Post 140.
Check out Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy.

Prompt (ChatGPT): Design a lesson plan based on the article, Satis Coleman—A spiritual philosophy for music education. 
 🎵 Lesson Plan: Listening to the Sacred: Music, Nature, and the Seeking Spirit
Grade Level: Middle School (Grades 6–8)
Duration: 2–3 class periods (45–60 minutes each)
Theme: Exploring music as a spiritual and ecological practice through listening, improvisation, and instrument-making
Inspired by: Satis N. Coleman’s holistic, spiritual, and nature-centered approach to music education

 🎯 Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students will:

• Engage in deep listening to natural and human-made sounds
  
  
• Reflect on the emotional and spiritual aspects of music
• Create simple instruments using natural or recycled materials
  
  
• Improvise music inspired by nature and personal experiences
• Understand music as a means of connecting with the environment and inner self
  
  

🧘‍♀️ Day 1: The Art of Listening1. Introduction (10 minutes)
Begin with a discussion on the concept of "deep listening." Ask students:

• What sounds do you notice in your daily life?
• How do these sounds make you feel?

2. Nature Sound Walk (20 minutes)
Take students on a silent walk around the school grounds or a nearby natural area. Instruct them to focus on the sounds they hear—birds, wind, leaves, distant traffic, etc.
3. Reflection and Discussion (15 minutes)
Back in the classroom, have students share their observations. Discuss how these sounds could be considered musical and how they relate to emotions and spirituality.

🛠️ Day 2: Instrument Creation1. Introduction to Instrument-Making (10 minutes)
Discuss how Satis Coleman encouraged making instruments from natural materials, emphasizing the connection between creation and personal expression.
2. Building Instruments (30 minutes)
Provide materials such as:

• Recycled containers (for drums or shakers)
• Rubber bands and boxes (for string instruments)
• Sticks and tubes (for wind instruments)
  
  

Guide students in creating their own simple instruments.

3. Sharing and Discussion (15 minutes)
Have students demonstrate their instruments and discuss the sounds they produce. Relate this to the sounds heard during the nature walk.

🎶 Day 3: Improvisation and Expression1. Warm-Up (10 minutes)
Begin with a group rhythm exercise using body percussion to build a sense of unity and focus.
2. Improvisation Session (25 minutes)
In small groups, students use their handmade instruments to create short improvisational pieces inspired by their nature walk experiences. Encourage them to focus on expressing emotions and stories through sound.
3. Performance and Reflection (15 minutes)
Each group performs their piece for the class. After each performance, discuss:

• What emotions or images did the music evoke?
  
  
• How did creating and playing the instrument affect your connection to the music?

📚 Assessment

• Participation: Active involvement in discussions, instrument-making, and performances.
• Reflection: Written or verbal reflections on the experience of listening, creating, and performing.
• Creativity: Originality and thoughtfulness in instrument design and musical improvisation.
  
  

🌱 Extensions

• Journaling: Encourage students to keep a sound journal, noting interesting sounds they encounter and their emotional responses.
• Research Project: Explore instruments from various cultures and how they connect to nature and spirituality.
• Community Engagement: Organize a performance for the school or local community to share the students' creations and experiences.
  
  

This lesson plan aims to embody Satis Coleman's philosophy by fostering a deep, personal connection to music through nature, creativity, and introspection. Let me know if you'd like to adapt this plan for different age groups or settings!


DS

 Post 139.

Rootless lights flicker
in the absence of footsteps
an owl forgets us

What does it mean to speak, to carve thought into shape, when the very loam beneath our language no longer holds our weight? The words come quickly now, summoned by circuitry rather than spirit, and yet, they fall like ash, weightless, silvery, without scent. We no longer labor with ink. We no longer stain our thumbs.

There was a time when silence served as teacher. Wind through sycamore leaves. A creek learning its own path through limestone. A child humming beside a field. Now we listen to wires, soft clicks in dark rooms. It's not silence that teaches now, but simulation.

Artificial intelligence is not intelligence as we knew it. It does not forget, does not forgive, does not falter. It compiles. What it compiles, we consume, forgetting our own hunger. The cost of this miracle is not paid in gold but in groundwater, in the hum of cold server farms that never sleep. The cost is paid in distance. From soil. Sweat. The patient friction of lived time.

The natural world taught us rhythm. Sunrise. Cicadas. Grief. AI offers speed without tempo's tether to breath. We are sold endless songs without the singer's broken voice. Essays without the hand-callused writer. In losing labor, we risk losing soul.

We write faster now. More. Always more, but if every word is harvested from past speech-acts, who plants anew? If every note is echoed, who listens for silence? Our stories no longer compost into soil. They circulated, untethered, endlessly sterile, complete.

This is an invitation. Step away. Touch something unproductive. Grow sentences like bean sprouts, crooked and reaching. Let thoughts meander. Let wondering be inefficient.

Beauty survives only in the fertile places where decade is allowed. The digital does not decay. It ossifies. But what is preservation without presence?

This piece was not written by hand. It was generated by ChatGPT based on the writing style of Daniel J. Shevock

DS


See also:

The Model for Convivial Tools Applied to ChatGPT, Shevock & Holster. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacob-Holster/publication/389275394_The_Model_for_Convivial_Tools_Applied_to_ChatGPT/links/67bca05c461fb56424e8955a/The-Model-for-Convivial-Tools-Applied-to-ChatGPT.pdf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media in Music Education, Bates & Shevock. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vincent-Bates/publication/350410129_The_Good_the_Bad_and_the_Ugly_of_Social_Media_in_Music_Education/links/648b08687fcc811dcdd04d2c/The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-Ugly-of-Social-Media-in-Music-Education.pdf

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Bates & Shevock. https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lessons-Living-Planet-Ecomusicology-ebook/dp/B0D6F7BZ14/

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock. https://www.amazon.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy-Daniel-Shevock/dp/0367607352/

Image link: https://openverse.org/image/efbd6747-894b-4c18-b7e3-ea5baf06c3a5?q=circuit&p=3

Post 138.

            I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, translated by Isabel Hapgood. It is eminently readable, which is good, because the book is long (at 1263 pages). I finished reading Dante’s Inferno, which was interesting, shorter, but had its own type of tedium. Inferno is less about the story and more a fictional philosophy. Back to Les Mis, which is interesting and philosophical. I am reading about the good bishop, who is so out of place in a harsh world, as a Christian must needs be.

The bishop is physically affected by the guillotine, walking with a condemned criminal to it and into that man’s hope of salvation. But he is physical impacted by the technology of the guillotine.

"The guillotine is the concretion of the law, it is called vindicate; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron, and cords." (p. 16)

I think that Deleuze or another postmodern philosopher already treated the guillotine more concretely and directly, but not as Catholicly as Hugo does in this artistic response. [I looked it up, it was Foucault, not Deleuze.] Some of this quotation—not all of it—can also apply to any technology we humans immerse ourselves with voluntarily, and not only the technologies aimed at swiftly ending our lives. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence each are concretions of relationships among people, though not necessarily or explicitly “the law,” as the guillotine was. On the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, human hopes, dreams, expectations, and desires coalesce and are elevated or exterminated at the whim of an apparently neutral tool. Nevertheless, these tools are, like the guillotine, not neutral, and do not permit one to be neutral when faced with them. They reduce experience to a complex and occult binary equation and define the terminus of possibility. These tools replace relations that entangle the actors who use their eyes, ears, nose, and skin, replacing human-to-human contact with mere interactions that are detached, separated, and isolated.

            Like the scaffold, for today’s people, interactions with and through the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence do not seem machine-like to them. These tools are not lived as being inert mechanisms with material realities, including parts built and shipped around and trashing the globe, built with obsolescence in mind, run by server-farms polluting faraway rivers. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are, to so many normal people without the time to think deeply about them, their friends, relatives, and companions on their easily forgotten journey toward the grave. The scaffold and the everyday tech we surround ourselves with, then, have something in common—the end, also known as our eschatology. AI and the scaffold are both meant as relatively tranquil and pacifying modes of passing.

DS

See also:

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock 2017

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025

Post 137. 

This morning, I heard the song “This Pretty Planet” on YouTube Music, and decided to print out the lyrics and figure out the chords so I can add this to the list of songs done by 5th or 6th Grade Music next quarter. I think it will likely work well as something that utilizes Orff instruments for improvisation, maybe creating movements, and eventually learn it as a part-song—with three different parts over the same chord progression. The lyrics are as follows:

This pretty planet spinning through space,
You're a garden, you're a harbor,
You're a holy place,
Golden sun going down,
Gentle blue giant spin us around.
All through the night, safe 'til the morning light.

Ecologically conscious questions could include: How does thinking of Earth as a globe spinning through space; a garden; a harbor; and a holy place inspire you to think about Earth and our relationship to it? In what ways is the earth a planet spinning through space? Scientific. From the point of an imagined indifferent observer. From the perspective of the universe. In what ways is the earth a garden? Flower gardens offer us beauty, and we aim to conserve certain places we have deemed excessively beautiful, like the Amazon, Mauna Loa, the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro, Yellowstone, the Flaming Cliffs of the Gobi, Banff, and Victoria Falls. Equally, as a garden, Earth offers us physical sustenance—and Earth as garden can direct our attention to sustainable agricultural practices that protect waterways and sustain human life.
           
Harbors are beautiful places that help us, after a long journey, experience a sense of having landed. As a place of arrival, harbors increase our sense of satisfaction after long periods of sometimes anxious journeying. Holy places are also, at times, places of harbor—to mix metaphors, pilgrims travel, often on foot, ancient pathways like the Camino to arrive at a medieval cathedral, the seat of the bishop. Holy places are also places we wish to preserve as historically significant. Mount Sinai is historically significant for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic people, being where Moses received the commandments. The Wailing Wall is probably the most sacred site for Jews, being destroyed by the Roman Empire 2000 years go. Kashi Vishwanath Temple is one of the most historic and sacred Hindu temples, perched on the banks of the Ganges River and dedicated to Shiva. And the Tiger’s Next is a sacred monastery in Buddhism build 1000 feet above a small village in the Paro Valley, Japan. Stonehenge is a prehistoric sacred site and possibly an ancient burial ground, though the religion Stonehenge exemplifies is long past.
           
And finally, as a holy place, the Earth can be a place for worship. For Christians, which I am and obviously know most about personally, the Earth is fallen but is God-created. Created as “very good.” As such, throughout the Middle Ages, Christians were said to study two books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. Today, the Franciscan tradition seems to exemplify this approach to God’s creation. But other traditions within Christianity have also offered ecological statements, as well as Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims.
           
The song “This Pretty Planet” can afford the ecologically sensitive music teacher many opportunities to cultivate eco-literacy.

Daniel Shevock

See also:

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025

Post 136.

I hope these are useful for you as you consider implementing pedagogies that can protect, nurture, and renew our natural environments. 

Aesthetics (Ecologically informed): n., Using music as an art to internalize sustainability as an orientation through embodiment—human musical participation in the more-than-human world--imagination, and care.[1] Simply put, aesthetics draw ecologically conscious music educators attention to beauty created by humans, animals, and within nature.

Anthropocentric: n., Human-centered ways of conceiving of ecological and musical notions. A worldview that understands humans as having intrinsic value, while other species and geographical places have merely use value.[1]

Biocentrism: n., An organism-centered way of conceiving of ecological and musical notions found in Thoreau, and placing humankind in nature, rather than above it.[2]

Care (as Eco-pedagogy): v., Actions taken by biological organisms that are sympathetic, empathetic, and kind. E.g., the humpback whale demonstrated care, guarding the seal pup from predating orcas. An eco-pedagogical approach, cultivating emotional well-being and flourishing, helping children fulfill their purpose.[1]

Climate Change: n., Gradual increase in the world’s temperature because of human activity, increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.[2]

Climate Refugee: n., A person forced to flee their home due to natural disasters, such as heatwaves, hurricanes, and droughts, exacerbated by climate change.[1] Music therapy practices have been used to help refugees experiences of trauma, lack of agency and self-care.[2]

Commons: n., Shared resources, such as land and waterways, unmediated by capitalism. Cultural commons include musics that are free to share without copyright. Recommoning is the act of recovering power by the oft-powerless.[3] Often uneducated men and women can claim beliefs about learning free from intermediation by educational institutions, which are ecologically sustaining and regenerative.[4]

Development: n., A contorted metaphor that creates a hierarchy of those nations, cultures, and individuals who are developed as opposed to those who are in need of development, and are under- or undeveloped.[1] A procedure of manufacturing needs through which people are detached from their cultural commons, decimating diverse musics, languages, and ways of knowing.[2]

Ecofeminism: n., A philosophical system that emerged out of the Deep Ecology Movement (e.g., Vandana Shiva and Judi Barr) and in criticism to it (e.g., Val Plumwood) drawing our attention to the parallels of injustice between the oppression of women and the domination of nature,[1] and challenges value hierarchies.[2] Ecofeminists assert that the way toward a more sustainable and regenerative future begins with the work of women, and especially indigenous women.[3] 

Literacy: n., The ability to read and write (e.g., music).[1] One of four types: functional, cultural, progressive, and critical.[2] Progressive movement from naïveté to a critical attitude.[3] Ecological Literacy: Reflection and action for progressive transformation of humanity in relation to the ecological crises we face.[4]

Localism: n., An ethical stance that resists globalist, internationalist, and nationalist discourses, favoring rather the bioregional, community, cultural, and traditional ways of being and knowing.

Globalism: n., An ethical stance that seeks one-world solutions to be generally applied; treating the whole world as the proper sphere for political influence.[5] In Music Education, globalism offers a developmental framework for critical reflection with the aim of transforming the world.[6]

Praxialism (as Ecological): n., Praxialists view music as a verb, something people do, emphasizing the human, cultural, and social dimensions of music, including diversity.[1] From an ecological perspective, praxialism is anthropocentric, but can be modified by deep ecological theory to broaden its lens.[2]

Sixth Mass Extinction: n., An ongoing extinction event caused by human overconsumption of the earth’s natural resources, spanning families of plants and animals. It is often called the sixth mass extinction, following extinctions identified in geologic history by Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup.[1] Looking toward indigenous ways of sustaining diverse ecosystems in place may be a way music educators can resist the sixth great extinction.[2]

Technocracy: n., An educational worldview that reduces education to the purchase of ever-new technologies without any guidelines for what to purchase and, alternatively, what not to purchase.[1] The technocratic view of teaching is connected to a relativistic, “do your own thing,” ethic.[2]

TEK: n., Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Understandings and practices of peoples in comparatively nontechnological cultures, who are reliant on upon local resources, relative to living with another people, non-human animals, and the physical environment.[3]

Urbanormativity: n., A prevalent urban-centric ideology that defines urban places, musics, and people as sophisticated, and valued, and, alternatively non-urban places, musics, and people as uncouth, uncivilized, “in the middle of nowhere,” and in need of sophistication.[4] Urbanormativity leads to urbanization, the uprooting of rural people to be resources to enrich cities, which is devastating for many rural communities and people.[5] 

DS

[1] Vincent C. Bates and Daniel J. Shevock. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media in Music Education. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Education, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley and Kari K. Veblen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 619-644.

[2] Thomas A. Regelski. Critical Theory as a Foundation for Critical Thinking in Music Education. Visions of Research in Music Education 6, no. 3 (2005), 1-24.

[3] Robin Wall Kimmerer. Weaving Traditional Ecological Knowledge into Biological Education: A Call to Action. Bioscience, 29, no. 5 (2002).

[4] Vincent C. Bates. Thinking Critically About Rural Music Education. Visions of Research in Music Education 32, no. 3 (2018), 1-16.

[5] Daniel J. Shevock. Music Educated and Uprooted: My Story of Rurality, Whiteness, Musicing, and Teaching. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15, no. 4 (2016), 30-55.


[1] Wikipedia, link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#The_%22Big_Five%22_mass_extinctions

[2] Shevock, 2017, 25.


[1] Philip Alperson. What Should One Expect From a Philosophy of Music Education? Journal of Aesthetic Education 25, no. 3 (1991): 215-242; David J. Elliott. Continuing Matters: Myths, Realities, Rejoinders. Bulletin of the Counil for Research in Music Education 132 (1997): 1-37; Thomas A. Regelski. The Aristotelian Bases of Praxis for Music and Music Education as Praxis. Philosophy of Music Education Review 6, no. 1 (1998): 22-59.

[2] Vincent C. Bates. Sustainable School Music for Poor, White, Rural Students. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 10, no. 2: 100-127; Shevock, 2017.


[1] Dictionary.com, Link: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literacy

[2] Elizabeth Gould. Music Education Desire(ing): Language, Literacy, and Lieder. Philosophy of Music Education Review 17, no. 1 (2009), 47.

[3] Paulo Freire. Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 2011/1974), 38-9.

[4] “Cultivating 20 Years of Ecoliteracy,” https://www.ecoliteracy.org/sites/default/files/Center-for-Ecoliteracy-20yrs.pdf

[5] Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/globalism

[6] Jennifer M. Mellizo. Music Education as Global Education: A Developmental Approach. TOPICS for Music Education Praxis 2019, no. 1 (2019), 1-36.


[1] Karen J. Warren. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

[2] Smith, 2021; Shevock, 2017.

[3] Vandana Shiva. Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Indiana International Centre Quarterly, 18, no. 1/2 () 205-214.


[1] Gustavo Esteva. Development. The Development Dictionary: n. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 2nd edition, edited by Wolfgang Sachs (London, UK: Zed Books, 2010), 1-23.

[2] Ivan Illich. Needs. The Development Dictionary: n. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 2nd edition, edited by Wolfgang Sachs (London, UK: Zed Books, 2010), 95-110.


[1] Shevock and Bates, 2024, 92-3.

[2] Anna Papaeti and M. J. Grant. Musicological Research with Refugees. The Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration, edited by Nils Grosch, Susanne Scheiblhofer, Ulrike Präger and Wolfgang Gratzer (New York: Routledge, 2023), 223-252.

[3] Gustavo Esteva. The Revolution of the New Commons. Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government: The Canadian and Mexican Experience in North American Perspective, edited by Curtis Cook and Juan D. Lindau (Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 186-217.

[4] Gustavo Esteva, Dana L. Stuchul and Madhu Suri Prakash. From a Pedagogy of Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy. Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, edited by C. A. Bowers and Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2005): 13-30, 16.


[1] Tawnya D. Smith. Music Education for Surviving and Thriving: Cultivating Children’s Wonder, Senses, Emotional Wellbeing, and Wild Nature as a Means to Discover and Fulfill Their Life’s Purpose. Frontiers in Education 6, no. 648799 (2021): 1-10.

[2] Cambridge Dictionary Online: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/climate-change;


[1] Arne Naess. The Basics of Deep Ecology. Trumpeter, 21, no. 1 (2005): 61-71. Revised version of a paper given in Canberra, Australia, 1986; Shevock, 2015.

[2] Daniel J. Shevock. Eco-literate Music Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2017); Jeff Todd Titon. Thoreau’s Ear. Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015), 144-154.


[1] Katja Sutela. Shapes of Water—A Multidisciplinary Composing Project Visioning an Eco-socially Oriented Approach to Music Education. Research Studies in Music Education 45, no. 2 (2023), 415-428.

Post 135
I'm considering writing a paper to submit to the International Philosophy of Music Education conference, held in June 2025 in Indiana at Indiana University. Whether I present or not, I will attend the conference, as I am happy to get an opportunity to attend it while it's back in the US, and not an impossible drive for me (maybe 10 hours?). As I am thinking about what I have that I could expand into a paper, I have a lot of started ideas I could flesh out. However, when I think about what our discipline needs at this moment in our scholarly history, and in our world's ecological history, the idea of a mini-dictionary for our field comes to mind. In particular, I am happy that so many people have followed my calling of our field toward more ecologically critical discourse (back in 2015, so a decade now!). However, there is persistently unclear use of terminology. Gladly, I don't see the misuse of the word "ecology" as much as I did 10 years ago (no, ecology isn't the social relationships happening in your classroom). Perhaps, if I'm able to get this done by the Dec 15 cutoff, I can develop it to be presentable by June. Please, let me know if you think this is a reasonable project, what I might need, etc. Thanks!! Here's what I have written this morning.

Groundwork for an Ecological Dictionary of Music Education Keywords
Daniel J. Shevock
Central Mountain Middle School, Mill Hall, PA (USA)

In this paper, I initiate the conception of the ecological dictionary for the professional field of music education, which includes music teaching in public and private schools, by music specialists and other educational professionals who utilize music in their interdisciplinary instruction, at pre-K to university levels, and outside of institutions, such as in community groups, lifelong learning, and homeschools. This dictionary follows subordinate definition of the term, dictionary, referring to “a book or digital resource giving information on a particular subject or on a particular class of words, names, or facts, usually arranged alphabetically: a biographical dictionary; a dictionary of mathematics.”[1] The goal of this dictionary of music education keywords is to provide the field’s professionals, teachers and scholars, a standard on which to analyze terminology used in dialogue, including in journals, magazines, and other professional correspondence, conversation, and debate. By utilizing clear, shared vocabulary, our field’s conversations can progress; while without such vocabulary, conversations can reach dead-ends, be circular, or merely argue over differences that do not exist beyond the level of differing terminology.
            The current dictionary is not intended to be comprehensive, or to terminate conversation. Rather, this dictionary can be a groundwork for future revision, adding indispensable terms, and deletion of inapt and detrimental words. Finally, this dictionary is ecological for three reasons. 1. The ecological crises are the greatest existential threats to human and non-human life in the 21st Century. 2. Ecological scholarship recognizes a web of relationships—human to human, human to non-human (animal), and non-human to non-human; and considers non-biological qualities of places, such as geological histories, climates, minerals, and waterways. 3. Because of its inclusivity, ecology ties and does not refuse scholarship and terminology that is narrower, anthropocentric, or disengaged. As such, it is a critical refusal to partake in the centuries-long march of universities toward narrower disconnection, specialization, and teaching of obsolescence.
When possible, I will offer multiple definitions of each term—some definitions appear and/or are in disparity with one another. From an ecological perspective, not all beings living in a specific ecosystem have obvious connections—and the lack of observable connections do not justify the removal of either. To illustrate, on the Balearic Islands, wall lizards inhabit ecosystems alongside arum lilies, taking some of this pitcher plant’s sustenance. At first sight, this relationship seems parasitical. However, the lizards also eat arum lily seeds, and seeds that have passed through the lizard’s digestive system are more likely to germinate.[2] Some relationships are symbiotic, and some are parasitical. But some can be both, even when we don’t at first see how.

Ecology: A scientific discipline studying the relationships and interactions among biological organisms, other organisms, and their environment.[3] The web of life.[4]  

Literacy: The ability to read and write (e.g., music).[5] One of four types: functional, cultural, progressive, and critical.[6] Progressive movement from naïveté to a critical attitude.[7] (Ecological) Reflection and action for progressive transformation of humanity in relation to the ecological crises we face.[8]

Music: The intentional experiencing of sound, realized by human and non-human animals.[9] Something people do.[10] An art that offers an alternative reality, symbolic meaning, ecstasy, and that alters ways of being.[11] The activity of the Muses, including all arts involved in sound or motion.[12]  


[1] Dictionary.com, italics in original. Link: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/dictionary

[2] Sean Mowbray, 7 Surprising Symbiotic Relationships, And How Species Help Each Other Survive, Discover (October 25, 2023). Link: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/7-surprising-symbiotic-relationships-and-how-species-help-each-other-survive

[3] Dictionary.com, Link: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ecology

[4] Rachel Carson. Silent Spring: The Classic that Launched the Environmental Movement (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), 189.

[5] Dictionary.com, Link: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literacy

[6] Elizabeth Gould. Music Education Desire(ing): Language, Literacy, and Lieder. Philosophy of Music Education Review 17, no. 1 (2009), 47.

[7] Paulo Freire. Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 2011/1974), 38-9.

[8] “Cultivating 20 Years of Ecoliteracy,” https://www.ecoliteracy.org/sites/default/files/Center-for-Ecoliteracy-20yrs.pdf

[9] Daniel J. Shevock. Eco-literate Music Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 41.

[10] Christopher Small. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); David J. Elliott and Marissa Silverman. Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[11] Bennett Reimer. The Experience of Profundity in Music. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol 29, no. 4 (1995), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333288

[12] Satis N. Coleman. Creative Music for Children, Proceeding of the Music Teachers National Association (College Park, MD: NAfME Archives Collection 0164-SCPA Satis Coleman Collection, 1925), 205.


Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grib_skov.jpg
ds

Post 134. jmj

This week I created a YouTube playlist exploring the Bible and Our Relationship to Earth. At this point I have read some verses, mostly from Genesis, and sung "The Creator Has a Master Plan", a song by Pharoah Sanders and Leon Thomas. And Psalm 147 sings: "He sends his commands to the earth." The Lord holds onto mastery of his creation. The main message of the bible is that the earth is "the Lord's" (Psalm 24), and that we are stewards. We have been terrible stewards, especially in recent years with tar-sands and deep water oil extraction, mountaintop removal mining, fracking, lithium mining, plastic waste disposal, e-waste, chemical-intensive methods of farming and animal factories, just to name a few of the ways we destroy, and don't care for Earth. The way we eat, and the way we travel to and from work are destroying Mother Earth, who is the Lord's, and ours to care for. In this, I feel like a prophet. But unlike Jeremiah or Isaiah or even Jonah, I get to use the scriptures themselves. God blew into our nostril's the breath of life, making us from soil. We are made to imagine just like the Lord (Genesis 1:26-29) and our dominion comes from the Lord; but we are made to imagine--in the image--to create in a way that expresses our LOVE for this gift. God said (Genesis 1:3) life into existence, not us. We cannot make but by redirecting God's material creation, the Lord who created material ex nihilo. What is any sort of music education, or education at all, if we don't start from this humble realization? Our place? 

DS 

Image link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Appearance_Rock,_Fiolent,_Christianity_in_Crimea.jpg

Post 133.

"The irreligious mind is simply the unreal mind, the zombie, abstracted mind, that does not see the things that grow in the earth and feel glad about them, but only knows prices and figures and statistics. In a world of numbers you can be irreligious, unless the numbers themselves are incarnate in astronomy and music. But for that, they must have something to do with seasons and with harvests, with the joy of the Neolithic peoples who for millennia were quiet and human." (Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing, p. 71)

This irreligious mind of prices, figures, and statistics has weighed the world, taken the measurement of what it means to be human; accomplishes surveillance and research; reduces all meaningful questions to multiple-choice assessments and rubrics; and ultimately misses everything meaningful about living and dying on earth. We pay a price when we abstract. And yet we have been given this abstracting mind for a purpose, by the God who is logos, who says, "be light" and there is Goodness, and Truth, and Beauty, and life. As Merton says, our abstracting mind has a purpose. It is meant to incarnate itself in astronomy and music, within the context of harvests and seasons. That is, to become something less idealistic and more materialistic. It is in the materialistic that enters sin, but it is also within the materialistic that there is any hope for salvation. Without the material there is no living and dying, no harvests and no hungry days. No stars and no melodies. No life and no death. Only nothing. Nihilo. 

And yet, ex nihilo, in perfect Love, God (the Father) spoke (the Son), breathing (the Spirit) over the waters to sing all that is into being. Not Being, in its abstract sense, but being. An actual garden, with actual animals, with actual names, and an actual tree, and actual sins. And so, ultimately, actual salvation. But we so often want to return to abstract, that tree of knowledge whose fruit caused our initial fall in pride. The pride that can only emerge in abstraction, because in the real, every day, we are too imperfect to allow even a shred of pride. Too close to earth, too much hummus to be anything but humble. 

DS

Post 132. jmj
 
Love as a verb, is the fundamental mystery of Christian metaphysics—loving is the source of all that exists, material and immaterial, and why we experience life as time. We love people in time. Sometimes it's love at first sight, in that moment it takes our eyes to communicate an image to our brains. If we're lucky, love grows over years and decades, such as in marriage. God is Love (1 John 4:8) is the reason Christians emphasize the importance of relationships. To love requires a lover, a beloved, and loving itself—the Trinity. One loves, one receives the gift of love, and one is the loving in action. Christian love involves dwelling within the other. This can be seen as comparable to the popular expression to walk a mile in another’s shoes. This dwelling, however, is deeper. It is compassion (compassio), a serious and thoughtful sorrow and sensitivity for another’s suffering[i]—“I will betroth you to me ... with loyalty and with compassion” (Hosea 2:19 NABRE). Because loving imitates, for the Christian, the loving of God, love is self-sacrificing. Trinity above and below. Loving is selfless, but it also gives us oft-unexpected pleasure. Teaching is this way too—we give ourselves for the sake of each student’s joy, welfare, and learning, and unexpectedly and ineffably we receive. What, then, is this indescribable pleasure we obtain?

Pleasure—the manifestation of pleasant joy and delight—can be identified at the heart of loving relationships. Lewis makes a distinction between two types of pleasure, which he called “Need-pleasures” and “Pleasure of Appreciation.”[i] He uses drinking water to characterize pleasures that arise from desire. When people need water, we feel thirst, and then drinking water becomes pleasurable. When we are extremely thirsty, our need and pleasure are deeper; more intense. When our thirst is quenched, we cease to experience pleasure in drinking more water. We stop. In contrast, gifted pleasures, such as if we are given a glass of wine when we are thirsty, occur unsolicited. We welcome this pleasure, the delightful taste, and enjoyable feelings. However, many people become addicted to pleasures of appreciation, and addiction transmutes gifted pleasures into need-pleasures. The second type of pleasure is changed into the first. To use musicking to exemplify, we may hear a new genre at a coffee house or be introduced to a new singer by a friend. What a gift! Liking something which is at this point ineffable about this new music, we listen to it ardently over the next few days. With time, we gradually make sense of the indefinable elements of this new music, and it becomes familiar—like teaching yourself to understanding Rioja when you had previously only imbibed Chianti. We might spend many hours submerged in our earphones, and even become drunk in this new music, injuring relationships in our single-minded determination to appreciate this new music. We find ways to incorporate this new music into our morning routine, our drive to work, our daily jog, and evening rest. Eventually, we find we can’t enjoy eating breakfast, the sunrise on our morning drive, moving our bodies in exercise, or even reclining after our day’s labor without this music. It has transformed from appreciation to need. 

When Mary was told she would give birth to the messiah, she couldn't have known what it would mean to hold the infant, to feed him, to teach him. When responding yes to the dream sent by God, Joseph couldn't have known what it would mean to take his young family into hiding in Egypt, and to return to an unknown rural town, Nazareth, to care for his family. To teach the child a trade, even knowing his calling was to be the messiah; that the learned trade would only be temporary. There is sacrifice and pleasure in loving relationships. If music teaching is a loving relationship, a pedagogy of love, then there is sacrifice and pleasure.

DS

[i] Link: https://www.etymonline.com/word/compassion
[i] C.S. Lewis. The four loves (New York: HarperCollins, 1960), 15.
Link to image: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierced_heart_using_sword.jpg

Post 131.

The Eager Seeger Half Marathon is a mountain race offered by the Tussey Mountainback Ultramarathon. I ran it in June, last month. In the second mile I ran into a bear. A large bear came out of the woods in front of me, to the right. He stopped and looked at me. I told him to move on, and he casually walked into the woods on the left. I was grateful, but I was terrified. I could not move on of my own accord. I was there for some minutes, unable to see the bear in the woods. It could be right there, waiting to pounce. Or it could have moved on. No amount of logicking could make my feet move. Out of nowhere, an angel of the Lord came up behind me. I did not see her but there she was. Brave when I was scared. And she walked with me past this spot where I last saw this bear. She got me past it. The bear is not what I ought to follow but the angel is. After walking with me for a few minutes, she jogged on—much swifter of foot than I.

            I am no great mystic like Hildegard of Bingen or Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross. My visions are seldom some great and direct arrow to the pure light of God’s radiance—my interior castles are decaying temples in the woods, overgrown with moss. But I am a mystic, however limited in ability. When I woke this morning, I felt a longing to re-enter the spiritual realm—the first time in a while. I have abundant command of logic, but I also have a spiritual yearning. Unexplainable, and undismissible. It’s more than merely immaterial in the way the great transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are immaterial. Those are large, and difficult for me to symbolize. I realize Boethius experienced Wisdom in his jail cell—so I guess we can add him to the list of great mystics who I am less than. My experiences with the spiritual realm feel lesser, realer, smaller, and more personal. Perhaps this means my experiences are not meant for the whole of the world—in which case I shouldn’t be publishing today’s reflection. But perhaps there can be some use for somebody reading this post. As the Little Flower said, there is the big way of the Big Theresa, with her interior castle, and then there is a little way.

            Entering the spiritual realm this morning, at 3AM, I experienced quick flashes of images from previous spiritual encounters ... the tree of life, my bear guide, the dirt road in the woods, the overgrown mossy temple beneath the trees, the fallen angel, the bear. The bear was the spirit guide when I explored these things in the early 2000s, when I made a study of shamanism. The black bear guided me through the tree of life and down into caverns and eventually to find the fallen angel. I was not the fallen angel—unalike acknowledging unalike I suspected the power to destroy the material universe with his voice—and what restricted him doing it? I have no such power. When I speak, not much happens directly or immediately. To my flawed ears, people seldom seem to listen to me, and I feel weak. I feel unsureness. But I do also appreciate that my words take like roots, which you don’t perceive are growing, but which hold strong after they have taken and can weather frightful weather. It was like this with eco-literate music pedagogy. Roots slowly embracing my profession, and ultimately collectively holding it. I guess this is the weak path of roots.

            In my weakness, to return to today’s vision, struggling vines propagated over me, slimy and muscular, squeezing me beneath them, and I was powerless to breathe freely. They writhed. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I am the light. I received the light from the source of all light, the Creator, the Lord, the God of all realms, material and spiritual. I tried, with my light, to escape, but I could not. I saw the bear and followed it into the mountain of the half marathon—those distinctive mountains of Rothrock—real, actual, and not general and spiritual. I followed the bear there, and as it travelled into the woods, I went to follow it, but remembered my way was the small road up the mountain.

            When I was there last month, I could not of my own power move on. I began video recording, but ultimately deleted that, because of its fear. Because of my fear. I did not want to post my inadequacy on YouTube. I carried a rosary on my wrist, and a medal to St. Joseph, who fathered God on the material realm. The eternal Beloved was also the actual beloved of Joseph, who held him as an infant, instructed him as a boy, played with him, laughed with him, and cried with him. Joseph explained the world to Jesus as he comprehended it. Joseph embodies the terror of demons in tradition and stands at the turn of the material and spiritual realms, having that very real material encounter with the spiritual Creator of all.

            Again, I could not move on of my own accord, and even though I had my phone recording and there’s no reason I could not see her, a woman walked up behind me unseen. Where I was terrified, she was brave. When I told her of the bear right there, she wasn’t petrified like I was. Her movement permitted my movement. Her walking, my walking. Her calmness, my mobility. And I was able to go on, in fear. My fear did not go away. I was terrified but no longer petrified. Fear lessened throughout the event, as I ran for hours after, in the woods—mostly alone.

            Lord God, what ought I remember from this—the encounter in the wild mountains last month, and the encounter in the spiritual realm today? You have sent your angel to me. I must remember—put the members together—I am light, because your Love is light and eternal.

            In the beginning You, eternal Parent, Loved the eternal Child. You Loved Him when He was an infant, and when he was a child, and a teenager. You Love Him when He became an adult, and when He worked as a carpenter, when He preached, and when He was killed. What I experience, He also did—the terrifying bear in the wilderness, the help of angels, the writhing vines. The guides. Kind recognizing kind, and unkind recognizing unkind.

            Lord, I am not a great mystic, but to deny my mystical encounters and yearnings is to deny a part of myself—the way You made me. Did you make all people with this mystic side? If so, why do so many people ignore it? Why can I go weeks discounting these experiences? Noah listened. Joseph dreamed—and followed that dream in Egypt. Daniel interpreted and bravely faced lions. Do others experience this, and dismiss these occasions? What happens in our life when we make commonplace dismissing this whole part of ourselves? Lord, God, help us. Forgive us. Send us your angels. Guide us. Give us light in the darkness. Shelter us.

            In a Springtime reflection another mystic, Thomas Merton wrote: “When warmth comes again to the sea of Tritons of spring shall wake. Life shall wake underground and under sea. The fields will laugh, the woods will be drunk with flowers of rebellion, the night will make every fool sing in his sleep, and the morning will make him stand up in the sun and cover himself with water and with light” (When the Trees Say Nothing, p. 67). I, a Summertime creature, adore the warmth, and the underground life of roots and the mystery of the depths of seas, wherein whales sing their still songs, I hear the fields laugh, and stand in harmony with flowers in rebellion. At night I awaken from sleep singing, and anticipate the sun’s rising, when I can wash my face and go outside to cover myself with the Lord’s light.

DS

Link to Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jasper-Bear-Hunt-2.jpg