early formation of Santana.  It was either that or accept Eric Clapton’s invitation to join Derek and the Dominos.  Not bad for a kid.  But Schon really made his mark a few years later as a founding member of Journey.  Schon’s solo at the end of “Faithfully” is a masterpiece forever schooling guitarists on how to support and stay within the bounds of a pop song while simultaneously elevating its themes to celestial heights.  Following a fluid jazz idiom, Schon first anchors the melody, then varies it, then goes completely nuts taking us all with him.

            David Lindley is a multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire with countless album credits to his name.  But his work with Jackson Browne remains his most powerful.  In “These Days,” Lindley finds the beating heart of Browne’s paean to lovelorn sadness and lays it bare for all to see.  Every time I listen to this solo it seems brand new again.  Lindley makes it clear: a solo, like a work of literature, should have a beginning, a middle and an end.  A solo is not just noodling around or stringing a bunch of notes, lines and figures together.  And a solo should never be about the guitar player and his or her prowess and technique.  A great guitar solo burrows so deeply into the soul of the listener that the guitarist and the band disappear leaving only a wide open expanse of beauty, space, light and redemption.  That Lindley accomplishes this so effortlessly ranks him as one of the finest instrumentalists of our era.  And don’t get me started about his violin solo on “For a Dancer.”  Different column.

            “Gypsy”, a Stevie Nicks composition that didn’t fit on her solo album, found its way onto Fleetwood Mac’s thirteenth studio album Mirage.  Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar solo, echoing the format of their earlier masterpiece “Go Your Own Way”, doesn’t appear until the end.  Employing his trademark finger style approach Buckingham creates a cascade of shimmering notes that pour down like stardust and build upon the magic spell that Nicks created with one her most personal and powerful vocal performances.  When you hear a song like this you kind of feel sorry for all the other bands that will never in their wildest dreams reach these heights.  Buckingham’s solo plays the song out in a long, slow fade.  Woe unto the DJ who talks over this solo.  I will find you.

            The history of pop music is filled with great partnerships and the sub-genre of Americana is no exception, from Buddy and Julie Miller to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.  On “Barroom Girls” from Welch’s 1996 debut album Revival Rawlings plays a plaintive and heartbreaking solo that deftly encapsulates the world-weary pathos of this lament – so simple, yet so rich.  Who knew two unadorned acoustic guitars could create such a flood of emotion.

            Over on the mainstream Nashville side of country music, Paul Franklin’s pedal steel guitar solo on Vince Gill’s “When I Call Your Name” perfectly exploits the inherent ability of a pedal steel to create a shifting, sliding, fading, falling, slippery slope where you can’t find your feet and you fall powerless into the dark heart of the song.  I’ve listened to this a thousand times, and never in a million years will I understand just exactly what Franklin is up to.  But it breaks my heart every time.

            There are others.  I could go on.  And I know you have yours too.  Some other time we’ll argue about “best” guitar solos, or “most important” guitarists.  So many of my favorite players aren’t even on this list, like Angus Young of AC/DC, or unquestionable greats like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.  But in the end, the solos that grab me the most are the ones that keep me in the car in the driveway, unable to turn off the radio and go inside.  And besides, you don’t want your wife to see you crying. 

Ten Truths from the Kitchen

I’ve been studying cooking for a few years with Chef Bernard Guillas of the Marine Room in La Jolla, California.  When he isn’t running a group of top-tier restaurants, writing award winning cook books, flying off to New York for a Today Show appearance or Paris for induction into the prestigious Maître Cuisiniers de France (Master Chefs of France), he shares his boundless love of food in bi-weekly cooking classes at the Macy’s Home Store in San Diego.  Each class costs a whopping five dollars, every penny of which goes straight to the San Diego Food Bank and helps feed thousands of families in need.  My wife and I and a few friends have been attending regularly and it has really boosted the quality of our dinner gatherings, to say the least.  But something surprising and unexpected happened along the way.  Whether he intended to or not, while Chef Bernard was teaching us how to cook, he was teaching us how to live.
 

1.  If your process is chaotic, your results are chaotic.  Before you begin cooking, clean and organize your entire work space.  Gather all of the tools you will need.  Assemble and measure your ingredients.  That way, once you begin cooking nothing will interrupt your flow and you’ll be able to feel your way through the process without having to constantly stop and go looking for something.  And clean up as you go.  Your kitchen should start clean, stay clean and end clean.  The French phrase for this is mise en place.  It means “putting in place.”  How much easier would our work lives be, how much smoother would our homes function, and how much richer would our creative output be if we applied this principle to all the processes of our lives?

2.  Do one thing at a time.  When you are mincing shallots, mince shallots.  When you are filleting a salmon, fillet a salmon.  A divided mind is the enemy of awareness.  That’s when you burn the butter, drop a glass or cut your finger.  In every task we must be present and in a state of relaxed focus.  Only then do solutions and pathways appear.

3.  Keep it simple and let the ingredients speak for themselves.  As you create your own recipes or adapt the recipes of others, don’t over-think it.  Never let flash obscure substance.  When possible, eat in season, eat fresh, eat local, and let the natural flavors, scents, textures and colors of your ingredients suggest combinations and techniques that bring out their natural beauty.  And just because you have every ingredient in your pantry doesn’t mean you have to use them all.  Less really is more.  As in life, when in doubt, leave it out.

4.  You eat first with your eyes.  When you plate food, pay special attention to the way things look.  Every meal begins as a visual image, followed by aroma, then flavor.  But it all begins with the eyes.  So too in life, don’t discount appearances – of course inner beauty matters, but so does outer beauty.  Make your homes, offices, gardens, indeed your lives beautiful.  Follow and amplify the natural lines of your raw materials.  Celebrate the splendor of the visual dimension.  Take a tip from nature.  Look sharp.  Let your personal appearance be your primary art form.  Make it easier for others be drawn to the treasures within.

5.  Follow your senses.  We are cerebral creatures.  The name of our species, Homo sapiens, means “man the thinker.”  We are justifiably proud of our intellectual and rational accomplishments.  But we are still animals sensing our way through a world of bewildering sights, sounds, scents and textures.  As you assemble the earth’s bounties into dishes that feed and delight, allow the authority of your senses to speak.  And as you struggle through life’s challenges, let intellect guide your steps, but let your senses show you the path.

6.  Practice.  Cooking requires the mastery of a core set of techniques – knife handling, heat management, traditional prep processes, culturally specific ingredients and the regional methods that accompany them.  There is no short cut to mastery.  Simply begin cooking everything you can.  Then do it again, and again.  Eventually mistakes fall by the wayside, instincts sharpen and results improve.  So too in life, how can we demand mastery in any endeavor without a long and arduous apprenticeship littered with failure?

7.  Let the mystery be.  Food is energy embodied, made from the elemental substance of the earth just as we are.  When we eat, we commune directly with the mystery of existence and with our own deepest nature.  When we break bread together we enact a ritual that grounds us in the fundamental unity of all life beyond the veil of birth and death.  Don’t turn eating into an intellectual puzzle.  Embrace your animal nature.  All eating is killing, and as such, involves loss.  Eat mindfully, compassionately and reverently.  Honor the earth’s gifts.  And honor your heart.  Each of us must draw our own ethical lines and avoid imposing our views dogmatically on others, for in the end it is only a matter of degree between the omnivore and the vegan.  We vote with our forks and with our dollars.  Support growers, ranchers and fishermen who share your values and treat the earth with dignity.  Still, no matter where we draw the line, we all must participate in the sacrifice of life.  Trust your gut, and do what you feel is right.

8.  The process is the outcome.  Don’t put all your stock in the end result.  Make every step of the journey a destination in and of itself.  “Sometimes it’s better to travel than to arrive,” wrote Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he’s right.  Sometimes the dish you slaved over all day doesn’t turn out right.  But you have most certainly not wasted your time.  There is joy in the stages of becoming that the end result doesn’t know anything about.  Let the path itself be your reward.

9.  Cultivate gratitude.  After your mise en place is complete and you’re ready to begin, check in with yourself.  Don’t touch anything until you have a grateful heart.  Respect the plants and animals who gave their lives for your table.  Work with them consciously and compassionately.  Respect the fishermen and farmers who dedicate their lives to bringing you the fruits of the earth from every corner and continent.  Feel their passion and their commitment to excellence.  A sacramental offering is placed before you on the altar of your kitchen counter.  Don’t poison it with resentment or self-pity.  Preparing food is not a burden – it is a sacred ritual.  Really see.  You are surrounded by miracles.  Let gratitude fill your heart and guide your hand.

10.  Let your work be play.  Cooking shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun.  If you cannot cook with love and an open-hearted sense of wonder, step away from the stove.  Slap yourself in the face and get it together.  Your mom was wrong.  You should play with your food.  Get your friends involved.  Lead your kids into their own life-long love affair with food by your example.  Explore the myriad wonders of the earth together.  Food is communion that erases all boundaries.  A chef is a shaman, a priest, and an alchemist who uses fire to turn the base elements into the Elixir of Life.  Cooking and eating binds us to ourselves, to each other, and to the sacred source from which all things come.  Learning how to work with food teaches us how to work better with the whole world.  Who knew all of that could begin in the kitchen? 

God and America: Our Nation's Uneasy Relationship with Religion

[A version of this article originally appeared in the June/July edition of Unity Magazine, and is reprinted here with permission.]

In November, Americans will head to the polls to choose the next president.  Whether it’s Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, one thing’s certain: At the inauguration in January, the victor will place his hand on a Bible and make a stirring speech invoking the name of God and imploring Him to guide and bless our great nation.

            Religion has always been at the heart of the American experience, from the first pilgrim to tomorrow’s opening prayer in the House of Representatives.  Leaders from all points on the political spectrum scatter religious references like cherry blossoms on the Washington mall.  The Promised Land, the new Israel, the land of milk and honey – it’s as if a divine mandate were written across her purple mountains majesty and her amber waves of grain.  Still a nagging question remains; whose religion?  In a land founded on the principles of freedom, particularly the freedom to think and believe as one sees fit, America has always had a tempestuous relationship with religion.  When the two conflict, to whom do we owe allegiance, our nation or our faith?

            Like the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome and the kings of medieval Europe, political leaders have long claimed a special relationship with the divine.  Yet in the creation of the American political system, the Founders made a conscious break with the concept of the divine right of kings.  In its place, many of them envisioned an empire of Reason, a republic founded on the inherent human capacity to steer a course through the vicissitudes of life with the rudder of rational discourse.

Was the United States founded by and for Christians, as some claim?  The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) reminds us that when we go searching for origins what we usually find is our own prejudice.  Looking back, Christian revisionists see the Founding Fathers as devout Christians building a theocracy while atheist revisionists see Freethinkers erecting a secular state beyond the crippling reach of old world superstitions.  In other words, no simplistic, reductionist and self-serving portrait can ever do justice to the rich diversity of thought present in early America.  Like contemporary America, colonial life was characterized by a plurality of positions on all questions, especially those regarding religion.  Simple platitudes like “America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles” are not borne out by the evidence.

Faith and the Founding Fathers

Many leading figures in Colonial America were Deists, espousing a deep and lingering animosity toward organized religion.  Deists also hold the view that God created the world as a distant engineer, and is not involved in the day to day affairs of humanity.  Our only salvation, Deists argue, lies in the proper application of our God-given capacity to reason.  Deists also deny many traditional Christian doctrines like the trinity and the divinity of Christ.  Yet Deists like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson believed that God imbued his creation with Natural Law and that it was our primary duty, both as individuals and as a whole, to discover, expand and perfect that Natural Law by envisioning and creating a just society.  And one of the hallmarks of a just and free society was, in Jefferson’s words, a “separation between church and state.”   

“In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Horatio Spafford on March 17, 1814.  Like his friend John Adams, Jefferson had little but contempt for organized religion and what he derisively called “the churchmen.”  Yet in his extensive study of classical literature and philosophy no figure enjoyed greater esteem in Jefferson’s mind than Jesus whom he regarded as the most important ethical philosopher of all time.  So keen was Jefferson’s conviction of Jesus’ importance that he took a knife to the Bible in order to free Jesus from “the errors of his biographers.”  Using two copies of the Bible and a pen knife, Jefferson carefully cut out all of the best sayings of Jesus and pasted them in a new volume, now known as the Jefferson Bible, separating, as he put it, the “diamonds” from the “dunghills.”  No virgin birth, no miracles, no resurrection and indeed no unique or divine status.  The Jesus of the Jefferson Bible is a Deist, a humanist and a philanthropist who has absolutely nothing to do with the institutional Church that calcified around his name.  “The religion-builders,” Jefferson reasoned, “have distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus.”  In a letter to Charles Thompson in 1816, Jefferson said of his deeply redacted Bible, “it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian [his emphasis], that is to say, a disciple of the true doctrines of Jesus.”

Our true salvation, according to Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and Adams, lay in our capacity to reason.  Only through a vigorous and vigilant application of our God-given minds could we gradually realize a human society aligned with the ideals of Natural Law.  For Adams, a Unitarian, “the question before the human race is, whether the God of Nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether the priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.”  The God of Deism is available to everyone without priestly or institutional mediation in the hallowed light of our own higher minds.  “The Infinite Father expects or requires no worship or praise from us,” wrote Franklin in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.  And in a letter to Peter Carr dated August 10, 1787, Jefferson calls us to “question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

Christian apologists often point to George Washington as the counter-example of the prevailing Deism of his time.  They cite his mention of Jesus in several early writings and his talk of God’s providence in the American project.  While it is true that Washington observed Christianity and attended church regularly, he refused to kneel in prayer as was his congregation’s custom, and he always slipped out of his pew before the communion sacrament, much to the chagrin of his wife and family.  Abraham Lincoln was even worse, described by his long time friend and law partner as a true-blood infidel who “had no faith in the Christian sense of the term.”  Things sure have changed.  Presidential candidates who exhibit the open disregard of mainstream Christianity that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln did would today be utterly unelectable.

“In God We Trust”

The turmoil inherent in any open and free society often results in strange and deeply imbalanced eruptions of power.  Out of the fearful spasms of the McCarthy era grew a campaign to change the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrase “under God.”  Originally penned in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, the pledge read “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  As a socialist Bellamy wanted to include the word “equality” as in “with liberty, equality and justice for all,” but knew that it would never stand given the dire plight of African-Americans and women in his time.  Despite his restraint, the socialist themes of his sermons got him defrocked by the Baptists.  Sixty years later, in the long shadow of World War II with its specter of nuclear proliferation and the global expansion of communism, conservative religious forces campaigned for the inclusion of the words “under God”.  Thanks to vigorous activism by the Knights of Columbus, congress passed a law in 1952 giving us the pledge as it exists today.  Conservative anti-abortion activists continue to campaign for one last change – adding the phrase “born and unborn” to the end of “with liberty and justice for all,” while those on the left want to honor Bellamy’s original impulse by adding the word “equality” alongside “liberty” and “justice.”  Once again, the human tendency to project one’s own private convictions onto the whole pushes against the inherently decentralized nature of a pluralistic society.

A few years later in 1956 the phrase “In God We Trust” began appearing on paper money and officially replaced E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) as the national motto.  The long reach of religious authority, specifically Christian authority, was gradually replacing the free-thinking secularism of an earlier age.

Religious Diversity in the White House

When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, his Catholicism raised a lot of eyebrows.  American presidents had always been Protestants of one form or another.  Anti-Catholic voices grew bolder in the months leading up to the election, wondering aloud whether or not Kennedy would be taking orders from the Vatican.  John Adams expressed a similar concern in a letter to Thomas Jefferson when he asked, “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic Church?” 

Questioning the religious beliefs of a presidential candidate seems at once an invasion of privacy and terribly salient – all the evidence you need of a mixed mind at the heart of the American experience.  But in the end does it really matter?  Nixon was raised as a Quaker.  Did the deeply pacifist convictions he learned as a boy shape his Vietnam War policy?

Today both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face similar scrutiny.  Because Obama’s father was a Kenyan Muslim, because his middle name is Hussein, and because he lived in Indonesia for a time as a boy and attended a Muslim school, his Christianity will forever be seen by some as little more than manipulative political theater designed to render him electable. 

Even more remarkable is Romney’s successful campaign to become the Republican nominee, given the fact that his family’s faith, Mormonism, is widely regarded by mainstream evangelical Christians as the fourth Abrahamic faith and not a form of Christianity at all – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism – a claim Mormons strenuously reject.  Yet clearly, mainstream Christians are willing to overlook this as well as some of Mormonism’s more curious deviations from traditional doctrine in the name of party unity.  Perhaps they are digging deeper.  Perhaps they are going back to a time when the promise of America was the vision of a pluralistic, multicultural and authentically free society, where on the big religious and philosophical questions we are left to the privacy of our own conscience. 

In spite of Obama’s embodiment of racial, ethnic and religious diversity and regardless of Romney’s outsider status as a Mormon, no matter who becomes president in November and stands on the Capitol steps to take the oath of office next January, the idea of God will hang ever-present over the proceedings.  The idea of God and the idea of America are forever joined.  But the question of whose God and what sort of God will always draw us into a vigorous and vitalizing dialogue that compels us to speak and listen respectfully, compassionately and humbly, knowing that the voices of the many really are united in a common enterprise that ennobles and affirms us in our ultimate unity.

My Dad

My ninety year old dad is in hospice. He stopped eating. He says he doesn’t remember how to chew. The IV drip administers hydration, nutrition, and morphine for his chronic pain. No one knows how long he has. No one knows how long any of us has. It’s just that with him the problem is a little more apparent.

My dad no longer bothers with the distinction between the dreaming and waking state. He often describes incidents that could have only happened in dreams. Actual events in his immediate surroundings no longer interest him. He’s slipping into a spirit world. Who my father was is mostly gone. Alzheimer’s took care of that.

Whoever we are, whatever a human being is – bits and pieces of consciousness and a few pounds of flesh – is never just one thing. We are a gathering of light, a swarm of bees, a cloud of vapor. Gradually the light fades, the bees fly away one by one and the vapor vanishes leaving only a dry and empty clarity as silent as a windless day in the desert. Left behind are the traces of a thousand moments – and never once in the middle of any of them did we recognize their significance – moments that drew us together in communion. For an instant we shared one pair of eyes, one pair of ears, one mind. These are the marks we bear and carry forward with us until the end of our days. These are the stones of our gratitude with which we build our lives.

I’m grateful I had a father who loved me, and who was kind, and who worked hard day in and day out, year after year, and who showed by his constancy and presence that he loved, honored and respected each of us. To grow up in a family knowing that you are all loved, honored and respected – that is all a child needs to thrive. He gave us that.

I’m grateful I had a father who was simple in his needs. He never wanted or needed a lot of things. He liked simple food. He took pleasure in the everyday world, as it came to him, through the grace of God and through the endless creativity of his loving wife and the home she made for all of us with her hands and with her heart.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved the road. We three boys were forever shaped by his love of open spaces, of forests and deserts and distant places. Visiting national parks and camping out under the stars and swimming in rivers and hearing the wind through the pines and campfires and cold mountain mornings and the promise of the next bend in the road – these were the memories he gave us.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved music. He showed us that music wasn’t something fancy, it is just something every day and normal. The way he sat down at the piano and let the fun and joy bubble out of his fingers and fill the house with song. He could read music, but rarely bothered, preferring to bang it out by ear. He hated rock and roll, yet unwittingly personified it. He showed us that music was just another way to give of yourself, to share love without words, to be present with family and loved ones, and to bring the inner world into alignment with the outer world by bringing beauty to life in the here and now.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved books and ideas. I loved the way he always thought things through, and let there be time for reflection and contemplation. His curiosity about everything made him a life-long learner. Without effort, out of the depths of his own nature, he modeled for us the philosophic life, the love of wisdom, and the willingness to live inside questions and let answers come in their own time.

I’m grateful that I had a father for whom the line between spirituality and everyday life was blurred. I’m grateful that he never imposed his views on us and instead allowed truth to well up through the cracks of our own lives. He honored our individuality and authenticity by letting us follow paths and voices he could not see or hear. Underneath it all, he trusted that truth finds everyone in their own terms, because it is in everyone, and takes the shape of their own yearnings and realizations. This lesson shapes me and my work to this day perhaps more than any other.

I’m grateful that I had a father who understood the power of silence. His gentle temperament and quiet spirit is a powerful presence in my life to this day, and for all the days of my life. And I’m getting older. My dad has lived long enough to see all of his sons grow old, even me, his baby boy. That is a great blessing. And beneath the confusion and sadness of these long, last years, I still see in his eyes a quiet knowing that no matter what is happening, it’s alright, it’s o.k., and a gracious acceptance is the last gift we give to ourselves in the face of great loss.

I’m grateful that I had a father who was courageous enough to leave war-torn Europe and come to America. I have no parallels in my own life of the tremendous willingness, faith and decisiveness that my mom and dad exhibited by leaving behind family, home and homeland to sail across the ocean and start over in a new world. It is of course one of the watershed moments in our family story, and we three boys are Americans because of it. His courage, faith and willingness will always inspire me.

And I’m grateful for the way he showed me how to make peace with the sadness of the world. He never talked about it, but when depression fell on him like coastal fog he simply picked up and kept moving, keeping his promises, finding solace in the actions of daily life, and staying present in the simplicity of the moment. I will always see him standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes after every meal, everyday, without fail, even though he will never again stand at that kitchen sink. I still see him standing in the garage at the workbench repairing a lamp or framing a picture, even though he will never again stand at that workbench. I still see him raking leaves out on the lawn under a soft Ventura sun, even though someone else is raking those leaves now. And I still see him sitting on the patio typing long letters home to Holland on his red portable Olivetti typewriter, even though the keys have fallen silent.

Beneath all of the heartache there is a quiet stillness, a sacred presence, an eternal flame, a light that never wavers no matter how fleeting these frail and fragile lives are. We all arise and we all fade, leaving the world to a new wave of younger people who will never really know us, or see the things we saw. They will see the world through their own eyes and in their own terms, a world that we no longer recognize. And when they finally grow old they too will realize that none of us owns any of this – it is all borrowed. Everything we touch will be taken away from us. Even the people we loved were never ours to possess. It is all a gift, a glorious gift, and the only sane response is profound joy and gratitude that we ever got to touch any of it. That is how I feel in the emptiness between the waves of sadness – a profound joy and gratitude that this deeply humble and beautiful man was my dad.

The Wisdom of Summer

In summer we are drawn upward like ripening corn, feeling ourselves expanding, reaching and unfurling into shapes our winter gestation and springtime birthing only imagined. If winter taught us to wait and spring awakened our possibilities, then summertime calls us in this present moment to fully come into our own. Summer is the season of bright light, deep perspectives and bold realizations.

Come to fruition. Something has been moving in you, rising through you, trying to be born. Now is the time to let it out. Let your plans and projects reach their apex. Pull the trigger. This is your year. All the waiting, withdrawing, nurturing and messiness of birth is behind you. Let your life take its natural shape and proudly proclaim your fullness. The Tao te Ching says that “if you force a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.” But what if it really is ripe? Then let it drop. Allow the natural progression of your life to proceed unhindered. Don’t interfere with the great unfolding. Bear witness to your own fulfillment.

Don’t hide your gifts. Walk out into an apricot orchard. Look how an apricot tree turns the light of the sun and the nourishment of the soil into fragrant golden globes of juicy perfection. Fruit is a gift to be shared, a sweetness distilled from the dark of night and long hot days, a moment of fleeting glory bringing sustenance and delight to a hungry world. Your life is a similar gift the universe gives to itself. As the life-force pours through you it culminates in gifts of love, beauty and service. Hiding your gifts is a crime. They are not yours to hide. Shyness and false humility is an ego disease, a fearful and small-minded form of self-preservation. But all that’s preserved is a pitiable isolation and the deep sorrow of an unrealized life. “What shame,” the Afghan saying goes, “to die like a pomegranate with all one’s seeds still locked inside.” Because finally, the fruit you share bears seeds that will grow, bloom and bear fruit in the lives of others.

Get out. Summer calls us to the great outdoors. Holed up all winter, busy as beavers all spring, summer is the time to walk away from our desks and get out under a wide open sky. For a million years our ancestors lived in forests, savannas, deserts and alpine valleys. It was only yesterday that we invented ceilings and these confounded electric lights. Modern life has insulated us from the very cycles and processes of the natural world that gave birth to us – we have forsaken our mother. That restlessness you feel might be your soul’s longing for home, for we are made – body, mind, heart and soul – from the elements of the natural world. Summer is the time to step back into the primal home of our Pleistocene ancestors. Garden, gather, hunt, fish, camp, wander and wonder at the depth and breadth of our sweet mother earth. Embrace the life and death process by which nature feeds itself in a never-ending array of transformation. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Let a campfire, a ring of trees and a star filled sky be your home.

Unwind. Let the warmth of summer soften the coils of worry and woe that bound you during the long months of winter and spring. Emergence and becoming are naturally stressful and fraught with uncertainty. But now the course is set, the sails are full, whatever will be will be, and the peace of allowance drifts over us like the warm scent of jasmine blossoms. Find a hammock and let a whispering canopy of leaves and a veil of dappled light untie the knots that tangle your heart.

Rest. After the rampant growth of spring, when cells multiplied at a furious pace and expansion trumped every other concern, summer brings a welcome respite. Now it’s time to simply enjoy who we are, where we are and how far we’ve come. Savor the beauty of the world not for what it could be, but for what it is right here, right now. Gather some friends. Share the joys of the table. Waste away an afternoon on the beach. Skip dinner because the sunset is so beautiful, then eat cherry pie and ice cream with the abandon of a twelve year old. Drop your expectations, your tactics, your shoulds and shouldn’ts and simply let the world be what it is today. Take a break from your brilliant plan. Stop being so interested in what you think, and turn your attention instead to anything and everything but you. When we soften our grasp and let it be we enter into a necessary and nourishing time of rest and restoration, a season of Sabbath, a vital shift from human doing to human being. Every wave that crashes slips passively, restfully back into the sea. What made you think you could accomplish more by ceaselessly surging?

Allow joy. When we unwind and move toward restfulness, our eyes, ears and hearts open like pores in the heat of July. Suddenly life gets a little easier and we return to a simplicity our busy mind cannot understand. Old forgotten joys return to us – the perfection of peaches and cream, diving into a cool clear mountain lake, the smell of the grill at the neighborhood block party. It is in these moments we realize that joy is not something we have to strive for. It is not a hard-won prize that lies at the end of a long road of struggle and achievement. Joy is an ever-present mode of consciousness that our busyness and striving smother, like a wet blanket over a fire. When we pull back and rest in the presence of the here and now, joy naturally arises of its own accord. It is not something we create. It is something we allow and perceive when we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see and the heart to feel it. Our job is not the manufacture of joy but the inner work that moves us into receptivity and allowance.

Marvel and wonder. In the end, summer is a time of great miracles and endless magic. There is no limit to the boundless mystery of existence, and in the long warm days of summer this infinite parade goes right through our heart like cupid’s arrow. We fall in love with the messy world just as it is, and we feed on the bounty at our feet. We become again as a child, and gaze in wide wonder at rivers meandering through meadows of columbine in a lingering twilight while in the distance lilting fireflies grace the boughs of the darkening trees, and high above, the stars one by one return to take their rightful place in the order of things. We stand on the shore of a vast ocean. Our toes are barely wet, but we feel in our soul the infinite reach of the cosmos present in every grain of sand. In the loving gaze of our dog, in the kindness of a stranger on the train, in the unearned grace of good fortune, we feel the divinity of a purposeful, meaningful universe – a place where we belong, where each of us teaches, learns and grows in the wisdom of summer.

Ten Steps Away From Anxiety

Nothing interferes with our peace of mind more than anxiety. Anxiety is our ever-present friend, stealing our joy, hampering our relationships, clouding our judgment, and wasting our time. Why is this malady so persistent, so resistant to treatment, so common and widespread? Maybe we’ll never rid the world of anxiety altogether. But we can learn how to manage it better, and how to walk away from it one step at a time.

1. Clear the Clutter
The first rule of feng shui, the Chinese art of spatial arrangement, is eliminating clutter. It is difficult to free your mind from chaotic thinking when your environment is chaotic. Clutter, dirt and debris trap the soul in a downward spiral of inertia. The Hopi people share a similar perspective, that the outer world is a mirror of the inner world, and that the way we arrange our homes and offices reflects the order of our minds. Take a long, hard look at your room, your house, your office, your desk, your closets, and your in-box. The office-kitsch witticism a neat desk is a sign of a sick mind is a clever bit of nonsense belied by this essential truth: simplifying and streamlining the world around you frees your mind of untold stress and needless ineffectiveness.

2. Get Back in Your Body
Anxiety is over-thinking, plain and simple. The most direct and immediate remedy is physical activity. Get out of your head and back into your body. Your body was designed to move. Modern life has us sitting down nearly all the time. Push back your chair, get up and go outside. Walk, run, swim, surf, bike, hike, play, work out, have sex, do yoga, dance – whatever you like. Or at least clean out your garage, wash the windows and mop the floor. That way you accomplish steps one and two simultaneously.

3. Be Present
Anxiety is future-thinking. Anxiety only exists in the realm of thought. It cannot exist in this now moment because this now moment is not a thought – it is Being itself. When we worry, we wallow in troubling fictional scenarios that have not happened yet, all of them centered on our victim-status and affirming our weakness. In other words, anxiety is a defense mechanism that prevents action, for if we do not act, then we cannot fail, thereby fulfilling our childish need to be flawless and perfect. Every action is necessarily flawed, ringed round with unintended consequences. It is so much easier to risk nothing and retreat into the safety of our anxiety and fear. To combat this well-worn pattern, drop out of future-thinking and down into this present moment – this room, this conversation, this priceless, fleeting miracle, this simple task. The world will never again be exactly as it is in this now moment. Stay in your thoughts and miss it. Come out of your thoughts and be it.

4. Practice Allowance
We all carry with us a long list of expectations, judgments and ego-demands that deeply interfere with our effectiveness and joy. Simply notice how much agitation is generated by your resistance to what is. Arbitrary and self-serving ideas about how things should be blind us to the only reality we have and lock us away in a fantasy state of alienation and loneliness. Making peace with what we cannot change, letting situations unfold on their own terms at their own pace and allowing people to be who they are frees us from the relentless and agonizing task of trying to control everything and everyone. Living in a perpetual state of disappointment and resentment is detrimental to our well being. Unskilled self-interest leads to bad habits and self-absorption. Genuine, enlightened self-interest leads to allowance and joy.

5. Let Beauty Happen
One of the gifts that arise when anxiety is relinquished is beauty, or rather, the ability to perceive beauty. Beauty is never hidden, but it often goes unseen. When we are lost in the fog of fear and future-thinking we fail to feel the utter perfection of the uplifting moments that make up our lives. The quiet heroism of our fellow-travelers, the shimmering light that bathes every leaf on every tree, the smell of distant rain on the wind from the mountains, the love in the eyes of those who forgive us in spite of our blunders – this aura of abundance shines around us in every moment. We have only to cultivate the eyes to see.

6. Take One Step
The journey away from anxiety is a path of action. We don’t need to think about it anymore. The time for reflection and contemplation is past. Now it is simply time to move our feet. One step is all it takes. Notice how the thought of all those endless steps before us stops us in our tracks. So don’t think. Act. You don’t have to know what all of the next 10,000 steps are. You know what the next step is. Take it.

7. Shift into Appreciation
 Instead of focusing on all of the unfinished tasks and challenges unmet, look back and marvel at how far you’ve come. Take the time to appreciate yourself and everything you have accomplished. Cultivate the consciousness of gratitude and let it be the lens through which you see the world. Journaling can be a helpful practice because it forms a chronicle, a written record of all of the myriad ways things go right and how we are surrounded by abundance and beauty. A gratitude journal forms a crucial counterpoint to the mind’s natural tendency to dwell in the consciousness of scarcity and fear.

8. Don’t Resist Anxiety
Instead of turning conquering anxiety into yet another stress-inducing chore on your to-do list, re-frame it as simply an inappropriate or disproportionate response to uncertainty, or as a necessary time of restlessness out of which great creativity will soon emerge. I imagine that a butterfly feels a lot of anxiety as it fights its way out of the cocoon. What if anxiety is as necessary as adrenalin? What if anxiety is an evolutionary adaptation, a needed jolt of juice to spur us to action? The caveman who worried about the saber tooth tiger (whether there was one around or not) survived to pass on his genes. His hapless brother, not a care in the world, got eaten. Turning anxiety into a problem only strengthens and deepens its grasp. Quite often, anxiety is just how change feels.

9. Stop Thinking You’re in Charge
One of the primary sources of anxiety is the groundless yet persistent delusion that we are in charge. Our ego continually mistakes its limited range of power and influence as omnipotence and as a result we take on challenges and tasks that are absolutely none of our business. We don’t have to run the whole world, and in fact we couldn’t if we tried. Gandhi called this shift renunciation and correctly identified it as the core principle of the world’s spiritual wisdom. Paul McCartney lost his mother Mary to breast cancer when he was fifteen years old. Years later, through the voice of her grieving son, she sang a mantra of renunciation to all of us: “Let it be.”

10. Find Your Higher Power
Atheists, have no fear, this works for you too. There is an order, a structure, a pattern, a presence, a force in nature that binds all individual phenomena into a singular whole. Some people personify and deify it. Others prefer to let it float just out of range of the conceptual mind. No matter how you conceive of it in the realm of thought, the Source is real. Make peace with it. Find it in meditation, prayer, service, nature, art, beauty, truth, or in the deepest recesses of your own beating heart. Gandhi didn’t have a personal god, he just called it Truth. When you are rooted in the depths of your higher power, you live in a peace that surpasses all understanding. In what the mystics call God-consciousness there is no room for ego, and therefore no room for anxiety or fear.

This then is how we begin. Don’t try to conquer anxiety. Simply see its uselessness. Even that simple awareness will weaken its hold. Then take one step, then another. This is how we move away from anxiety and toward the joyful life our soul is asking for.

All the World's a Stage

A stage is a strange vantage point from which to see the world – all of those faces looking up at you, waiting for the magic to begin, and hoping you’re the one who can deliver it. In all the thousands of times I’ve been on stage as a singer-songwriter, guitarist, band leader, side man or speaker it never ceases to amaze me just how weird it is, how audacious, how presumptuous, to step out in front of a crowd and claim the right to everyone’s attention, and how volatile the situation really is – you could crash and burn or rise up in transcendence. You just never know. In live performance there are no second takes, no do-overs and no mercy. What you see is what you get. Your blunder will live forever on YouTube. In so many ways, that hour on stage is not all that different from the other 23 hours of the day. In fact, the lessons learned on stage apply with equal force to our so-called normal, everyday lives, because Shakespeare was right – all the world’s a stage.

Be here now. When you take the stage you must leave behind your divided mind and show up as a single point of clarity and simplicity. So too in life, our effectiveness suffers when we show up as a convoluted swarm of tangled thoughts. Dissipated and drained, our energy wanes just when we need it most. And for what? All our busy-mind machinations produce nothing. Only when we arrive fully in the present moment do we have a real shot at getting it right.

Fall in love with what is. Your best performance, and your best life, can only arise in the consciousness of acceptance. Struggling against a bunch of little things that don’t align with your arbitrary preferences only saps your strength and dilutes your essence. Resistance to what is kicks up a lot of dust, like a mule dragging its hooves on a dusty trail it doesn’t want to go down, making it hard to see and even harder to breathe. Instead, renounce resentment and fall in love with the messy perfection of this moment, a unique alignment of disparate elements that have never before and will never again occur in this specific fashion. Buddhist philosophy calls it tathata, the ordinary miracle of every moment. Why would you want to miss that?

Trust your team. Assuming you’ve attracted the right people and chosen well, stop trying to run everything and let the strength of those around you carry you. Allow the unexpected power and creativity of the good people around to you find solutions, build bridges, and show you the way. When you stop meddling and interfering, people feel free to be their best. Everyone has a job to do and a role to play. Let them.

Let yourself be lifted. When you are here now, in love with what is and graced by the brilliance of your team, feel yourself lifted. Let the ground slip away and float on a wave of beauty. Feel fully the freedom that can only exist when you let slip the pedestrian concerns of more fearful souls. This light, this grace, this sublime clarity – this is what you have prepared so arduously for. Don’t forget to experience it.

Smile. You work hard when you’re on stage. You are fastidiously processing a million things at once. Your memory is working overtime – lyrics, lines, notes, timing, phrases, cues. In the middle of singing the third verse you’re thinking should I plug the CD after this song or later in the set? In the midst of all this heavy lifting, don’t forget to smile. This is supposed to be fun, remember? Bringing a sense of play and a sense of joy to your work, no matter what your job is, opens channels within and without you – channels through which the love you and your audience have for each other can flow. Slow down and let the joy of the work sink in. It’ll be over soon enough and after the show you’ll be just another schmuck stuck in traffic. Enjoy this while you can. When you smile, you empower others to feel their own joy.

Feel it, don’t think it. No matter what you’re doing on stage, make sure your heart leads the way. Once the preparations are done, it is essential that you stop thinking and start feeling. What your audience wants most is to feel something, and they’re looking to you for leadership. So too in your daily work leave room for inexplicable kindness and impractical compassion. Institutional and bureaucratic structures are designed to serve humanity, not the other way around. When the machinery of intellect fails, use the Force Luke.

Prepare thoroughly. Do your homework. Know your tools. Practice all your moves and build a brilliant skill set. Art is not just inspiration. Before the creative frenzy begins, make sure you’ve thought through all the probable steps. There can be no inspiration without preparation. Chefs measure out all their ingredients and gather their tools before a single spoon hits the pan. What if we brought this same attention to detail to our everyday lives? Instead of flailing around and wondering why we feel so uninspired, draw up some plans. Like they say, fail to plan? Plan to fail.

Let go completely. On the other side of the planning process, when the house lights go down and the curtain comes up, abandon all your fastidiousness. Let loose the dogs of war. Time to revel in your abandon. Get a little crazy. Forget about who you are and what you’re supposed to do. Surrender to a childlike sense of play. Step off the path and see what you find. In any endeavor there comes a time to let go completely and trust the process and the preparation and the good people around you and the audience, especially the audience, because they will rise to meet you in that sacred place where all of the lines blur. So to in our everyday lives when we let spirit guide us we feel our fear slipping away and in its place arises a boldness, a willingness, a powerful creativity not entirely of our own making, and on this wave of grace we are carried to a place we could not have found or even recognized on our own. We come together around stages in bars, in nightclubs, in theaters, in concert halls, and also in classrooms, in churches, in seminars and sports arenas to let our alienation and loneliness fade away in the bright light of our collective reverie.

Play the role you have been given. In art and in life we must play the role that best suits our strengths and abilities – it does us no good, nor anyone else, if we attempt to tackle a task ill suited to our temperament or talent. Start, and end, with the truth of who you are. Careful, honest and generous self-assessment combined with a courageous willingness to experiment and fail will lead you through a sometimes painful but utterly necessary series of trials and errors until you finally find the yellow brick road that leads you home to your authentic self and your rightful place in the sun. Your true purpose and greatest joy lay within you. You don’t have to be a professional performer. You don’t need a spotlight or a three-camera shoot with a director shouting, “Action!” You can begin right where you are. Because all the world’s a stage.

The Wisdom of Spring

Since the invention of language, poets and writers have strained every linguistic fiber and stretched every metaphoric muscle to celebrate the magic of spring. Songs have been written, symphonies composed, paintings painted and sculptures sculpted. We’re perennially drawn to the emblematic power of spring because it represents our own capacity to begin again, to rise from the ashes of winter and to stand reborn in the bright light of redemption. Spring is proof that death is not real. No matter how low and how long the downturn, there is always resurrection. Hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes, spring turns the myth of eternal recurrence into concrete fact. The wisdom of spring is ripening all around us.

Grow. Like ascending fireworks, flower bulbs shoot up long thin columns that burst into color. The smooth and deceptively barren wood of deciduous trees erupts with buds that split open unfurling bright green flags in the wind. Everywhere new forms arise from the pregnant core of old forms. The emptiness of winter fills with emerging shapes casting new shadows across the thaw. And like the awakening world around us, the restlessness we feel inside of our body, mind and soul is our own endless unfurling. We hunger to learn more, see more, be more, and find new ways to give voice to the music within us. Learning to get out of the way, we allow what is emerging through us to flower and expand into fruition.

Be bold. In spring time, life gets loud. Every living thing comes out of its shell and stands tall. Colors just a little too vivid, birdsongs just a little too shrill, sunlight just a little too bright – everything is over the top, unafraid to grab attention and rise above the rest. What if we dropped our practiced reticence? What if we stopped being so…beige? What if we let the explosive beauty of our own inner nature finally arise unfiltered, unprocessed, raw and impetuous? Would we frighten our more polite neighbors? You’re alive, and life is messy. So be it.

Play. Newborn lambs bound across the field, leaping in the air for the sheer joy of having legs. Coyote pups roll in the sage grappling and snarling in mock combat. Everywhere the young at heart let a skip into their step and do delightful things for no good reason. What if we let the simple enjoyment of being alive guide us for an hour or so? Would we really fall so far behind on our precious to-do lists? Or would our mindless reverie invigorate and enliven our deeper creativities? Fall into play, and watch your productivity climb tenfold.

Celebrate. Nature decorates itself majestically. Festooned with blossoms and flowing curtains of green, a dogwood and cedar forest draws close around a meadow of columbine like a gathering of family. Through the meadow runs a ribbon of cold clear water the color of lapis and quicksilver. Butterflies float from blossom to blossom like thoughts meandering through a placid mind. In our homes we clean and renew and restore and rededicate. We paint rooms, clear out garages and wash windows. We set tables, light candles, arrange bouquets, and prepare meals from the bounty of our gardens. We welcome friends and let the space in which we gather become a sacred place of commemoration and celebration, banishing the mundane banality of our aloneness with the mirth of our songs.

Be beautiful. Nature cannot help but be beautiful. Her beauty arises out of her own nature, not arduous effort. So too the beauty of our lives arises out of our own nature and not through calculated artifice or clever striving. We do not add one speck of beauty to our lives by worrying if we are good enough or by comparing ourselves with others. Yes our clothes and hair and make-up and jewelry are wonderful, and it is certainly fun to play in the field of forms, but real beauty is an inner light not of our own making. You can’t find it at the mall. Beauty is not something you buy – it is something you are.

Take chances. Rabbits run the same trails as coyotes. Mule deer sleep in the meadow with mountain lions. Sparrows fly in the flight lines of Cooper’s hawks. New sagebrush and lavender spring up from the scorched earth left by last year’s wildfires. Nature risks everything for a chance to fly, run or bloom. In our own lives there are always a million reasons why it’s never going to work and a long list of impending disasters. Instead of carefully cataloging the height and width of every barrier, marveling at the power of our enemies and inventing problems that never happen, let us simply take root, take flight or take the next step as if the universe were conspiring in our favor, because it is.

Shine right where you are. When a seed falls in a crack in a granite boulder it doesn’t dream of loamy meadows – it grows and blooms right where it is. Every place is the right place to be. Making peace with our genetic code, saying yes to the conditions of our lives that we cannot change, practicing deep and mindful acceptance – these are the gifts we give ourselves on the path to serenity and effectiveness. How can we truly grow, create and thrive if we do not first stop resisting what is?

Say yes to love. When spring lights up the world, love is certainly in the air. Love invites us into a deep and vital reckoning with all that is good and bad about ourselves, all of our unconscious maladies and beauties. In love we must surrender to the truth about whom and what we really are. Nothing is hidden, all is revealed. In order to embrace and be embraced by love, we must tap into everything we know and apply every skill as artfully as possible while simultaneously relinquishing control and surrendering to music we did not write and cannot fully hear. We must embody everything spring has taught us. We must allow growth, be bold, recover our playfulness, celebrate our beauty and the beauty of others, take enormous risks, and learn to shine in the here and now of this time and place. When we answer the call and join together with another in love, we come to know, not in our minds but deep in our bones, that this life-force surging in us, through us, and as us is an energy not of our own making, and the very fact of our lives is a mystery and a majesty no poet, sage or prophet has every fully conveyed or understood. When we love we dive deep into that formless ocean of sacred consciousness that goes down and down and down to the place where all of the riddles are solved, all of the heartaches are healed, and all of the secrets are revealed – but when we rise again to the surface we cannot bring any of that with us. We reappear naked and naïve, stripped of insight and bereft of wisdom – frolicking like fawn in the meadows of renewal, caught by the beauty and significance of the world, but strangers in it still and awkward in our own skin. Yet there beside us is a trusted friend, a soul like us, a kind face, a hand up, a loving embrace, and in their presence we feel our worth, and we learn to trust their trust, honor their honor and take refuge in the shelter of their love. Together we rise up and take our place among the sacred things of this world. Together we are beautiful and free. Together we honor the seeds from which we came and grow strong enough to pass along what we have been given in the great blossoming. This and so much more is what we learn from the wisdom of spring.

The Phi Theta Kappa Address: Learning to Serve

The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at the induction ceremony of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society at Southwestern College on February 18, 2012.

Good morning and thank you all so much for this honorable invitation. It’s profoundly inspiring to be in the presence of so many deeply disciplined and completely committed people.

Over 100 years ago Phi Theta Kappa was created to honor, inspire and celebrate academic excellence. And over the last 100 plus years, tens of thousands of outstanding young people have earned the right to wear the banner of this esteemed honor society. And today, we celebrate you, our newest inductees.

On this important occasion, I think it would be a good idea, alongside the pageantry and celebration, to reflect for a few minutes on some important questions that we’re generally too busy to think about because we’re working so hard at being successful. But what is all this success really for? What is it really that we’re working towards? What is the real purpose of education?

Sometimes it seems that education is about gathering information, collecting data and hypotheses and theories and techniques and methods and more and more and more and more until you think you’re going to burst. It’s as if every class is an information dump – teachers back up giant trucks full of knowledge and dump it all in the middle of the room and you’re expected to carry all of it away and make good use of it.

All of that may be true to a large extent. But lost in that model is a more ancient notion of what education is really all about. The word education comes from the Latin educare which means “to draw out”. In other words, in this classical sense, the purpose of education is not to cover you over with layers and layers of what everybody else thinks, but to draw you out of yourself, the way a sculpture is lifted out of a bath of water.

Here’s a dirty little secret. Your teachers don’t really know anything. Sure, we’ve read more books than you and taken more classes than you, and after years of teaching we’ve certainly mastered our disciplines and learned how to effectively draw others into them. But we are not pouring our wisdom, such as it is, into you like water into an empty vessel. All we teachers really do is set up a series of tasks and challenges – read this, try this, find your way through this confusion, struggle through this problem – and when you take on these activities earnestly and vigilantly, something begins to shift inside of you. The real you begins to emerge.

The best education then, true education, is not indoctrination. True education does not bind you to tired and stale second-hand opinions of powerful others. True education sets you free, to finally be who and what you really are. It draws you up out of your fear and safety and invites you, or drags you, onto the wider stage where the rest of us are waiting for you to pitch in and help us heal the world.

So in a very real sense, education doesn’t add anything to you – it removes barriers. The Tao te Ching says that “in the pursuit of knowledge everyday something is added, but in the pursuit of wisdom, everyday something is dropped.” As we become who we really are, all the fear and artificiality falls away from us. Real education gives us to ourselves.

I know you’ve all experienced this yourselves. In the best classes with the best teachers, you’ve confronted this irony – that wisdom is the end result of a process of unlearning – letting go all of the false assumptions, prejudices, conditioned responses, biases, judgments and opinions that coalesced during our long childhood and adolescence. College strips all of that away.

A true teacher frees you from the things you think you know.

A true teacher leads you into an open field beyond all the partisan encampments.

A true teacher softens the walls that compartmentalize the uncarved wholeness of the world.

And out there in that field, with the rest of us, you find your own path, your own rhythm, your own light.

And then within yourself a sense of authority arises, an unshakable conviction that you are on the right track, that this is where you are supposed to be. Joseph Campbell calls it “following your bliss.” It comes from within and tells you clearly whether you are on the right path or not.

Bliss is different from pleasure. Bliss isn’t always pleasurable. Sometimes it’s challenging, difficult, frightening. But when you feel it, you finally feel alive, really alive, and you wouldn’t trade anything in the world for it.

And then comes the surprise – we learn that our deepest, most abiding joy lies not in the private fulfillment of desires. Our deepest, most abiding joy arises only when we perform the work that we have been given to do, in the service of others. When we take the tools we have been given and courageously fashion out of the raw materials of our lives great works of compassionate action, when we do this, a joy wells up in us that affirms our very existence. Finally we feel comfortable in our own skin. Finally we feel useful. Finally we feel like we are a part, a vital part, of something bigger than ourselves.

And this is where our education has been leading us.

And next comes this insight – that there is no difference between self-interest and the interests of others. In western philosophy we often place altruism – self-sacrifice for others – and egoism – pure self-interest, on opposite ends of a spectrum. We act as if they were diametric opposites. I’m either doing things for myself, or I’m sacrificing myself for others. It’s one or the other. But our own lived experience reveals that that construct is a lie. When we learn how to live lives of service, when we fully embody the truth that any and all work is service, then we awaken to the fact that our self-interest and the interests of others are, and have always been, wholly interconnected.

The Dalai Lama puts it this way: “Compassionate action is the highest form of self-interest.” In other words, only when we truly embody the consciousness of service does our own deepest joy arise.

So today we celebrate learning and achievement. Today we celebrate hard work and great accomplishment. Today we celebrate willingness and optimism. Today we join together to bind our talents and gifts into a great moral force for good. And today we honor that hunger you feel inside of you, that hunger to learn more, to grow, to do more, to be more, for that yearning you feel arising in you is a sacred energy, a divine expansion. It is nothing less than the universe expressing itself in you, through you, as you.

From us, to whom so much has been given, so much is expected. We have the talent, we have learned how to cultivate the discipline, we have the desire and the ambition, and we have the chops. We know how to write, we’re good at math. We figure things out. We read. We incessantly read. And all of this struggle is polishing us smooth, and shaping us for the rich and rough road ahead.

The real purpose of education is to draw out our authentic nature, and equip our joy with the tools it needs to better be of service, to be a part of the healing of the world. And the world needs healing. So many suffer. So much injustice thrives, awaiting only our awareness. For in the withering light of our vision suffering and injustice cannot stand. And in the warmth of our compassionate action, misery and disease cannot persist.

So take these colors, take this banner, take this honor of membership in Phi Theta Kappa and carry it forward as it carries you forward, into a future not one of us knows. But together, with the good men and women all around us, we will walk across that bridge together, and begin to build a world that works for everyone because that is what our soul is asking for, that is what we were born to do, that is what all this hard work is for, and that is where our deepest joy lies.

From the Eagle's Nest

When a fledgling eagle gets a little too big for the nest, and the time has come for him to fly away and live on his own, he is understandably reluctant. Why would he want to leave? He has a soft, safe refuge from the frightening world. Through no effort of his own food arrives at his feet on a daily basis. There are few risks and ample rewards. But in her wisdom, the young eagle’s mother slowly begins to remove the soft, downy feathers from the nest, exposing the sharp and gnarled branches of the nest’s foundation. Soon the nest is no more comfortable and no more appealing than any other clump of branches, and the wider world suddenly seems much more interesting, much more possible. So too in our own lives, comfort is often the enemy of growth. It is our discomfort, our suffering that pushes us past stages of our life where we no longer belong. The problem is we don’t have eagle mothers. In fact, we work very hard to surround ourselves with soft, warm cocoons mistakenly believing that the purpose of life is to be comfortable. Fortunately, life has a way of shaking us loose even from the most carefully constructed cocoons.

Making peace with the inevitable disruptions of life is the work of every wise man and woman. The capacity to reframe loss as growth is a mark of our maturity. Coming to understand that suffering and dissatisfaction are soul-messages we ignore at our own peril is a vital part of our evolution from fearful, dependent beings into courageous, independent beings. The quality and depth of our life is directly proportional to our ability to recognize discomfort as a turn-signal – a call to a higher order of being.

Instead of honoring our uneasiness and heeding the call, we often take the opposite course. We self-medicate, we avoid, we deny, we slip beneath the undertow of the thought-stream, letting our endless excursions into the imagination seduce us into the lie that it’s o.k., at least we’re thinking about it. We gaze down from our lofty perch, seeing the wider world, but never daring to venture out into it.

Think back on those times in your life when you made the most dramatic changes, changes that resulted in new-found freedom, astonishing growth, the emergence of latent talents, the acquisition of new skills, and the realization of a deeper, more authentic joy. In almost every case were those necessary changes not preceded by periods of great uneasiness or worse? Like labor pains, did not your rebirth emerge at the end of process that was disorienting, painful and frightening?

When we look back and reflect on our suffering we often see a pattern. It turns out that life itself is our eagle mother. It relentlessly strips away the ephemeral comforts we thought would last forever and the tighter we grasped the more painful the inevitable separation. It is only when we look forward with eyes uplifted, wings outstretched, feeling for the subtle and invisible updraft that rises in response to our readiness that we finally come to understand that our highest good and our deepest joy were present all along – they were simply hidden from us by the fog of our own comfort.

On the hero’s journey of our lives we must leave the known world of childhood safety and enter the unknown, a place where none of the old rules apply and none of the old supports are in place. It is only in the great wide open that we feel our own latent strengths emerge. In the Wizard of Oz, the lion, the tin man, the scarecrow and Dorothy already had courage, a heart, a brain and the way home – they just had to have it scared out of them. When the wizard sent them to get the wicked witch’s broom he really knew what he was doing. It is only by running toward the thing we fear most, not away from it, that we die to our limited and limiting sense of self and realize our authentic nature. This is why the eagle mother pulls all of the down out of the nest – because she loves her chick so much and wants its life to be as magnificent as possible.

It is our nature to grow and expand, and growth requires the dissolution of earlier forms. As old forms crumble and fall away there is always a period of great uncertainty. What shape will the new forms take? Do I have the energy and the talent to manifest them, the graciousness to allow them, or the eyes to even see them? Uncertainty is a necessary condition. Expecting certainty is a disease of the ego, that part of us that wants to control every element, manage every turn and script every outcome. New forms emerge from a complex and untraceable confluence of streams of causation – suffice it to say that no single person or power is in charge. We’re all working together, mostly unawares, in the construction of this next now moment. And it is our collective suffering that conspires to co-create what’s next.

The wizard and the eagle mother do not give us our gifts. They merely help us create the conditions in which those gifts emerge from deep within our own nature. This is the sacred role of every teacher, mentor and guide – to see in their student the potential the student has not yet learned to see. And in the hero’s journey the mentor or guide always appears just when they are needed most, when the old way of being in the world is no longer working and a dizzying shift is underway. As the old Indian saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It is our task then not to find a teacher, or the right book, or the right philosophy or ideology to subscribe to. We are only to make ourselves ready. Readiness means openness, humility and willingness. When we surrender to the call of our own authentic life, the right people, the right books, the right opportunities start finding us. And when you begin to live the life your soul is asking for, you feel a joy welling up in you that lights the path ahead. You may not know what the next 10,000 steps are, but you know what the next step is, and you take it willingly, faithfully, knowing that by honoring your authentic nature you are honoring the sacred nature of reality itself and moving into a deep and harmonious accord with all that is. This is a satisfaction that the fearful and nest-bound never get to feel.

There is nothing wrong with being young and scared. You unwillingness to change and grow is not your fault. It’s built in. Falling out of the nest before you have your feathers is fatal. But there comes a time when the habit of comfort no longer serves our best interests. It is in an eagle’s nature to fly high above the world and see things others will never see. None of that can happen in the nest. When we learn how to take risks and test the boundaries of our nature we give a great gift to ourselves and to the world. The world needs you and the gifts only you can bring. And when we learn how to live lives of artful service, our own joy comes to fruition. We have only to find the courage to finally feel our own feathers rise on the wind, and with a heart full of gratitude for those who nurtured us, leap from the eagle’s nest.