“Life is One Big Improvisation”: A Conversation with Saxophonist, Music Educator, and Master Improviser Tom Hall

One of the beautiful paradoxes of improvisation is that every individual choice is simultaneously of the greatest importance and not important at all. At every moment you must be both completely committed to what you are playing, and completely willing to let go of it if the music demands it.
Tom Hall, Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide, Chapter 5

When I first interviewed Tom Hall for this post in early January, the coronavirus was still hushed and hooded. Since then, and at quite a viral pace, our understanding of reality has become ectopic. Our routines are hardly recognizable, our plans left waiting and uncertain, our relationships expanding and contracting. It feels like macro-scale gory re-birth.

I’ve been sitting on this interview for months, trying to find the right moment to grapple with the weight of the gift that Tom teaches: the art of improvisation. Improvisation is traditionally associated with music and theater. At its root, the word improvise comes from the Latin improviso, meaning “unforeseen” or “unexpected” or “not prepared beforehand.” In this historical moment, we are encountering a gaping “unforeseen” future. There was something almost prophetic about meeting with Tom right before the coronavirus crisis.

“Sometimes, we need to reject the dominant structures of how we’re supposed to be together,” Tom explained before we knew what would hit us, “right now, we are at a crisis point in our history where we need to figure out ways for people to improvise together.”

Replaying his words in my head over and over this week soothes me. At its core, improvisation is the exploration of right-now’s infinite possibilities. It sounds so simple, and yet so overwhelming. How can we learn to carve out new spaces both alone and with each other? Even more, what can we discover when we open ourselves to the unforeseen?

First, we make sounds with our bodies. We stand clapping in a circle.

In February, when students were still scurrying to class and eating Einstein’s bagels by library windows, I asked Tom if my friend-bandmate Jason and I could observe “Improv Collective”, one of the most cherished courses at Brandeis. “No need to bring anything, just yourself, if you are comfortable using your voice to do stuff…” Tom encouraged. We’ve never done any “formal” improv before, if that is a thing to ever be formal about. On the drive to campus, Jason and I munched on apples, taking turns asking each other what if we sound like bumbling idiots? We didn’t know what to expect. When we shyly settled in with the twelve other students in the classroom, Tom opened the evening’s class with lively hand gestures, riding the inflections in his voice:

“If you’re on a train, and you hear a rhythm, what makes you identify it as rhythm?”

Patterns! Motion! the students call out from their chairs.

“If you’re in the bathtub and you hear the drip-drop-drip-drop, why do you hear that as rhythm?”

Repetition! Beats over time! Assumptions! the students call.

“Right, right! But also, when you hear things as rhythm, you are constructing a reality based on what your senses experience,” Tom offers, “no two people experience things the same way. And no two places or moments have the same sound. Every beach has a different sound, every city, every conversation. Everything has its own sonic signature.”

And so, we stood clapping in a circle and made sounds with our bodies. Each student would have a turn in the middle of the circle, releasing sound and movement from their mouth or skin or shoe or pencil, and the blob of the circle would mimic it. This went on for a half hour or so. Perhaps we did all look like bumbling idiots with quite distinct sonic signatures. With each passing minute, my self-consciousness began to dissolve. Not fully- but enough that my old friend Judgment was thrown to the backburner for an hour. I let myself laugh and play. Before even interacting with our instruments, we had to become human to each other. We had to connect. This is one way that Tom Hall teaches improvisation: listening to the sonic signature of who you are and who you’re with.

The more intimate a relationship is, the more important it is to have more improvisation and less structure because that’s when you get to offer and accept who you are.
Tom Hall

Just like we tend to construct rhythm in the even rumble of trains and the drip-drop of the bath, we also tend to slip into patterns in our relationships. We slip into what we expect of them and what they expect of us, often automatically. The rhythm of relationships is essential for society and civilization. Structure is how we have codified right and wrong and how we measure value and how we agree upon what behaviors are acceptable. These predetermined rhythms come at us from all sides: our family, our media, our work, our education, our friends. The structure is what allows you to know how to interact with a random person in the cheese aisle of the grocery store without freaking them out. It allows you to recognize that it’s not okay to pick your nose and wipe it on your co-worker’s desk. And you expect that no one will wipe their boogers on your desk either. Seems reasonable. It allows you to believe, perhaps, that your career must be the most important thing in your life. These same structures could have also told your grandmother that she must dedicate herself to cooking for her husband, having five babies, and being buried under a gravestone that says “WIFE, MOTHER”.

You may notice some of these structures breaking down in quarantine and new ones being built all the time. The deconstruction of established structures is just as important for keeping our relationships strong and sensical. What if we didn’t live in those structures, if even for a moment? How would we engage with our partner? How would we engage our bodies? How would we engage with the person in the cheese aisle? What if we gave ourselves the freedom to play?

We’re not the only ones who have asked ourselves this question. If we look at the history of music or art or literature, the drive to challenge the status quo is obvious. When we challenge what is said to be “valuable,” when we move toward the unexpected, and give ourselves permission to believe in that movement, we open up a space for freedom. Improvisation is the seed of creation, the moment where something connects and transforms, Tom says. This creative human impulse is at the root of social movements as well.

At crisis moments in history, people begin to question the structures that have governed their decisions and identities. Free improvisation itself is said to be a direct outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The free jazz experiments emerging in the 1960s were a purposeful rebellion of pre-established jazz conventions. This was the time of Rosa Parks and Little Rock Nine and the Freedom Riders. This was when man walked on the moon. By the 1970s, it was all about freedom.

Free improvisation, unbound from even the few pre-established, ambiguous musical elements of free jazz, can be anything at all. It can be about digging into or out of the womb of unconscious history and bringing it to light with no commitment to style or sound. It can be about rejecting the elite, flattening the hierarchies. It can be about creating music together outside the confines of tradition. It can be about feeling a groove in your body. Whatever it may be, and whatever it may sound like, each player brings both their identity and their liberation from identity to the table.

At its conception, a dominant idea was that improvisation cannot be taught. It had to be felt and done. Any parameters or restrictions or definitions would ruin its creative essence. Forty years ago, during his education at New England Conservatory, Tom recognized that engagement in music and theater and relationships and life were all parallel experiences. “What’s the stuff that is the same?” he wondered.

“On stage, what happens is what’s true.” The expectation of what is supposed to happen becomes less important than what is already happening. In his early life, Tom remembers how high stakes human interactions felt. There were all these social codes of conduct, all these structures, that didn’t make natural sense to him. “I’m a terrible improviser,” he easily admits, even today, “maybe it’s a neurodiversity thing, but I just have a difficult time improvising with people”.

Off stage, he would get in his head, torture himself with judgments. How do you know the “right thing” to say? How do you know what is worth saying? How can you say the most true thing? But on stage, improvising, the most true thing was happening already. In these moments of presence, Tom, the young saxophonist, gave himself permission to play. He could be whoever he wanted to be. Play allows for freedom, even within limits. “It’s the improvising,” he realized, and then he recognized that everything is improvisation.

When you’re actually creating an interaction rather than mimicking one, or riffing off the one you think you should have, that’s when you actually discover things about yourself and the other person. The only way you can freely improvise with someone is if you’re showing yourself and being yourself. Anytime that’s happening, you’re going to be in a more intimate kind of relationship.
Tom Hall

Everything Tom knows about improvisation off-stage, he learned from April, his wife of twenty-five years. She can walk into a room and know instinctively what little dramas were playing out: how people felt, how to communicate, how to make people feel at ease. For him, social improvisation felt impossible. In the bloom of their young relationship, she would help him notice useful social cues. They would practice having candid conversations. They would work on his fear of judgment. If you’re not comfortable, she would tell him, you don’t have to say anything about yourself. Just ask people about themselves and listen!

Music and relationships expanded upon each other as he learned to apply improvisation everywhere. When he and April had a child, the time he spent practicing saxophone got smaller, “but my ability to make music got bigger,” he says. Before then, he had convinced himself to be dedicated tooth and nail to the saxophone, to be the best saxophonist in the universe. “I was never that person and I will never be that person,” Tom smiles, “I’ve learned that I’m something else.” He owes much of his vitality in life to the creative nature of his relationship with April. “We compliment each other as a dyad,” he said matter-of-factly, “we are really good, really powerful. We are able to do a lot of stuff together that we can’t do alone because of how we intersect.”

In the classroom, Tom teaches exactly this: how to connect. Six students volunteer to try the next exercise. Tom Hall dashes to the front of the room and kills the lights. Less light, less noise. There is an eeriness to the silence now because we notice it’s really not so silent at all. The exercise begins with listening.

The “silence” is broken with the smooth, deep tone of electric bass. Within seconds, the bass finds a tentative groove with itself.

Tom Hall interjects, waving his long arms up in the air.

Free yourself from rhythmic structure!

The bass stops with a clank.

Last class we focused on rhythm. This exercise is for finding yourself outside of any rhythm.

The silence starts again. Inside this nighttime veil, everything is one thing. Contours of faces and instruments and legs and tables. We grow uneasy with our confused senses.

First, there is a shuffling of feet upon carpet. Always an electromagnetic buzz from the amp. Then, a soft “shhh” comes from a body standing in front of the window. One by one, new textures come. A resonant flick of a tuba, some sharp shimmers from where we know the drums are, something like nails on wood near the piano, a deep voice from the bass amplifier, maybe. Within half a minute, the landscape of the air vibrates. The sonic landscape of this moment.

Something shifts in the room that none of us can name.

Let it come to a natural end, you’ll know when it’s time. And it does.

“You can’t improvise and not show who you are,” he says, “and when you do it with other people, you can’t do it without accepting who everyone is. That’s what makes it work.” He teaches improvisation as a philosophy, a meditation, and a way of life. The “stuff that is the same” that Tom was searching for since his younger years intersects at intimacy.

A friend staying with her partner’s parents complains they only eat meat and potatoes. Her stomach hurts all the time. Another friend accidentally joined a digital “love yourself” cult. It’s expensive, she says, but it’s helping. Friends who never post shirtless pictures take up kettle bells and post shirtless pictures. In the cheese aisle of the supermarket, we no longer mess around. Everything is grab and go. Friends quarantine with men they met four months ago. My mom texts me “I read that divorce rates are so high now!” She sends statistics from different cities. Back from his father’s for the weekend, a five year old boy is forced to strip in the driveway before entering his mother’s house. A grandmother sews a cloth mask for her only grandchild. It is sky blue with yellow dragonflies. My dad and I translate our family stories from Russian to English. His Zoom background, since Passover, has been the Great Pyramids of Giza. On the rim of the Housatonic, a friend and I watch an eagle hack a fish open. A small crowd of five people gather in masks, transfixed.

Life under quarantine is the epitome of limitation. Intimacy must be re-imagined. “Like playing a tune,” Tom says, “improvisation occurs between limitations.” The old rhythms of our days are different now. The expectations of our attachments have shifted. If we boil it down, we have two choices: to upkeep old dynamics or break free from them. Sometimes in the hardest moments, it’s time to play. It’s time to stand in a circle together, make sounds with our bodies, and listen.

Check out Tom’s amazing book!
Cover designed Lennie Peterson

~~~

A huge thank you to Tom Hall for being who you are and letting Jason and I sit in on some of the classes you teach at Brandeis. Thanks to the amazing students in the class who made us feel so welcome! Thank you to Moira Applebaum, one of Tom’s former students, for sharing your memories of Tom’s class. Shout out to Jason, Sam, and Ethan who shared their thoughts and feelings with me and listened to my incessant processing of this subject. And thank you thank you to Sam, Ethan, and Clay, my quarantine roommates, for making each day an improvisation in these strange times! I would love to hear about your quarantine experience and how improvisation plays a role in your every day life now!

Posted on May 18, 2020May 18, 2020 by awindowinside 0

Opening the Portal: The Secret World of Imaginary Friends

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Ursula Le Guin

Lights off and windows shut, a tear rolls down my cheek as I tell my dear friend Rachel I think it’s time that we part ways.

For years we whispered into each others ears. We laughed together in the bathroom at some juicy middle-school drama. We hugged on icy nights when the gas heat wasn’t on, and falling asleep was hard. We asked each other questions about the day’s happenings: what was your favorite part of that song you just heard on the radio? Did you see grandma get tense when the bank teller couldn’t understand her accent? What if Shane never loves me back?

I would get upset at my dad and she would offer a different perspective, “maybe he was just stressed today because of work; tomorrow will be better,” she would posit. And it always was better.

Rachel was my compass. I trusted her with all my heart, especially in the moment of saying our goodbyes. I was in high school and feeling ready to take it on alone. Keeping up our friendship would make us emotionally dependent each other, I realized. She would become an appendage, a vestige of a relationship that we could no longer learn from. We assured each other that night that we would both be safe; she would go on to love another human being and I would go on living and building new, meaningful friendships.

As great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula Le Guin

Rachel didn’t have a face, nor a body. She floated as an invisible, twin-soul above me. I understood that she was my invention, yet she would still come and go as she pleased, independent in body and mind.

A surprising 37% of children develop imaginary friends at some point (1). In my younger years, I thought people would judge me if they knew about Rachel. In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of friends’ invisible, sometimes secret relationships.

Considering how common imaginary friends are, it’s poignant that as adults we often forget about them or feel shame about them. It’s easy to make fun of ourselves for having made-up beings to talk to. We may even wince at the thought. But for some of us, these imaginary friends have guided us.

Imaginary friends have helped us make sense of our world. These inventions can help certain humans find comfort in times of loneliness or boredom, difficult transitions, and moments of low self-esteem.

*The Eastern eyed click beetle (Alaus oculatus), Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

Some of the most well-known fiction writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, converse with their characters in vast, fantastic worlds steeped in deep history. What better way to practice relationships and storytelling than with a universe that you invented yourself?

In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of people’s invisible, sometimes secret relationships. I heard about an invented family of a hundred cats, a best friend twin-soul (similar to my own), fairy adventures, little beings living in the walls, superheroes, and the list goes on and on.

Reflecting on the experience of having imaginary friends also reveals something deeper — an intimate window into someone’s inner world. By tapping into memories of our forgotten imaginary friends, we can learn a lot about our own and each other’s journeys through life.

In this post, we will meet some of the characters that became companions and platforms for experimentation for real humans. We will explore reflections from two different A Window In readers!

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, [s]he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula Le Guin

First, we meet Sarah and her two high-school aged (invisible) brothers, Dave and Charles. In juxtaposition to their mischievous company, Sarah was “the only level-headed one”. In reality, she was an only child of an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mom living in the hustle and bustle of LA. Sarah didn’t keep her brothers a secret from the adults in her life. She would go on and on about them to her parents, and they played along, shaking their heads, oh those boys!

When it came to the kids on the block, however, Sarah kept it secret. She felt like the odd one out, the solitary girl with no siblings.

“When I was growing up, a lot of people had siblings and I was like, “what’s wrong with my parents that they can’t have another kid? Why did they give me this weird lifestyle of being alone by myself?”’

She felt “weird” and isolated, and was afraid that kids her age would think she was “pathetic for wanting siblings so badly”.

As Sarah started socializing more and being involved in dance at age seven, she started interacting with humans outside her own head. She suddenly stopped talking about Dave and Charles. Her mom asked once what happened to them and Sarah, a clever little chap, explained, “they went away to college”.

She doesn’t think about her big brothers now that she’s in her mid-twenties. She reflects:

“It set me up for creating a reality in my head for what I could consider as normal, comfortable, and protected.”

Now, she uses listening to music and dancing as portals to fantastical worlds where she can explore, be comfortable, and be free.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.
Ursula Le Guin

After initiating this topic with another friend, Liam, our discussion flowed in a totally different direction.

Exposed to Irish folklore as a child, Liam and his (real life) siblings fashioned miniature homes, completing them with waterproof roofs, little plants in little gardens, including windows, making the designs stylish and complex. Despite never befriending a fairy in real life, he wanted to make make sure they had a place to sojourn.

The imaginative story became a family affair. His sister, Grace, joined him in the construction. His mom would put marzipan potatoes in the huts as gifts from the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day.

“It felt good and right making them homes, even when we didn’t get to hang out together”.

Though he never met these fairies, they left coins, bits of thread, and acorns for him to enjoy and cherish.

We dove deep into memories of how we learned lessons in generosity from roots of tradition. Listening to Liam remember the magic of giving homes to silent creatures, sparked my own forgotten moments of cradling a butterfly with a broken wing.

Nowadays, you can find Liam hopping around Indiana, working on land restoration projects, identifying plants, creating seed libraries, and building communities that prioritize sustainable agriculture.

*Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula Le Guin

How can we use our powerful experiences with imaginary friends to summon such magic now?

Yesterday (November 23, 2019), at my friend Eva’s memorial service, her twenty three year old brother stood bravely in front of an overflowing church of grievers and began to deliver a eulogy about none other than their beanie baby collection, the political dramas in the beanie universe, and how much this play had helped them bond and understand the world beyond their own.

This moment of intimacy that he shared with the rest of us, who didn’t know Eva’s earliest creations, lands in a tender place in my heart. Her brother summoned this magic by honoring and integrating these stories into our memory of Eva.

What if we asked each other, “Did you have imaginary friends growing up? What were some worlds that you invented?” The people I thought I knew so well sometimes bare unexpected sagas of adventure, longing, loneliness, and kinship.

It is such a joy to remember these invisible beings who got some of us through lonely and experiential moments in our lives. These conversations elicit surprising intimacy that we can tap into by calling on our childhood imaginations. Our invisible companions not only cradled and shaped some of us, but still do in how we reflect and connect over their existence.

Having a relationship with ourselves means not trying to confine the galaxies inside our bodies that are too vast to map out and predict. Instead, it could be about finding ways to connect, to make our own diverse realities intersect, to learn, and witness, and listen, and imagine the world beyond what we perceive to be true. After all, the most magical forces are the invisible ones.

Thank you all for reading and sharing your heartwarming stories! Special thanks to Sarah Estrada and Liam Kelly for letting me interview you for this post! Thank you to Jason Kimball for contributing beautiful photographs to color this post! If you have any thoughts or memories, I’d love love love to discuss! ❤

Sources:

(1) https://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/1-1-article-taylor-imaginary-companions.pdf (this is actually a really cool paper, if you’re interested!)

Posted on November 24, 2019November 24, 2019 by awindowinside 0

A Place Where Lost Souls Gather

“Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines.”

David Berman, excerpt from “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan”

When a song is born, where does it live?

Music is ephemeral and fluid in its nature. We can’t hold it, we can’t see it, we can’t possess it.

But when a certain song touches us, we witness its power: we can see the strings vibrate, we can feel the bass in our chest, we can absorb the lyrics in our mind, we can press “repeat” on Spotify twenty times.

We can memorize it, record it, sing it, dance with it, forget it.

Songs can move us through time and space, deeper inside our true body – the one that extends beyond our skin. And still, we can never possess a song.

Connecting to life through songwriting and music, I often find myself wondering what it is about some songs that sweeps me into a place of safety and surrender.

After all, music is just sound and organized time. I’ve often thought of songs as friends or family – companions to cry and sway with.

One of David Berman’s obituaries described a song as “a place where lost souls might gather” (1). When I read that, I had this Aha! moment: what if a song is a place! A place where we may find connection and warmth. A place where memories hang on the walls.

What if we can return to songs like returning to lost homes, or rest in songs like resting in a cabin in the woods. What if we think of songs as a place to experience community? A place where many of us can go all at once and feel what we feel privately and together.

Imagine going to a concert for your favorite band and seeing hundreds of strangers in the audience singing the same words and melody together. How many times had each person listened to this song to commit it to memory? What about this song called to all these individuals who otherwise would not connect? It’s magical that songs can bring bodies together in such a resonant way.

Sometimes, we don’t even notice the way atmospheres change as a result of music. Think of that smooth jazz band creating a mood in a loud bar, elevator music when you’re anxiously getting all your luggage to your hotel room, or pump-up music when you’re jogging.

If music doesn’t quite do it for you, that’s okay too! Everyone has their own way of connecting to people through space-time. Because most of us are either consciously or subconsciously immersed in music daily, it is an important aspect of the human experience to consider.

In this entry, we meet Mariam Dahbi, an incredible singer and songwriter whose songs have made my heart weep with relief. The first time I listened to her at an open mic in Cambridge, the air in the room shifted.

Her song “Solace” (featured in this post) lulled me into her inner universe, a rare moment to share with a stranger. In our conversation, she gives us a window into her journey and reflections as a singer, songwriter, and educator.

Some songs come all at once, when my heart wants to empty something.

Mariam Dahbi

Mariam knew she wanted to be a singer since middle school. “I don’t remember myself not singing,” she reflects.

“I would go to school, come home, go to my room, and sing my heart out. I would sing in English, and I didn’t even know English! I couldn’t understand the lyrics but I could understand the emotion behind them.”

As a middle schooler, she soaked in every second of the French version of “America’s Got Talent” and then ran to her room, bawling her eyes out afterward, desperately longing for a future she knew was out of reach.

Growing up in an academically-focused environment in Morocco, Mariam often felt torn between her intrinsic dream of being a singer and the “practical”, safe approach to life (i.e. education, work, marriage, kids, die). And she knew which road she would have to take – the practical one. This flavor of compromise tastes familiar to many of us, I’m sure.

She went on her academic track in education, abandoning singing as she entered into a deep relationship with a man who said music was “not a serious” form of “entertainment”. He may have felt threatened by the possibility that Mariam’s passion for music may eventually outweigh her love for him.

Upon uprooting from Morocco and plopping down in Boston to pursue her PhD in education, Mariam’s relationship crumbled and the loneliness started to tease her tongue. She realized she had been forfeiting her true self in order to keep her relationship afloat.

Feeling worlds away from her cheerful, sociable, singing self, Mariam returned to her consolations, the songwriters she listened to in high school: Norah Jones, Sarah Bareilles, Damien Rice.

She bought a guitar.

She swam with the shame of it all, the loss and the relearning of the self. In the process, after years of invisible gestation, she wrote her first song, “Solace” at age twenty-five (which is featured below).

She briefly (and heartbrokenly) had a “fling” with an artist who “saw the artist” in her. With an encouraging witness for her creative spirit, she pushed herself into the public eye by attending her first open mic.

When you write a song, you learn to hear yourself.
Mariam Dahbi

Mariam’s songwriting process often involves solitude, repetition, and lots of “crying through stuff”.

After the song is born, it is a whole different process to expose it to the public eye where it can live in a new way. Almost every day, Mariam finds herself fighting mental blocks about sharing her songs.

Her family members have expressed confusion about her desire to perform. Do you just want people clapping for you? Isn’t that narcissistic?, they ask her.

“They just don’t want me to be an entertainer,” she considers. But the main motivation for her has little to do with validation or approval. It has more to do with authenticity.

“It feels like getting naked. Performing was a way for me to get out of the zone of hiding from the world, hiding from myself, and joining a community that I knew I was meant to be part of.”

Mariam wades through the nerves and shakes on stage until she comes to a place of peace inside the song. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to worry about the people listening.

Life has a way of bringing you to what you were meant to do.
Mariam Dahbi

The irony of Mariam’s story is that she thought she had to forgo singing in order to have security in an academic track. But she has found herself writing her PhD dissertation on the potential links between songwriting and learning in the classroom.

“Songwriting is a literacy activity,” Mariam describes. Songwriting with children in school settings helps with language, communication, and memory retention.

She conducts research on how to integrate songwriting into curricula to give voices to students who come from different cultures, speak a different language at home, or who have different learning styles.

“What you really want out of a student,” Mariam notes passionately, “is to connect, interact, and co-construct knowledge. Not just passively memorize.”

If you’re complaining about being lonely, in a way you’re seeking help. If you’re ready to not be lonely, then you have to put some kind of work in. That work isn’t songwriting for everybody. That work is vulnerability.
Mariam Dahbi

When I met Mariam, I was bopping around open mic nights because I was in a transition phase in my life. I was feeling lonely and isolated, fresh out of college and lost in a job search.

Attending intimate musical nights exposed me to communities of people who valued sharing and openness. If you’re feeling any kind of tug like that, I strongly recommend hanging out at an open mic night. It can be a space where it is socially acceptable for people to get up in front of you and tell their story through music and poetry. Here is an environment where people cry, laugh, and support each other.

Let’s transform the question of where does a song live? into where do we live inside a song?

Thank you so much to Mariam who spoke so openly about her experiences and her intimate songwriting process. A humongous thank you to Jason Kimball for filming and editing Mariam’s beautiful original song “Solace” with such grace and love. Thank you to my living room (featured in the video) for embracing 13 intimate house concerts hosting over seventy singers/songwriters/bands over the last 4 years. And thank you to Kayla Popik and Marc Yaffee for sharing David Berman’s influential obituary from Jewish Currents with me.

1- https://jewishcurrents.org/kaddish-for-david-berman/

Posted on September 8, 2019 by awindowinside 0

Beyond the Motherhood Monolith: Reflections from a Mom

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
Sharon Olds

Sometimes, it’s hard to see past the monolith of motherhood. We often find ourselves reflecting on the classic pillars of the “motherhood experience”: obstetrics, child development, mother-child bonding, unconditional love, chicken pox. Our culture tends to focus on the development of women as mothers, but not on their development as an individual, complex person. Meanwhile, every person raising a baby out there has a wildly distinct experience that is generally kept hush-hush in public conversations. By sharing our stories and listening to each other, we can crack some of the tropes of motherhood.

In this entry, we meet Rebecca*, who gifts us with candid, thoughtful reflections about how her relationships have shifted since she became a mother. While she navigates the straits of having three young daughters, she is also balancing a full-time job, her marriage, her friendships, and her own identity.

I want to put out there that it’s possible and/or totally inevitable that her story doesn’t parallel your own experience of motherhood, marriage, or friendships. The landscape of relationships out there is as vast and mysterious as the deep sea. It’s impossible to generalize “motherhood”, despite all its monolithic glory. If any thoughts come to you during this reading, I would love to hear them if you are willing to share!

As a mom, there’s no space for you to be vulnerable or weak when you’re with your children because they need so much. So much of just your role as a mother, at least in my experience so far, is just security. It’s just: I’m here. I’m steadfast. I’m not angry. I am your rock. Period. Stable as hell. Because everything in a kid’s life changes every single second.
Rebecca

Rebecca describes herself as a “cisgender woman in a heterosexual relationship”. She married her high school sweetheart when she was twenty six and loves him to the moon. Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, Rebecca was one of the only women in her friend group to wait and have children later. When she moved to the East Coast for graduate school, she had to build a new support system from scratch. The shifts in friendships really became apparent once she “reluctantly stumbled into motherhood” when she turned thirty. When asked about friendships today, Rebecca easily slices her friends into two separate categories: mom-friends and nighttime-friends.

She defines mom-friends as friends she made when she became a mom, but “not because they’re mothers necessarily”. She says it “just marks a time in [her] life in which they became [her] friends”.

“Mom-friends have become so essential,” Rebecca describes. She admits that a huge part of why motherhood has been fulfilling so far was because of the opportunity to bond (and “commiserate”) with new friends who are also going through these challenging transitions. An important part of the mom-friend bond for Rebecca is the opportunity to vent, to be vulnerable, to break down the motherhood tropes with someone who can empathize.

“If they’re close enough, you can be like, “this is really hard”, and “you know what? I didn’t love my child for the first 10 weeks of their life”. You can say, “I don’t want to have a second child because I can’t wait for the time where I don’t have to be a mom anymore”. Those are the things that I have heard said, and things that I’ve said that make it really vulnerable.”

Vulnerability can be really hard for a mother because of societal expectations. A mother carries on her back the tropes of unconditional maternal love – the “instinctual”, the “selfless”, the “sacrificial” woman whose ultimate mission is inseparable from being a mother. The emphasis on these tropes diminishes the actual experience and humanity of the person within the mother.

“You as a mom are not allowed to say, “today my kids suck”. You as a mom are not allowed to say that; you as a woman are not allowed to say that. Not that long ago, before women were allowed to be in the workplace, all they had that was theirs and theirs only was kids, kid-rearing, and motherhood. Your power came from your ability to bring that life into the world. If you say, “this is not always great,” you are sort of giving up the only power that women have only ever had to themselves.”

Rebecca argues that “communal therapy” with mom-friends helps normalize some of the feelings of isolation and frustration. She argues that it helps to keep her marriage stronger.

“I decided at some point: you’re the person I’m going to be with forever and ever and we’re going to figure shit out and I’m going to commit to that every morning I wake up.”

“On the surface of things, he is somebody who stands right there with you,” Rebecca describes her husband. Everything had always felt equal between them since they were 15; they stood by each other while moving across the country and changing jobs. “And then we had the girls,” she states.

“You don’t realize how much you learn as a woman just through being a woman in society that men really miss out on. I don’t know a single woman who made it into her 30’s who has not bottle fed either a real person, a baby animal, or a doll. These are the things. We are still raising our little girls to be mothers, and not raising our little boys to be fathers.”

Suddenly, she is the only one who could pump and breastfeed the girls. She needs to take more time off of work. She needs to stitch her “body back together”. She stays home more so she knows what the girls’ cries sound like. She knows when they’re hungry. The pediatricians call her instead of him. When the diapers run low, she is the one who notices.

“It’s these little things that we’re all, myself included, contributing to that make motherhood in some ways harder than fatherhood. And my husband is 100% there. He is all in when it comes to being a dad. Even if the work that we are doing day to day is 50/50, I’m still doing all the management.”

Rebecca’s frustration with the blatant imbalance that flooded her marriage came as a shock. She expresses that she feels incredibly lucky that the foundation of their relationship is strong, and they are able to discuss the problems as they arise. “We need to stop saying that everything should be equal,” she retorts, “instead we should think about fair.” She reflects that the inequality isn’t only biological – it’s how we’ve been conditioned in ways we didn’t choose. She looks at the new challenge in her marriage as “covering each other’s weaknesses”- learning and developing ways to find balance as a parental unit and as individuals.

Rebecca also sensed that it was difficult for her husband to get to know his children and what role he played in their lives.

“I knew my girls way before he knew them. To some extent, their personalities now are similar to what they were in the womb. If I had described to you the children that I was carrying, to some degree it would be these children. I got to know them so well.”

Benjamin*, her husband, was able to take a chunk of time-off at work to spend one-on-one time with their oldest daughter in their first summer as a family. With the younger daughter, he wasn’t able to do that. Rebecca noticed that “it really changed their relationship. It took a lot longer for him to get to know her. He misses it. It made becoming a parent harder for him”.

Beyond the logistical balancing act that marriage may encounter with children, there is also an emotional balancing that needs to be addressed. Rebecca jokingly referenced a book called “How to Have Children Without Hating Your Husband”, which helped her name some of the shifts.

“There are so many things that tell you how to have a good marriage, but there aren’t many things that tell you how to balance this physical, immediate love that you have for your children with this esoteric, very brain driven love that you have for your spouse. One you choose, one you don’t choose. How do you balance those two loves? How do you not get consumed by one or the other?”

Some of what we learn about partnership and parenting is through observation and experience. Rebecca notes that her own parents had a difficult relationship with each other and got a divorce. Her becoming a mother has also prompted profound reflection of her relationship with her own mother.

I was like – holy shit, the only other person I feel this way about is my mom!
Rebecca

Rebecca followed in the footsteps of a long line of women who worked in education. Her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all worked full-time most of their lives, a historic rarity. She didn’t “identify with motherhood” at first, and found it difficult to imagine herself sacrificing her independence to take care of a bunch of drooling babies. When asked about what she may have learned about motherhood from her upbringing, she shared, “hearing my mom and the older generation’s experiences of motherhood, both good and bad, led me to make a lot of choices within defining my own sense of who I am as a mom”.

The intergenerational trauma and learning regarding motherhood directly impacts how women slip into their roles as mothers. Rebecca’s mother’s story is totally different than her own. Her mother had married “late” (in her 30’s) after “sowing a lot of wild oats first”. Rebecca speculates that one of the only reasons she was married was because she “was ready to have kids”. She never really had a partner in raising children, and got divorced when Rebecca was a teenager. She and her own mother’s relationship was one where the “two women broken by circumstance loved and hurt each other in equal measure”. Rebecca’s mother often felt isolated and alone.

Rebecca reflects that she and her mom are “close friends”, but sharing her challenges can be difficult because of her mother’s trauma. She says:

“In some ways, it’s hard to talk to her about my experiences. She says, “well you have it so much better than I had it”. But I’m sure she never really had a voice to say “I had this bad experience”’.

On the other hand, she’s grateful for the powerful and foundational relationship with her mother. She can share her developing identity as a mother with the woman who carried and raised her from birth.

“I don’t know that I appreciated my mother. I don’t think I appreciated the connection that we had and the physical love behind it. Now we’re connecting as adults over a bond that we’ve had your whole lives, even when she were an adult but I wasn’t. To realize, I’ve been completely obsessed and in love with this person and never, ever realized it until I had my own person that I was insanely in love and obsessed with.”

Despite all the difficulty, Rebecca finds wonder and gratitude in watching her young daughters discover the world.

“My oldest just started this new thing where she says “It’s a mysteryyyyy” and she’s just really cool – she’s just a cool human being. I am cultivating this person who didn’t choose to be here. That’s a lot of responsibility.”

Thank you to Rebecca who shared these intimate details of her life with us! Thank you Sam Bavelock for the cover art made from beet juice. Thank you to all the humans willing to converse about motherhood in the interim to help me write this in a semi-cohesive way. This entry may not reflect your own experiences, and of course there is a lot of nuance here with various family structures, gender roles, culture, and the list goes on forever. Motherhood is such a monolith to tackle, so this really just represents a morsel of one person’s reflections.

*Names are changed for some semblance of privacy!

Posted on July 7, 2019July 7, 2019 by awindowinside 0

A Window In: An Exploration of Intimacy, Loneliness, and All Our Faces

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich

I’m a person on Earth today. My first experience with intimacy, probably like yours, started when I was born – when I was unconditionally dependent on my mother for life. She carried me in her body as a hungry, banging, painful blob of matter. She strolled through the autumn landscape of Peabody, Massachusetts chewing on her owns fears, hungers, regrets, anticipations. And as I grew in the womb, closer to becoming separate from my life source, she held a radio playing Beethoven up to her belly, hoping I would one day love music as much as she does.

The question of intimacy and its noted scarcity in our society has been on my mind since I was young. Why do people give weird looks if I embrace my dad in public? Why can’t I tell my boss I have to stay home from work because of menstrual cramps? Why is it “uncomfortable” to have platonic (or maybe a wee bit sexual) physical intimacy with a close friend? Why are first dates on tinder so mind-numbingly interview-like and judgmental? Why do I feel lonely when there are 25 other people on the bus, all going to the same place?

I do not claim to know anything about intimacy except for what my own experience has illuminated. Like everyone else, I make assumptions about society because I have a brain the size of two fists and limited peripheral vision. I am aware that this blog cannot and may not cover your experience of love or intimacy (but please talk to me about it so we can explore new dimensions!!). The main purpose of this blog is really to dive into what intimacy means to people, how it drives us, and how to improve our relationship to it.

By Jason Kimball (Vondelpark, Amsterdam)

When we hear the word “intimacy”, we think of gazing into the eyes of someone we adore under a candlelight glow, a wanting of the skin, a memory of warm whispers passed between lovers. In short, we think of romantic or sexual intimacy. As a society, we are committing a colossal disservice to the gift of closeness by enclosing it in the sexual realm.

Intimacy can be between a grandmother and her grandchild eating breakfast, a nurse and a patient’s family during a difficult diagnosis, strangers at foreign bus stop getting lost, a two people on a high school soccer team, a group of friends sharing experiences of their past, a church group praying, someone texting you “good night” no matter where in the world you are. Intimacy can be sharing a piece of art with an audience, paying for “professional cuddling” on a rough afternoon, or hiring a professional mourner (aka moirologist, China).

As humans of the modern world, we are incredibly lonely. And though loneliness may be part of our human condition (according to existentialist thinkers), it has never before been thrust into our faces at such speeds and quantities. Technology may be used as a tool to foster intimacy (such as allowing long-distance conversation), but it also ramps up the pace of our lives. At our fingertips, there is always something to do, somewhere to be, someone to plan something with. When we sit in our rooms staring out the window, we wonder at the seemingly myriad possibilities beyond us that could make us happier, more productive, more worthy of love.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich

Many of us are still caught in the mindset that intimacy must first and foremost come from sexual relationships. If we find ourselves single, in a committed relationship that we are not “certain” about committing to, or in the midst of a breakup, we feel utterly groundless and lonely. The loneliness is born from thousands of factors. But we don’t help ourselves as a society by demanding intimacy from basically one person. First, that person will never be able to meet all our needs (physically, emotionally, spiritually, etc) and second, that person is not guaranteed to be around forever. As Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright, comically remarked, “If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.” Because of our paradigm of thought, marriage often isolates us from pursuing other kinds of intimacy outside the partnership.

By Kayla Popik (Death Valley, California)

We have become stingy with our “love” and intimacy, fearing that if we are vulnerable we will be hurt, will inflict hurt, or will be perceived as obtuse. As a result, we limit the reach of our ability to give and receive love. This creates a scarcity complex around love and intimacy – a feeling that we can never have enough, that relationships are competition, and they are most desirable products on the market. We reserve our love for sexual/romantic/marital partnerships and leave the remaining relationships distant and dark. And we wonder why we are so often thoroughly dependent on romantic relationships for fulfillment, and why we feel a loneliness creep in desperately like a spider every time that relationship is on the rocks.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
Viktor Frankl

In this blog, we will hold conversations about intimacy and all the unexpected places we can develop it. We will discuss loneliness and how cultural expectations for various ages, sexualities, occupations, and social structures can make us feel isolated and/or empowered. We will be interviewing people of different stages of life as a window into their experience of intimacy and loneliness. The hope is that these conversations will empower us to be empathetic and vulnerable, maybe shifting our own habits to interact with love more freely.

Posted on April 14, 2019 by awindowinside 2