The best of humanity’s recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Naked flights of art unshackled and incandescent songs of poetry undiluted return to the soul what hate, ignorance, fear, and violence steal from the heart.
The realization of dreams, like every battle for freedom, has always required compromise to one degree or another. When the result of a concession, however, is the mutilation of your soul or the cancellation of someone else’s future, then it may be said the desired goal was corrupted or destroyed rather than attained.
The pursuit of excellence with unrestrained passion can lead to the accomplishment of wonders with unsurpassed joy.
Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.
In its essence, Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love, maintains we are all on a quest to experience qualities of compassion and acceptance capable of helping to sustain both the individual and the larger society. Because such a journey tends to take place even more within than without, the visual imagery, words, and music of ILLUMINATED LOVE incorporates both levels of that reality.
The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to ‘vindicate’ Black people.
When the lyrical muse sings the creative pen dances.
The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.
At the different stages of recognition, reflection, and redress, practicing compassion provides potentially world-saving opportunities which otherwise likely would not exist.
Whether we consider hip-hop as an evolved manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance or something completely new under the sun, it clearly has moved beyond the stage of just entertaining lives to that of informing and empowering lives.
We can gain a lot more striving for harmonious coexistence than we can by giving in to hate-filled rage and fear-driven ignorance.
Each new year is another chance to get love right.
We knew how to combine our strengths in order to overcome our weaknesses, and how to live off faith when nothing else was available.
The chances of satisfying my renewed appetite for literary exchanges increased once I began to visit the library more frequently and make my way from the hotel to City Lights Bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue. For all I was learning about the role its founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had played in helping to nurture, promote, and sustain the talented souls who made the Beat Movement possible, City Lights became a kind of sacred space for me.
The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss.
Poetry is less a respecter of individual persons than it is a compassionate witness to the meanings of the secret language that beats inside human hearts, the music that pulses through human cries, and the divinity which shines love beyond the veils of human limitations.
It may be that poetry’s real beauty and elegance is not its finely-chiseled lines or smoothly-rounded ideological concepts at all. The crown of its significance might be––or possibly should be?––its expansive capacity to embrace with equal passion the deadliest failings and the most splendid victories defining human existence.
The practice of alchemizing suffering into meaningful art as well as social and political advancements has been one of African Americans’ greatest gifts to humanity. Many have followed their lead in this regard and that practice can make a lot of positive difference during this time of renewal and re-weaving.
Leadership has never been an exact science. But it has always found itself particularly challenged when tasked with elevating one segment of a society onto a level more politically, socially, and economically equitable with another.
The bird carried me inside his song. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and tried to embrace it, the bird, and when I did, I put my arms around you.