Cloud Shadows

[This piece was originally published in my "A to Zen" column in the May/June 2014 issue of Unity Magazine under the title "The Wisdom of Embracing Change," and is reproduced here with permission.]

The ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu lived alone in the mountains. Legend has it that when his wife died, his Confucian friend Hui Tzu made the difficult journey up the mountain to pay his respects. When Hui Tzu reached Chuang Tzu’s hut three days later he found his old friend singing, banging on a kettle, and dancing naked around the fire. Hui Tzu was mortified. This was certainly not proper decorum in the aftermath of such a grievous event, and not befitting a philosopher of such renown.

Hui Tzu stepped into the clearing and chastised the old man.

“Chuang Tzu, how can you behave so outrageously? Proper etiquette demands that with the loss of a spouse one wears black and behaves solemnly for one year. And here you are dancing naked around a fire banging on a kettle and singing at the top of your lungs.”

Chuang Tzu looked at his old friend.

“Three days ago, when my wife died,” he said, “I fell apart. I sank to the ground, curled up into a fetal position and didn’t move for three days. I wept and gasped for air like a fish out of water. Then I realized that it was time to get up. My wife was not my possession, therefore she could not be “lost.” Each of us arises out of the field of pure potentiality and takes form for a while. Then we return to the great field of formlessness. Why mourn?  I did not mourn before she was born, why should I mourn now? Instead, I celebrate the time we had together. Now when my eyes fill with tears they are not tears of sorrow but tears of gratitude for the depth and beauty she brought into my life.”

Behind this apocryphal story lay a very important theme – things change. And wisdom is acceptance of change. Maybe it’s just that simple.

The Buddha taught that impermanence (anitya) was one of the fundamental qualities of reality. Not only does everything change, but everything changes into everything else. Each composite thing is built from bits and pieces of formerly composite things. Therefore everything is part of one, vast, interconnected web of being. Nothing is self-caused. Everything is dependent on everything else. Thich Nhat Hahn calls it “inter-being.” This boundless interdependency links each of us into the whole whether we’re aware of it or not. Forms may come and go, but the whole is intact. Learning to love the whole as much as the parts is the engine of our awakening.

A year ago I had the honor of performing a memorial service for a friend whose son had died of a drug overdose. All funerals are hard, but this one was particularly painful. The deceased was a vibrant, outgoing, talented young man, as well as a recovering opiate addict. He was doing well. Then he slipped and made a dosage error. His mother found him dead in his bed three days before Christmas. I recently spoke to her and asked her how she was doing now that it’s been over a year. She said it was hard. The first six months she could hardly breathe. Then slowly and for no particular reason the suffocating grip of grief began to lift. Nothing would ever be the same, but the strange clarity of peace began to penetrate and illuminate the sorrow. She misses him every day, and it will never be right that he died so young, but in her dawning wisdom she knew – everyone dies, it’s only a matter of when, and we do not measure the value of a life by its length but by its depth.

A cloud casts a shadow that passes swiftly over the surface of the earth, here and then gone. A cloud is just a coalescence of ice crystals and water vapor high in the atmosphere. It isn’t really a thing, but a collection of elements taking momentary form, sometimes even a recognizable form – a feather, a flower, the face of a loved one. Then high winds rend it apart, its form dissolving in the light of the sun. And the shadow vanishes.

As he lay dying the Buddha told his monks, “Remember this, all forms are impermanent.” Suffering, he taught, was the natural result of a cognitive error – the mistaken notion that we own any of this. Everything we have is borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Living in the wisdom of impermanence enables us to be fully present in this now moment, the only moment there ever is. By coming out of the fog of the delusion of permanence, we awaken into reality – a place of love and interconnectedness that the mind and its ego attachments can never access. By saying yes to transition, we say yes to the unambiguous beauty of being alive.

Crowdfunding

In 1884 the committee in charge of funding the Statue of Liberty ran out of money. Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper the New York World to spread the word. More than 125,000 people heard the call and donated over $100,000. Most gave less than a dollar – a small price to pay for bragging rights every time you spied Lady Liberty lording over the New York harbor – “I built that.”

These days, if you want to make a film, record an album, mount a play, or launch any other sort of art project, you’re going to need money – a lot of money. You have some choices. One is to self-fund – drain the household budget dry and somehow scrape together thousands of dollars to fund your project. Or you can find corporate sponsorship – a business partner who sees some commercial benefit in allying with you and your work. Both of those approaches have their benefits and liabilities. But the liabilities loom large. Going broke or permanently hitching your art to a corporate logo leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, there’s a third alternative – crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding isn’t new. But it was slow to catch on. These days there are dozens of crowdfunding services available with Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe leading the pack. Each of these many services has its own boundaries and permutations. Some focus on the arts, others on medical expenses. But they all have one thing in common – they create an opportunity for community-building in ways personal or corporate funding do not.

I started my 30 day Kickstarter campaign on March 18. My goal was to raise $6,000 toward the recording, production, and manufacturing of my new CD Two Pines. There were a lot of decisions to make. How much money? You don’t want to set the target too low because it costs about $10,000 to make an album. And you don’t want to set it too high, because with Kickstarter, if you don’t hit your target in the allotted time, you don’t get a dime and the whole thing goes away. We aimed low hoping to raise at least 60% of the $10,000 we needed. We ended up with $8,833. How long of a campaign? Your first instinct is to let it go a long time, say 90 days, so that there’s ample time to hit your goal. But Kickstarter advises you to choose a 30 day campaign for one simple reason – their research shows that 30 day campaigns successfully fund at a much higher rate than longer campaigns – something about the urgency. So we went with a 30 day campaign. We were fully funded in 20 days.

Then you have to make a video. Since I don’t know anything about making videos I decided on a simple, single camera, direct appeal. I shot three versions of me just talking into the camera, making my pitch on what this project was about, what my goals were, and how you could help. Then I just laid an audio track underneath – the song “Long Way Home” from my last album.

Then I had to decide on the number and amount of reward levels. I looked at a lot of other successful Kickstarter campaigns for ideas, including those by my friends Eve Selis, Grant Langston, and Joe Rathburn. That’s when it occurred to me – crowdfunding is not charity. You’re not just passing the hat and shaking down your friends for cash so you can make your little art project a reality. Turns out it’s nothing like that at all, although that’s certainly the rap it often gets. What really happens is this – you’re giving your fans the rare opportunity to get inside an art project on the ground floor. At the lower dollar levels, $15 and $20, you’re giving them a download or a signed copy of the CD before anyone else gets to hear it. At the $30, $50, $75 and $100 levels you’re offering increasing packages of handwritten, signed and framed lyrics, signed album posters, some or all of the back catalog of Peter Bolland and the Coyote Problem CDs, and the permanent tribute of being listed in the album credits as a contributor.

Then, following the pattern I’d seen on other Kickstarter campaigns, I created a $500 and $1,000 level. At the $500 level you get all previous rewards, plus a solo house concert anywhere within a hundred miles of San Diego as well as the title of associate producer in the album credits. At the $1,000 level you get all that plus a custom song written and recorded just for you and the title of executive producer. And this is where it got amazing. Within two hours after the launch, back on March 18, someone came in at the $500 level. And it wasn’t long before someone came in at the $1,000 level too. In fact, in the final analysis, the seven backers at the $500 and $1,000 level account for 71% of the funding. Another surprise was the twelve backers at the $100 level. When you add the top three tiers together – the $1,000, the $500 and the $100 levels – you get a staggering 85% of the total funding. I did not see that coming.

The real benefit of crowdfunding, besides of course the funding, is the community that forms around your project. Before your album even hits the street there is already broad awareness, piqued interest, and committed support. By creating an opportunity to become a co-creator of a work of art, you are giving people a chance many of them don’t often get. Music is already an inherently communal art form – it exists in the space between performer and audience. It belongs as much to the audience as it does to the artist. It is a profoundly intimate art form. Noises you make with your body – your fingers, hands, mind, soul, heart, and voice – travel through the air as physical vibrations and enter the body of another – their ears, their skin, their mind, their heart. Music is the total immersion of one soul into another. Crowdfunding allows you to expand, celebrate and concretize this inherent symbiosis. By binding together exactly the right people – people who vote with their time, treasure, and talent for the completion of a new body of work – the lines between artist, art patron, and art perceiver blur until you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

The experience is profound. I am humbled, enlivened, and grateful beyond words. I take the stage now a little differently than I did in the past. Now when I step on stage I stand there confident, authorized, supported, and absolutely convinced that this work has value. That is a gift my fans gave me, and I will strive to repay that debt with every song I sing. I know that even on those days when I don’t feel like singing, those nights when performance feels a little like a job and not so much like play, even then, with the first downbeat it all washes away and I’m caught again by the conviction that this matters, that the beauty of this music is not my own – it’s ours.

I feel it more strongly now than ever – the music not only belongs to all of us, the music is us. It is our heartbeat, our sorrow, our longing, our wit, our wisdom, and our aliveness. Music is a joining together. It only took 66 people to fund my album. Do you think you could get 66 people to co-create your next project? Are you humble enough to ask for help? Do you believe your work deserves wider support? Are you willing to prove it?     

Would Gandhi Tweet?

Would Gandhi Tweet?

Would Martin Luther King have a Facebook page?

Absolutely.

Both men were masters at using every available medium to great effect. They understood the fact that if you really want to change the world, it’s not enough to stand on the sidelines and be right. You have to overcome your natural aversion to self-promotion and get loud. How can you change people’s hearts and minds if they can’t see you, can’t hear you, and don’ know who you are?

After he graduated from law school in London Gandhi moved to South Africa where there were countless opportunities for a young lawyer to ply his trade. He quickly realized that the institutionalized racism of apartheid was no mere abstraction – as a dark skinned Indian he endured daily indignities and outright violence. He was reviled, thrown off of trains, and frequently arrested for refusing to cooperate with apartheid. While in prison he read Henry David Thoreau’s immortal essay Civil Disobedience and later wrote that he was “galvanized” by it. Thoreau laid out the four core principles of non-violent civil disobedience. First, use only moral and non-violent means, like boycotting and other forms of non-cooperation. Second, always work within the system before, during, and after your civil disobedience. In other words, be politically engaged – vote, go to meetings, back candidates, or even run for office. Third, be open and public about your actions. No ski masks, no digital anonymity, and no safe houses. And four, be willing to accept the consequences of your actions, up to and including prison, fines, deportation, and unemployment. Gandhi would enact these four principles with great effect.

The whole purpose of non-violent non-cooperation was to knowingly and publicly violate unjust laws with the sole purpose of overturning those laws. It was essential, therefore, that your actions be highly publicized so that the conscience of the nation, indeed of the world, could be raised. By sacrificing themselves and causing no harm to their oppressors, non-violent protestors shine the light of truth into the darkness of ignorance.

Martin Luther King and other leaders of the American civil rights movement were great students of both Thoreau and Gandhi. King understood the power of the principles of non-violence and employed them fearlessly, all with the keen sense of a trained publicist.

In March of 1955, a 15 year old unmarried pregnant African American girl named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white man on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested for violating the Jim Crow statutes of segregation. Dr. King and other civil rights leaders decided not to pursue her case and instead orchestrated another, similar event, this time with the married, more conventionally respectable Rosa Parks. In December of that same year Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the bus and was arrested. So began the 385 day Montgomery Bus Boycott. The city’s African American population organized its own ersatz bus lines, carpools, and walking teams. The sheer spectacle of it attracted national attention and elevated both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to celebrity status. Like Gandhi before him, King knew how to turn a local story into a universal struggle.

Eight years later in 1963, King and others ramped up the pressure in Birmingham, Alabama. They were met with brute force in the streets by the infamous chief of police Bull Connor with his police dogs and fire hoses. King’s call to “fill the prisons” brought thousands out in non-violent marches. The movement even began to use children as street protestors, over the objections of some of King’s more cautious compatriots. During one particularly violent episode a Life magazine photographer put down his camera to help a fallen child. Dr. King pulled the man aside saying, “Never do that – never put down your camera. That child is going to be alright. Take a picture. That’s how you can help.”

There’s no doubt that if King and Gandhi were alive and working today, they would employ a vast array of communication media to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Gandhi would Tweet, and Martin Luther King would have a Facebook page. And they would both use crowd-funding to build committed communities around important actions.

It’s not that different for artists.

The goal of making a film, staging a play, publishing a book, or producing an album is very different from the goal of social justice; nonetheless, an interesting parallel exists. You’re going to need publicity, and you’re going to need funding.

Michelangelo had the de Medici’s. Van Gogh had his brother Theo. The Rolling Stones have Prudential, Volkswagen, and Sprint. But independent artists only have each other, and their fans. Twitter, Facebook, and crowd-funding are the new tools of the trade.

There are no more record companies. Not really. Not like the old days. No one’s going to hand you a hundred thousand dollars to make an album and mount a tour. And that’s probably a good thing. The vast majority of bands never survived that system anyway. Independent artists have also largely abandoned radio – corporate radio isn’t interested in them and vice versa. YouTube has replaced radio as the medium for breaking new music, and it’s utterly democratized – no one’s in charge. All you have to do is make a great video of great song, and hope it goes viral. You do whatever you can to draw attention to yourself. You stop being afraid of being annoying. You ask everyone you know for help. And money. If it works your Twitter followers suddenly hit five figures, then six. Your Facebook page explodes. Fans all over the world start sharing your work with each other. Your CD Baby and iTunes income starts to pay the bills. The hive mind has spoken. We’re the record company now.

Two hours after I launched my 30 day Kickstarter campaign for my upcoming album Two Pines, a generous fan pledged at the $500 level. That means she gets a house concert, among other things. When I spoke with her I told her, “You know, you could charge at the door and easily make your $500 back.” Then she said an amazing thing. “No, I want all the money to go to the project.  I’m giving you the door.” I was floored. But then I understood. People want to help. They want to get inside art projects and be a part of them. They want to share in the creation of something that has value for them. Crowd-funding is a way for fans to have the ultimate fan experience – to stand with the artist in co-creation. Music is a collective art form. It belongs to no one. It exists in the space between us. We make it together. Artists and audiences are two halves of one thing. In my natural aversion for self-promotion I’d overlooked this dynamic. Kickstarter isn’t charity – it’s a way to draw exactly the right people into a supporting community around a shared body of work.

And that’s something worth Tweeting about.

Good Enough

Striving for excellence is all well and good, but the fact remains, most days we’re lucky just to make it through without burning down the house. Somehow in our culture the expectation has taken shape that every experience must be a peak experience, every moment an amazing moment, and every effort a stroke of genius. That’s a lot of pressure. Believe it or not, it might be time to lower our expectations. Maybe it’s time to get reacquainted with good enough.

The shadow side of every motivational speech is the implication that who you are right now isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s the wrong message. Do more? We’re already the busiest generation, scrambling like crazy people, multitasking, running on caffeine and nerves. When do we get to rest? When is it OK to simply enjoy the fruits of our labor? When is good enough good enough?

I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately, and how different his life was from mine. I race from one obligation to the next. His hours and days were filled with a kind of reverence, illuminated by a slow motion glow brought on by letting things take their sweet time.

When he died last year at the age of 90 we found an old diary he’d kept for the year 1963. It was a simple journal filled with brief entries chronicling each day’s events. Our family had just moved from New Jersey to Ventura, California, a quiet town on the beach just south of Santa Barbara. He was picking up shift work as a printer typesetting at the Ventura Star-Free Press. Like a lot of families back in those days, our family had only one car and after work he’d often walk down to the beach for a stroll along the sand or even a swim if the weather was warm. Then my mom and I would come meet him, I was only 4 at the time, and we’d all swim or walk on the beach. As the sun set we’d amble on home for dinner and a quiet evening. Maybe the neighbors or some of my parent’s friends would come by for a visit, or we’d watch some TV, one of the three channels. My dad seemed content in the knowledge that he was a father, a husband, a worker, a thinker, a homeowner, and the simple of act of being alive was enough. There was no ambitious scheme to be more, do more, own more, or in any other way stand out from the ordinary. Ordinary was good enough.

Of course I realize I’m romanticizing his life – he was subject to the same pain, disillusionment, and endless hunger that any man or woman feels, but none of that worked its way into his diary. But I do remember as a boy often wondering where does he go when he’d just sit in a chair and close his eyes after a long, hot day of working in the yard. My dad had a rich interior life, and that’s another thing that’s increasingly difficult to maintain in our modern, busy world of hyper-connectivity. Being quiet and being alone are increasingly rare and precious jewels buried under the clutter of our busyness.

When my dad was at work he was at work, and when he was off, he was off. That’s something I don’t have. Because of the nature of my work, I’m never off. As a professor and department chair I’m immersed in the life of my college in many ways, and I’m a mentor to 180 students. Not to mention the tens of thousands of former students who I bump into everywhere I go. They message me through Facebook at all hours of the day and night and ask all sorts of questions, and I love staying in touch, but it’s challenging. And in my work as a singer songwriter, public speaker, and writer I am constantly in self-promotion mode pitching shows, talks, my blog, and my upcoming album. I use Facebook and Twitter to build my brand and strengthen my platform. I wake up at three a.m. and ponder a web design decision or a media contact I should make. I run lyrics in my head or think through guitar solos. In my mind’s eye I peruse the photographic styles of noted local photographers and deliberate about who to use for my next photo shoot.

It may be hard to believe, but I’m really not complaining – I chose this life and I eagerly seek the next opportunity to expand my reach. I love singing, playing, recording, performing, speaking, writing, teaching, and being a part of a vibrant and thriving community of fellow artists, speakers, thinkers, and teachers.

In this crazy life many of us live, we have to work hard to make our own sabbaticals, our own Sabbaths, our own days off, our own vacations. If you don’t schedule down time you’ll go crazy, because there is always a deadline, there is always a long list of urgent emails, voice mails, texts, Tweets, and Facebook messages to respond to. If you aren’t careful, your entire life becomes one long to do list, and all human interactions are reduced to increasingly insistent demands for your time. Total strangers message me on Facebook and say things like, “Hey, I love your work, we should really hang out. I play too. We should jam and write a song together.” While I’m touched that I seem that approachable, and that people feel connected enough to reach out, I can’t help but laugh. Dude, I don’t even have time to hang with my best friends, how on earth can I carve out a minute let alone an afternoon for a jam session with an absolute stranger?

I used to continually freak out at how busy I was. Now I see it differently. Keeping a gratitude journal for the last two years changed that. Now I see my work, all of it, as an opportunity for service. I am so deeply honored and blessed that the art I make, whether in song, prose, or oratory, is welcomed warmly in certain circles, and that the encouragement I receive from audiences and readers is profoundly nourishing. Like my father, I just want to know that I’m useful, that I fit somewhere, and that my passions have a place in this world. I think of him often, his quietude, his gentle nature, his steadfast commitment to his wife and his sons and to the proposition that life is beautiful and to be relished and enjoyed. There is no later. There is only now. If it’s a beautiful day at the beach, then you go to the beach.

Wealth is wanting what you have. Success is well-being. Happiness is a decision. Joy is a natural by-product of a virtuous life. These are not secrets, they are ancient insights taught in every spiritual and philosophical tradition. And they are born out in every life lived with integrity, honesty, vigor, and willingness. Life is only a problem if you try and figure it out. If you just live it, it flows pretty well.

Finding a place where your passion meets the needs of the world is the soul work of every man and woman. For my dad it was printing. He plied his craft setting type and playing an integral role in the publication of the news, making our Founder’s ideals of a free press a concrete reality. He knew that language and print media were essential to the human project and he humbly took his place on the mechanical side of the process. And he took it seriously. But when the type was set, he turned it over to the boys on the printing presses, punched the clock and walked down to the beach. He was free. I still see my father swimming in the ocean at the end of a long day, happy, in love, grateful, and reverent. And it was good enough.