The other day I was running late for work, just one chapter in a comically star-crossed day that included a full parking lot at the train station, a full bladder leading me to an out-of-service public restroom, and my foot landing squarely in a pile of dog poo 5 minutes before a big meeting. At this moment, I was driving (hurriedly though of course safely) with a sense that I’d make it almost on time IF I didn’t hit any obstructions or delays . . . and at that moment I came to a stop sign while a funeral procession drove by across me. I don’t know if I’m becoming enlightened or if recent wounds are simply still fresh, but my annoyance disappeared before it even emerged. I just sat there in my car and reflected on the reality that everybody in each of those cars had lost somebody. And indeed, who hasn’t?

Mother’s Day is here, and it is a time of celebration and acknowledgment for some (most?) and a time of bringing difficulty into sharp relief for others. I am certainly not advocating that those who are experiencing the telephone-commercial version enjoy their day one iota less. Quite the contrary, taking a moment to empathize with those who are dealing with loss should only enhance the edict to enjoy and savor each moment of love and togetherness.

Growing up, I seldom gave Mother’s Day a thought. In my upbringing, one made token acknowledgment of this day, but it was framed as essentially a ruse by the greeting card, flower and chocolate industries to a) make money and b) absolve neglectful children of their guilt by giving them a one-day opportunity to act appreciative. It was really only after I got married (and thus became part of another family) that I began to first see that not everyone feels this way, and then realize that everyday appreciation doesn’t make it a bad idea to heap it on to a deserving mother on that day. When we became parents, my appreciation for Kate’s devotion to our girls increased that sense all the more.

Eventually, though, I started to see the parallel thread of people for whom Mother’s Day is complicated, and nowhere was that brought into sharper relief than learning about the world of foster care. As a kid, I had little exposure to the notion of kids being raised by someone other than their birth parents, and the relatively few people I knew who were adopted didn’t outwardly express any longing for their birth parents. Maybe I can blame my ignorance on the writers of the Brady Bunch? I guess they had to heavily edit the episode where a teary-eyed Bobby had to be restrained while screaming at Carol “You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my real mother!”

Holidays are often hard for any trauma survivor, and over time I started to understand that there is a unique sort of challenge to those holidays revolving around complicated relationships. How does Mother’s Day feel when you can’t see your birth mom, maybe don’t even know where she is? When you are being asked to celebrate a “new” mother who you don’t yet entirely know or trust? When you are doing the work of mothering for your niece or your granddaughter or your child’s best friend, but without the ceremonial title that goes with the work? We Americans don’t like these asterisks (“Happy Mother’s Day*”) so it’s much easier to simply not think about that stuff.

*unless for some reason it’s unrealistic to expect happiness, in which case I will struggle really hard in a futile attempt to come up with something comforting and not feel like a jerk . . .

Now I find myself ever-conscious of another layer and type of loss. How do you celebrate Mother’s day when you’ve lost a child? Or when you yourself have become a motherless child? Or when you are a bereaved spouse and thus a father of motherless children? It could be violence, it could be illness, it could be any number of things, but this is the unintentionally painful flip side of every “happy” holiday – the world is reminding you of how happy you could be if not for your loss.

Last year I wrote a tune called “Motherless,” inspired by the most spiritually transcendent work of the “classic” John Coltrane Quartet and incorporates “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” That old spiritual is generally used metaphorically to refer to displacement or simply feelings of overwhelming grief and struggle. Any metaphor, however, is only effective insofar as people can relate to the imagery. And being a motherless child a long, long way from home is chilling in ways that can haunt any of us, even if we have been fortunate enough not to have experienced this directly. The bond between mother and child is one of the most sacred elements of human existence, and that means that losing this bond hurts in ways that cut right to the core. If you can’t understand what it must feel like, don’t feel guilty, feel grateful.

When I perform “Motherless,” I sing two verses of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Trust me, it isn’t that I’ve decided I’m the second coming of Paul Robeson. The intention is to simply inhabit and communicate the emotion as directly as I know how. Recording that for the Ripples album felt a little risky in that regard, but ultimately this is about emotional potency, not being pretty. Any emotional release for me or for listeners may be a drop in the bucket, but I’m learning not to discount the drop. And as we come together through the great brotherhood of humankind, we can’t fill the void for those experiencing this sort of loss, but we can make the suffering more tolerable. At minimum we can acknowledge those for whom “Happy Mother’s Day” is not realistic by taking a moment to send prayers or good vibes or kind thoughts their way, while savoring our own blessings all the more.

Lately it’s easy to get the feeling of swimming against the current. Messages and actions of peace and love are so important, yet the voices of the hateful are so much louder at times. And I will admit that since the Boston Marathon bombing, it has taken me some time to regroup both from the horror that so many of us feel about the event and from the demoralizing sense of being unable to keep pace with the amount of tragedy going down (which, of course, is compounded exponentially when looking beyond our country’s borders). Is chanting “love wins” a realistic and energy-efficient thing when there is such evidence that we’re better off saving our energy and curling up in a fetal position under the kitchen table as we await Armageddon? Ultimately, I’ve concluded that the answer is YES, and I want to offer posthumous thanks to my young friend Lester for helping me solidify that position.

In 2005, a bit more than a year into our own parenting journey, we met Steve and Daphne, who quickly became friends and mentors. They were the first (and still among the few) people we had ever met who had undertaken parenting in the manner that we had – taking in older kids without ever having raised younger ones. They had been doing this for years at this point, with an adult son who had by that point been in their family for a long time, and at the time they had recently begun raising Lester, then 17 years old.

Lester’s life before this had been rough to say the least. Of the various less-positive behaviors that would manifest over time, some were pretty innocuous (the confederate flag belt buckle, for example) and some less so, but Steve and Daphne stayed by him, even when it meant clearing their schedules to accommodate the visiting hours of the jail where he was incarcerated for some time for transgressions that were far more stupid than dangerous. We got to hang out with Lester on a few occasions and it was consistently clear that beyond the bluster, he was just a kid, and an extremely sweet, kind-hearted kid at that.

When the time came for Lester to be released from jail late in 2011, Steve and Daphne were there for him – something that is on one level a given for parents, but on another level would be considered “above and beyond” by most of our society given that they began fostering Lester pretty late in the game and had no legal obligation to be present for him anymore. They were encouraged by some signs that he was getting his act together. Then early last year we go the news that he had gone missing, and after several months he was found, having taken his own life not far from their home.

I have found myself thinking about Lester for two reasons. One is that in the sessions for the Ripples album, we just recorded the composition I wrote in his honor. The all-star band for this tune included Chris Dingman, Kris Allen, Linda Oh, Johnathan Blake and soloists Jimmy Greene and Kenny Barron (taking the piano chair as I slid over to organ) and they brought tremendous life to this music. The melody is based on the following text from an email Steve sent me reflecting on their processing of what happened to Lester:

Any sorrow we feel is for ourselves, since we don’t believe that Lester is going to suffer any more for what he did. In fact, we believe that the soul goes on and on, taking birth after birth until it finally gets it right. So we feel Lester is moving forward and we assume that next life he won’t start off with such a heavy burden of abuse and neglect to endure.

In many ways it’s almost a miracle that our kids survive at all, which makes us realize just how much we have to celebrate their lives as much as we can.

The other thing that keeps bringing Lester to mind is the cognitive dissonance that occurs when one does the right thing but the weight of the competing obstacles is overwhelming. Being principled and courageous and committed to doing good is challenging enough when we have the positive reinforcement of tangibly positive outcomes. Any rallying cry to get people involved in doing good uses positive outcomes as a selling point – not many people want to volunteer to clean up a neighborhood populated by people hostile to their efforts who will then re-trash it days later.

So, then, did Steve and Daphne squander their energies by devoting them to someone who in the end didn’t “make it?” Does this mean that we should just try to identify those who can be helped to more heartwarming outcomes and focus on them? Some surely find this tempting. In fact, while we’re at it, let’s make schools only available to high-achieving kids and limit medical care to healthy people. Are you limited in artistic talent? Well, no drawing classes for you. And if you contribute to losing a little league game, then never mind whether you competed well, you are off the team kiddo, lest you further sully their perfect performance. Just think what gratification teachers and doctors and coaches will feel from the consistent success they’ll experience!

Ultimately, all of our lives are finite, so how do we even measure the “outcome” of a life? While Lester’s demons may have “won out” in the end, he also experienced years of unconditional love and it was quite moving to see how that nourished him and counterbalanced the many wounds within. Many would label Steve and Daphne as idealists (with some people even using that as a derogatory term, implying some sort of separation from reality) but the last time I checked, virtually all spiritual practices and most secular philosophies on our planet demand that we take this sort of responsibility for others.

The reason to persevere in caring for others and striving for peace, love and brotherhood is not so we can produce positive statistics, but simply because it is the right thing to do and it nourishes all of us. There will be more tragedy, and some of us will be damaged in ways we can’t entirely fix. The fetal position option may sound good for a minute, but ultimately we need to endure both as individuals and collectively as members of the human race. Dark moments do not obliterate beauty and kindness and human history is filled with heroic actions that may have seemed futile in the moment yet contributed to the forward motion of humankind.

So in the end, we’re back where we started: love wins. Love wins even when the obvious yardsticks for measuring outcomes might seem to suggest a different short-term conclusion. I’m not immune to cynicism, I assure you, but ultimately now is not a time to wallow in disillusionment. My inner idealist knows that love must win because no other outcome is acceptable, and my inner pragmatist sees that forward motion for humanity must occur in incremental steps, and each loving action represents one of these steps, even when tragedy can’t be erased in the process.

So thank you, Steve and Daphne, for the inspiration and the potent lessons. I shall continue to reject the notion that our planet is debased enough that anyone with a soul could make a credible case against acting as you did. And I’m sure that Lester’s soul is now at peace and I’m grateful that, thanks to you, he was so well-loved while he was with us in this realm.

Some years ago, Bernice Johnson Reagon visited Wesleyan University and gave a speech. I have been an admirer of hers since I first heard Sweet Honey In the Rock while in college, and I find her to be one of the most compelling proponents of “message music” that is of great artistic substance while being meant to educate and uplift, even when the corresponding issues are thorny and don’t seem to lend themselves to songs. She also has a rich history as a civil rights activist, and when a Q&A opened up at the end, I wanted to know about that. Specifically, I acknowledged her more “direct” forms of activism and asked her how she saw her music fitting into that. The response I got was pithy – essentially this: “well, I’m a singer.” This seemed curt at the time, but the more time passes, the more deep I realize it was.

This post was mostly composed before I heard the news of the bombing in Boston, and I am still wrapping my brain around that. But of this I feel confident (and this will invariably be a post of its own at some point soon): those of us pulled toward activism and positive change of any sort need to use our strengths, resources and passions to that end. Some of us have money, some of us know important people, some of us have strengths in any number of areas that can help make the world better and/or make life easier for suffering individuals (as evidenced by the stories emerging about good Samaritans pitching in yesterday in Boston).

If our strengths are artistic, then a whole world of questions emerges about how to create and present socially conscious art. I find that the answers tend to come fairly organically if the questions are asked thoroughly enough. The questions below should help with this process, and they are culled from a residency on the topic of socially conscious art co-sponsored by Resonant Motion, Inc. and Wesleyan.  I use the term “socially conscious art” here in a very general sense, broadly comprising anything meant to tap into a cause of any sort and to contribute to positive change in that avenue.

* What is your personal connection to the cause?

It could be a matter of general human concern (as Newtown has been for many not directly connected to the bereaved families), a matter of secondary personal concern (adversity striking a person you know or that person passionately taking on a cause for whatever reason) or something that impacts you directly on a day-to-day basis.

The closer your connection to the cause is, the more complicated that makes things; on the one hand that personal connection can lead to a greater potency in the work, and on the other hand it also makes the artist more vulnerable, as disapproval or indifference toward the art can be that much more emotionally difficult.

* What impact do you hope for this work to have?

All art is, one would like to think, about expressing oneself, so that is no different here. As I told the students in no uncertain terms, insincere art is pretty well useless on any level. We can envy those who are genuinely into things that are also highly commercial (take a bow, Katy Perry) but if we’re not genuinely into it, it will ring false and have neither commercial nor artistic success. The same is largely true for involvement in a social cause – being realistic about what inspires you is important, and if the inspiration is tepid but you still want to be involved, there are countless variations on how to do that.

So aside from expressing yourself, are you instituting a call to action? This certainly was the most compelling motivation for the Wesleyan students in this workshop. Are you trying to comfort people or inspire them or make them angry? Are you trying to entertain them or challenge them? Is raising money a primary goal, and if so, do you need to alter the presentation of the art to make it more palatable?

Any of these conclusions are legitimate, but you want to have at least some sense of your intended impact so you can choose a mode of creation and presentation consistent with that. For example, we had an interesting debate over the relative merits of art for which fundraising is the only visible connection to the cause (citing, as an example, Madonna gyrating to “Like A Virgin” at Live Aid). Whether the pure financial benefit outweighs the incongruity (or, indeed, whether purely throwing money at a cause is worthwhile) is a subject open to plenty more debate.

* Who is your intended audience?

This is ultimately a variation on the question above, but it is important to consider this, particularly with regards to that audiences existing relationship with the cause in question. On a basic level, you could be presenting art to people already into the cause in question, you could be presenting it to people with limited (or no) pre-existing knowledge about this cause or you could even be presenting it to people on the “other side,” who disagree with your views, whether to prod them, to persuade them or simply to be true to your art and viewpoints even if there is a chance of a hostile reaction.

When talking to the students the other night I was reminded of an experience early in my career teaching in higher education. I was teaching a little bit at a college where I was invited to participate in a jazz faculty concert. It was right around the beginning of the Iraq War and I wrote two new tunes for the ensemble, one called “Pre-emptive Peace” and the other called “War Begins With Dubya.” Long story short, it turned out that several of my fellow faculty members had politics 180 degrees removed from mine, so we played the tunes but put a disclaimer to that effect in the program (“the views expressed in these songs do not necessarily reflect . . .”). Colleges tend to be pretty left-leaning, so it was an interesting eye opener to see from the outside what it was like for someone (these other faculty) to be presenting work in an environment with which they were philosophically at odds.

* How do you intend to balance the impact of the art itself vs. context of its presentation?

This is a particularly important thing to consider for folks wishing to use their art in service of social causes even if their particular mode of art-making (say landscape painting or classical flute) does not inherently lend itself to making that direct connection. In general, I see three basic elements to juggle, and it only takes one to make socially conscious art. Element one is the art itself, element two is the setting in which it is presented and element three is the manner in which it is presented. So the art itself could be socially conscious, the setting could be socially conscious (benefit concert, theme-based art exhibit, compilation of protest poetry, etc.) or the “framing” could be socially conscious (e.g. notes or stage patter or the like in which the issue to consider is laid out in words).

The most obvious thing, then, is to have all of these factors in place and create a bombardment of cause-based relevance (going to the “Save the Ferrets” benefit concert with your “save the ferrets” t-shirt and talking about ferrets to introduce your song with 8 verses of lyrics about ferrets) but that is not always possible and it is debatable whether that level of bombardment is the most effective methodology. That is a personal choice based on all the factors above. Playing a Bach cello suite at the same concert may still move people. Reading a poem about ferrets at an all-inclusive and cause-neutral open mic might do the same.

I’ll close with a great question that a student asked: since art has the capacity to move people, is that enough? That is, does wanting to make a positive difference through art require alignment with a cause when the art itself strives for a sort of transcendence that helps people? My answer to him was that anybody doing anything positive is providing a benefit to humankind, so in that sense yes, just making art is enough. Likewise, if you want to be involved in a cause, your art needn’t be the means by which you do that – for all I know, Katy Perry is spending 3 months per year going incognito and secretly building houses for the homeless in Kentucky. It is a personal choice, and it is a matter of degrees as well – Bob Dylan wrote some of the most high-impact cause-based music of the last century . . . and then he started writing about other stuff, because his muse demanded that he do so. If you do want to make socially conscious art, though, the questions above should at least help you construct your own framework.

Today would have been my aunt Margie Pozefsky’s 72nd birthday. Having “celebrated” the 7th birth anniversary of Ana Marquez-Greene just 5 days ago, it feels a little weird to be lamenting the absence of someone who managed to grace our world for so long. But aside from the fact that loss is loss, today offers a particularly good opportunity to look at Margie’s legacy and, perhaps more importantly (at least for those who didn’t know and love her personally, as I did), to look at what we can learn from her.

Margie married my uncle Tom when I was a teenager. They had been together for some time and both had grown children from previous marriages, so the wedding itself was to me just a big party. I remember the way a teenager remembers things, I suppose, for fleeting bits of personal relevance – jamming with a professional band for the first time (“Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”) and my last hang with my great uncle Charlie, the one serious musician to precede me on either side of my family. Deeper in my consciousness I now realize that they were in the process of providing me with the model for a successfully blended family, something that would certainly resonate years later as my own unconventional family took shape.

Tom and Margie lived in Baltimore, so I didn’t get to see them often, but I was always struck by her warmth and focused presence. I was also struck by her artistry – she was a brilliant ceramic artist and later on would transition to applying her creativity and attention to craft to making jewelry. I knew that at a certain point Margie had health problems, though a successful kidney transplant led me to think “phew, crisis averted” and get back to thinking of her as the kind woman who always made the people around her feel good. I last saw her in the summer of 2011 when I was in Baltimore for a gig with my trio and to attend a conference. She was characteristically hospitable and engaged in conversation (even when the subject shifted to some of my struggles that scare away many faint-hearted conversationalists) and I had the treat of poking around her studio to see some of her latest work.

All of this sounds nice, if perhaps mundane.

What I didn’t know, somewhat embarrassingly, was that she was simultaneously making major waves as a philanthropist and an activist. She was a board member for the Baltimore Symphony, for example, and worked hard in support of a ceramic studio in her community. Most significantly, perhaps, it was through her efforts that the national landscape changed for kidney donations and transplants. She and she and Tom endowed a professorship in kidney transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, and her advocacy led to profound policy changes surrounding transplants. Imagine that you intended to donate a kidney to a loved one in need but yours didn’t match. Wouldn’t it be great if your donation could go to someone for whom you WERE a match, essentially swapping out with someone who could donate the kidney your loved one needed but was in the same boat? It sounds incredibly logical, and yet it took the efforts of this passionate and committed woman to bring this program to fruition.

Until Margie’s passing from cancer this past summer, I knew virtually nothing of this. I am only spared from feeling really ashamed about it because . . . well, she never talked about it. We talked about her art and her family and beyond that she mostly wanted to know what was going on with me. I am not sure if she was capable of trumpeting her own accomplishments; at minimum, she certainly was uninterested in doing so.

Now, though, I look back and see what an impact her kindness had, both in the one-on-one context of her engagement with others and in the broader scope of her activism and philanthropy. I was asked to play something at her memorial service, both a profound honor and a daunting responsibility. No demand was made that I compose something for the occasion, but I felt compelled to, and that was the genesis of the piece “Ripples,” which is now serving as the centerpiece of the album by the same name that is currently in production. Being a part of this memorial service only served to reinforce my wonder at how many lives were improved because of her commitment to good.

The notion behind “Ripples” is that each of her acts of kindness impacted some people directly, but also had secondary and tertiary impacts and so on, rippling outward and ultimately leading to positive change for people she had never met. She was fiercely devoted to her family, and that inner “ring” is the most obvious, but each subsequent ripple also made people’s lives better. It really started to boggle my mind when I thought about how far out the ripples go. If her activism saved lives, just think about all of the people potentially impacted by each of those lives – and those ripples all begin from layers involving people she never even met.

As I’ve written before, we all have the capacity to make a significant impact with our actions. Those ripples aren’t always positive (acts of cruelty or violence certainly have their own ripples) but if we are committed to doing good and simply being kind, there is a great capacity for our actions to ripple outward in layers beyond anything we can observe directly.

To read a bit more about Margie, click here for her obit from the Baltimore Sun.