Blue in Green

Six years ago I attended a board retreat with an outside facilitator, Ian Symmonds (we’ll come back to him later) and the opening activity was to bring and share a piece of art that moved us. The assignment of a lifetime for someone who thinks about art and beauty and images and words and music a lot.

One board colleague read a passage from The Great Gatsby. Another, a Langston Hughes poem. I bent the rules and brought two; I don’t have it in me to pick one piece of beautiful art. Such a rebel.

Green is my favorite color and not in a light way. I remember being five and telling my mom a theory I was sure of: “God’s favorite color is blue, but His second favorite color is green, so mine is green, because I sort of feel bad for it for not being the first.” I am from green grassy fields of Ohio, my father’s hazel eyes, and the deciduous forest-fort play of my youth. When I buy flowers at Trader Joes, my husband teases me for buying only the greenery that’s supposed to surround and highlight the actual flowers. The title itself is one reason why I’m drawn to Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green,” from 1959’s Kind of Blue album.

Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain was a record my parents played growing up. But somewhere in the late 90’s in Athens, Ohio, I found Kind of Blue, and specifically “Blue in Green.” Back at the board retreat, I opened my laptop to song three, and moved my cursor to minute 4, second 54.

4:54 is a point where Davis’s trumpet has just left us. The trumpet has descended, and Davis has sent himself off too. The pianist accepts it. And at the 5-minute mark the pianist and bassist, who’s bowing the double bass, not plucking, blend a beautiful, rich sad close that repeats the same melody. It is actually blue in green. Green is life and blue is water washing over and through us, sad, cleansing. Or maybe the blue is blanketing the green. I’m not sure. But I’m sure that blue is in green - the hope I get from the act of expressing sadness. The notes communicate this to me, and the pauses communicate this to me even more.

This exact point in the song is somehow sublime and subtle. I think it’s the most beautiful moment in music I’ve ever been able to find.

So back at the board retreat, while 4:54 onward was playing, with none of the above deconstruction nor explication, I also shared a postcard. It was bent and janky, from having carried it with me for years in my notebook, a reminder of the essentialness of space and pause.

The postcard is a black-and-white photo of a Richard Serra sculpture that is installed in a spacious room at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. This image is my reminder of a later time I went to see an at-the-time new installation of a mazey, marvelous Serra piece at LACMA. I arrived and got on-the-spot, not disappointed, but mad. The sculpture had been placed under a low dropdown ceiling, one that I thought belonged above a cubicle, not a Serra sculpture. I felt claustrophobic for the metal sculpture. There was no space for the piece to breathe and radiate its power. Inhibited, Serra’s piece didn’t, couldn’t, move me as his pieces had at previous galleries and outdoor courtyards, because the space around it didn’t suffice.

So this I know to be true for me: beauty and power lies in what perhaps we don’t think to notice. It’s the pauses and space intentionally worked in that give essential significance. Perhaps the saying, “timing is everything” isn’t just about being at the right place at the right time, it’s also about the importance of pausing. S p a c i o u s n e s s.

A few months ago I was at a webinar for heads of school in California, and mindfulness expert Kelly Baron (who has done work with Westland) shared a story about one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, Arthur Rubinstein. Towards the end of his life, he granted a rare interview with a young journalist who wanted to be judicious with her time because of his ailing health. She asked him only a few questions, one of which was: “What is it about your playing that makes the music sound so incredible?” Rubinstein responded, “I play the notes no better than many...but the pauses, ah, that makes all the difference.”

Baron then invited us to think about how this notion translates on a practical level – our work, leadership, life. I would add in parenting. Do we allow enough pause and blank space for our beauty and power to shine? I immediately thought of my share at the board retreat and my fledgling notion that, yes, pauses and space do make all the difference.

Last April, at the early dawn of last spring’s rupture, Ian Symmonds – the same Ian Symmonds from some six years ago, spoke to a hundred or so heads of school about what we could anticipate as school leaders from this global pandemic that we now know all too well. He gave a list of predictions, and one specifically has been essential to my understanding of how we navigate this COVID-19 context: this time period will be a time period of accelerated change. Symmonds told us that change we know to be inevitable (the for-better-and-for-worse kind of change) will happen at a much more rapid pace.

Eight months in, I now know a thing or two about accelerated change. Change that was inevitable is now coming at us. It might even feel sometimes that it’s sweeping us up. I know I can’t control some of this change. In my role, and even in our roles as parents, we don’t always have the privilege of pause.

But when I do, I’m going to put on “Blue and Green” and just listen. I’ll remind myself to employ the pauses, to work in the pauses, to expand them, and retrospectively remind myself to notice the moments when the pauses just weren’t there. What would it mean for us all to do this in community together?

To find our breath when it’s particularly hard. To approach moments that are confounding with curiosity, calling in rather than calling out, a notion I recently read about. I often hear my teacher colleagues inviting children to take some “thinking space” to sort through those moments where multiple ideas abound at once or when children can’t quite develop their idea yet. Perhaps I could heed this advice when feeling that “sweeping-upness” of accelerated change. I do understand that sometimes the pause might have to come after a decision or a moment. That’s our reality right now. But whenever we can, let’s create thinking space for ourselves.

A final closing image comes to mind. It too is from a postcard. I bought the postcard last July, not for the beautiful vintage-y illustration of Zion National Park, where my family and I camped this summer, but the quote on the flipside: “Zion Canyon’s views are best when looking up, from the bottom to the top. This is very different from the Grand Canyon rim, where you look out and down.”

I see this description as a reminder for us to keep discovering new perspectives and ways of orienting ourselves through change. The pauses and the spaces between can be our companions. Let’s rediscover patience when not feeling very patient. Through this practice, as a community, we can discover new views, the looking-out-and-down kind of views, and also the less obvious looking-up kind of views. And the essential looking-inward views, too. What if we fully feel the blue and the green, and of course the blue in the green?

Perhaps we can bring each other’s power and beauty out more intentionally and vibrantly – and especially the power and beauty of our children. Together, we’ll keep finding the hope that comes out of the sadness, one pause at a time.