Les chansons de ma vie

Paul Schafer's musical reflection, which I shared with you yesterday, reminded me that some thirty-five years ago, with the advent of the writeable CD, I created as a holiday gift, Les Chansons de ma vie, a collection of the songs which I felt had either shaped my life or accompanied me well throughout its vicissitudes. It was a new way of sending myself to my friends and inviting them to be with me, body and soul, ears and heart, however great the geography separating us. The obvious starting point is one of my all-time favorite balladeers, George Moustaki, heard here inviting friends, les amis, to table and love.

When friends are together, we dance. I was one of the two guys who signed up for the rurhythmics course in grad school and felt the holistic integrity of it all, which Moustaki's Danse so richly illustrates.

The other guy in the dance class was my best buddy, Manny, who came from Thibodaux, Louisiana. A visit to his neighborhood brought me not only to chomp on alligator tail, but the chance to hear Sweet Emma at Preservation Hall, and move to the rhythm of Zydeco.

My CD gift collection also celebrated my early movements around the world. My first visit was to Paris, to sit at the Café de la Paix, at the beckoning of Edith Piaf.

France became a love I would never regret leaving home for... I live there now.

Certainly, my Francophilia was due to the fact that I had enjoyed one of the best French college profs ever. Hilaire not only taught us the language, but a love for French literature and culture. He actually motivated me to the point that I decided on my own to memorize almost the entire volume of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de mal, a stanza or two each evening at bedtime.

On my first visit, I put up on the Rive Gauche and traipsed as much as I could in a couple weeks by metro and foot. Then I picked up a hitchhiker and headed for Mont Saint Michel to munch with La Mere Poulard, then to Deauville in search of the little resto I saw in the film, A Man and a Woman. The tiny place where I dined had only two tables, but a vast menu. After I ordered, I saw a young woman running out the side door and returning after a few minutes, arms full of groceries. As I enjoyed my dinner, I couldn't help but notice, when I looked through the kitchen, whose other end opened on the family dining room, that the chef's family was enjoying the same à la carte repas as I was. Small is beautiful!

A cultural revolution was underway as I worked and wrote poetry at the Newman Foundation at Case-Western Reserve University and then at Oberlin College, busied myself with parish programs for racially-mixed neighborhood youth and supported local peace movements. My Dad found an old 5-string plectrum banjo which I plucked along with my friend Jim on the guitar, singing folk and freedom songs. It was a time that still brings tears to my eyes, when I hear it echoed by Harry Chapin.

My next holiday led me to Athens, on my way to backpacking in Sri Lanka in search of Thomas Merton memories. There was a stop in the Netherlands on the return trip to visit one of my old profs. Despite the Regime of the Colonels, my love of Greek history and culture was nourished. Nana Mouskouri's description remains in my heart.

Good fortune! While dorm-sitting, chaplaincy and teaching in the Human Development Program at Oberlin College, I won a Danforth Foundation Grant to do my doctorate at Claremont Graduate University. This meant packing up my life and driving my Audimobile from Ohio to the West Coast of the USA. Fortunately, I had the company of Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing album which made the adventure smooth sailing, rather than a grueling road race toward what would become the port to a new life.

Graduate studies in Gestalt Psychology brought me in contact with visiting German students from Hamburg. They invited me to cross the Atlantic and teach them approaches not offered in their uni curriculum. I cherish memories of wandering the Reeperbahn (by day, not at half one in the morning) and jogging along the Alster with my friend Gisela who had recruited me for these adventures. She witnessed my agony at a first swallow of Ratzeputz.

After a couple of visits and workshops, I settled in, ultimately becoming an itinerant dweller with friends and hip resident of a Wohngemeinschaft (a commune on an old farm) in Schleswig-Holstein. I made lasting friends with and in Germany, and I miss them with a kind of nostalgia that Marlene Dietrich stokes in my spirit despite the song's roots in World War Two, which marked my childhood.

Love and labor whisked me about in those days. Every month or so, I would trim my hippy hair and beard and do intercultural communications workshops at Management Centre Europe in Bruxelles, often with my best buddy Walt. I enjoyed strolling the Grande Place after moules et frites on the Petite Rue des Bouchers and discovered the true home of Jacques Brel. I never met Marieke, but I have been in love with her ever since he sang her song.

The Netherlands was another job and life adventure, though less of a home. Part of a global team shaping global teams, beyond groene haring, I pretty much had to do my own cooking to avoid a life of bread, cheese and bitterballen. Herman van Veen connected me with a tender moment or two of local life.

Relationships have ups and downs, and mine were no exception. Love loss songs abound. While I like but am not a big fan of country and western music, I an humored by the truth in the old joke, "What happens if you play a country and western song backwards?" The obvious answer, "You get your truck back, you get your dog back, and you get your woman back!" Ever enchanted by women's beauty in its infinite forms, I can only echo the "Aaaah" of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto.

Gender misunderstandings took on a larger challenge at this point in my story with the emergence of vociferous feminism. My friend Phil and I created Hidden Valley Center for Men where we did regular workshops on "How to love an angry woman" for several years running. We were learning and helping men learn the skills needed to survive the ups and downs of relationships and to begin to thrive despite the pain so well expressed by Bob Dylan.

But men's work ran much deeper than everyday gender conflicts. We learned that men's healing has a lot to do with the "father wound", the absence of and alienation from fathers. This is experienced by women as well as men and shows up in our relations with each other. Tearful reconnection with fathers, both living and deceased, was often the blessed outcome of our uncovering and sharing of that hurt. Imagine a couple hundred men crying their pain, weeping for and with fathers, embracing each other... I've been there, seen that. Like Michael Smith we learn to bring our fathers with us.

Well, thanks for your patience with my ramblings. These are most of the chansons de ma vie, the songs, largely of the first half of my life, that made their way onto the CD that I sent my friends so long ago. But don't go yet— there are still two songs, important ones. A large portrait of Leonard Cohen hangs over my desk, my inspiration. Cohen has furnished the motto for my life, the words that drive me forward to this day. "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." I ain't perfect, but I'm going to give it all I got!

Finally, Cohen's vision that "Democracy is coming to the USA", first sung over a quarter century ago, continues to realistically bespeak the blustering and blistering of the present moment. Democracy is not a given but asks to be won a day at a time. Cohen confronts painful reality with human determination. He stirs the vision, hope and courage we need to trump the all too often hypocritical, political, social and economic cards being played by thieves of democracy and perpetrators of hate both at home and abroad. Thank you, Leonard, for staying at my side.