When Plants Talk Back

Walk into her house, go past the living room, open the sliding glass doors. Outside, you'll see a beautiful array of flowers and fruit trees. All my life my mother has been a gardener. Growing up, I would wake up on weekend mornings and peak through my bedroom window to see my mother weaving the magical wand of a garden hose across the plains of her own plant paradise, where she, was it's protector. When my mom was in her garden, I would watch an almost seed-like light in her eyes blossom into a beauty rose. When her hands were working in the dirt, her heart rose into the sky and when you looked up, you could watch as she conquered the sun and all the rainclouds; only accepting the suns' rays and the rainclouds' rain as peace treaties to end the turmoil.

It was a sight to behold. But as I watched the growth of her garden kingdom unfold, I often wondered why: why does she loves gardening so much? So I walk up to her one day and arrogantly ask "hey mom, why do you love spending so much time with these stupid plants? You know sometimes it almost seems like you like them more than you like us." For a second my mom just looked at me, garden shovel in one hand and a hose in other, to my surprise smiles, and replies " well unlike my kids, when I talk, my plants don't talk back."

But it was more then that. Cause every time my mom steps back into her garden, a transformation occurs. When I close my eyes and really look , I can see a well with the purest of water rise up within her heart, transform into a geyser and shoot out from the very essence of her soul. This garden is her oasis, amongst the desert of day-to-day stresses, a way in which her spirit expresses its need to be released from this neurotically work work work driven society. But more importantly, it's a space where she can just be; where she can breath deeply due to the oxygen of inner peace that her plants produce and induce within her.

Two weeks before I graduate college, I arrive at my mothers' house to spend some quality time with my grandma. I sit down and listen as grandmother offers me words of wisdom; reminding me how important it is to pray constantly, then to do unto the world that which speaks life into your own being. As my grandma and I speak, we briefly step outside amongst my mothers wonderland. And as I stand in the motherland, surrounded by beautiful arrays of flowers and fruit trees , I can feel the power that these plants command. When grandma goes back inside, I sit down in the middle of this plant paradise; finally able to fully understand why my mother loves this "stupid garden" so much.

I gaze at her garden, filled with so much magic that I can't even come up with a metaphor to relate it to, and wonder if my mother and her father- who I now know something about through the green thumbs he passed down - may have felt this magic to. As I begin to wonder this, the wind whispers silent words through her garden . And though it fails to match up with what mom said about her plants before, I could have sworn that for just a second...I could hear her plants, talking back...

The Movement Continues...
Rhetorical Artz

An Uneducated Approach to Learning

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The issues at hand

Students are graduating college with nothing but a piece of paper and a possible position for jobs that justify the uncreative mind. Mind you now that in the eyes of many students, and many people in general, that is a perfectly acceptable end. To many students, college is nothing more than a means for momentary fun and money, not a means for true joy and enrichment. This seems to be todays' version of a "rich education"; acquiring professional skills instead of purpose building ones; closing in ones mind to finding a career instead of freeing it up to finding a calling. If this is the model which entails a "rich education" then I would much rather receive an abhorrently poor education- one that cannot, in itself, enable me to make massive amounts of money or get me the justification of a job- but one that will empower me to learn valuable lessons about truly living and loving life. However, to a certain extent, I do recognize the value of a capitalistically centered education that has fueled my own inner capitalist. It is, in all honestly, a big part of what has kept me in school this long (minus the fact that much money and sacrifice has been given for me to get this education). This inner capitalist, in collaboration with my conscious, shouts out "hey Adam, lets make meaningful money! Lets profit doing something positive! Lets prosper pursuing your most authentic of passions! It is a voice that I have come to accept into the Adam Keene club as the executive director of my financial thoughts.  
For those financial thoughts never once double-crossed my core beliefs on what learning was really about. Before I continue, if I have not stated what it means to be a learner well enough in the first paragraph, allow me to state it clearly here: To be a true learner is to be a liberator of ones mind, and the mind of others, in the pursuit of a fulfilling life. This central idea has been injected and accepted into the depth of my identity(by conscious choice) in order to better build my uneducated learning life in this bitterly broken system that is our schools.

Tales of the Uneducated Learner

Now if this was an action-adventure movie, this would be the scene where an angry army of academics, administrators, and security sheep(these being some, but not all, of the parents, students, professors, and professionals that were crafted within academia) storm into the base of the insurgents, demanding them to surrender their inventory of insights on the issue of education or else. The insurgents would promptly refuse, and all be hanged...or would they? For just as they are about to be put to death...BAM! In comes the special insurgent forces to set the caged captives free once more. But how will they escape the treacherous School city? The answer is that they don't...well not immediately anyway. Instead, they temporarily integrate themselves into School city as citizens, binding their time and building their resources for when the time comes to strike out against its reign of tyranny.

The United State of Our Society

But in doing so, the insurgents discover that School city is only a servant to an even bigger system failure known as the United State of Our Society. When gazing upon this bigger Goliath, the problems in our school system only reflects a even larger problem in society today. For our society has made a shift in focus from true substance and scholarship( note: I am using the definition of scholarship defined as the process of learning and gaining knowledge received by studying) to truly superficial and stagnating standards of living. This shift can be seen in the news, entertainment (two subjects that seems to now be synonymous with one another), and education which I shall now return back to through the fiction framed battles of the Uneducated Learner.

Back to the battles of the Uneducated Learner

With the true menace revealed, the insurgent forces quickly realize that they will not be able to fight these dark forces alone. In order to have a fighting chance against this gigantic foe, the insurgent forces would need the help of the very education system that they were trying to change. So they began to look for people and programs within the system who shared a similar desire in liberating minds to pursuing a fulfilling life. As they sought these people and programs out, the insurgent forces soon discovered that their was indeed a voice of these individuals and initiatives. In fact many of these individuals and initiatives were ones that the school system had willingly allowed in to promote such a cause. 
This was just what the insurgents were looking for. They started seeking a way to become one of these initiatives that the school system allowed in to liberate minds in a way that certain wiring(And bureaucratic red tape) within educational hardware had stalled. But to maintain their presence and growing influence in the schools, they needed to be registered in the system as something that wouldn't raise suspicion. Thus, no longer would they hold the hostile position of insurgent rebels. Instead, they would rise up as a phantom-like force known as the Uneducated Learners. With a new identity in place, the Uneducated Learners were then able to use that positioning as a foothold to form a quiet uprising through the citizens of School city who shared or sympathized with their cause.

Bringing the battle back to a reality

So what is the moral to this little tall tale? For me it is that as much as I have seen school fall short of the core ideas that are supposed to drive it(As all organizations do to a degree), I recognize that I also have needed school-and will still need the support within the school system- in order to become a full fledged vessel for social change in the society that surrounds us. So what I have decided to do over my many years of schooling is to become an uneducated learner amongst the education system. 

Educated learner vs. Uneducated learner

Yet in making this decision I have taken notice to the tension that lies between uneducated learners and more educated ones. The educated learner stands as those people in the system that benefit from it working the way it does. They do not wish to change the system(despite any claim to want to), but in fact wish for/contribute to making the system run more efficiently and effectively. 
Now before I continue on, I must make something clear. Being an uneducated learner does not mean wishing for the system to be destroyed and dismantled to the point of degrading the educated learner. It only means changing the system so it can support both types of learners, and in doing so acknowledging there differences.
For there are many differences between the educated and uneducated learner. Differences that the school system,and our larger society for that matter, currently are not doing a good enough job in acknowledging/serving with equal respect. In this instance, the difference being highlighted that distinguishes the educated and uneducated learner lies in how they are informed and uninformed about what it means to live a fulfilling life. To fully explain this, I need to first briefly talk about the relationship between society and the school system.

Society and School= Husband and Wife Stereotype

In an old-fashion stereotypical marriage, the wife is subservient to her husband. She takes care of the kids, maintains the house, and prepares the food so that when her husband comes home from work, he has a peaceful environment to return to after a long day out in the "real world." This is the relationship between Society and School. Societies wife(School) raises her kids(students) to be good little boys and girls for Society to deal with. They are raised to "do as they are told" and to "not talk back to your mother, or else daddy will give you a spanking(a degrading, doubt-filled, penniless life) when he gets home." The house is kept nice and tidy to support a stable environment for Society and his kids, so they can live "happy and content lives". 
I'll break away from this allegory now and give it to you straight: the big problem with the education systems lies in how strongly and subserviently they shift to the whims of societies current state. In other words, because our society works largely under a 9 to 5 structure, that is what schools largely educate students about; because society is polluted with the promotion of fear, that is what schools largely talk about; because society set it's citizens up to finding a place in it, instead of making a place in it, this is what schools largely encourage people to do. This is not to say that those are the only things that school does(if it did, I would honestly have already dropped out, don't care how much money I would be wasting). But I would venture to say that this is one of the loudest voices in the school space today(knowingly or not). It may not be said out loud, but 93 percent of communication is conveyed through what is NOT said verbally(As a communication studies major, I have been well informed about this).

The Difference: educated vs. uneducated learners

What someone listens to and how someone listens to it ultimately determines what's actually learned. And here is where we make our difference between the educated and uneducated learners in society. For the Educated Learner is informed by what they are told. They listen to what society says, and shape what they've learned/heard from their schooling to fit into societies image of them. In doing so, they risk compromising their creatively (aka the ability to make a life for themselves) and allow society to create a life for them in the same way that a chameleon compromises it true colors to match it's environment. They are literate in the language of losing your authentic self to better drive society onward. You can find the Educated Learner saying something like "that's just how the world works, so you better learn to work with it." They graduate college with all the basic knowledge needed to survive as a pawn in societies game of chess. Some of those pawns even make it over onto the other side of societies chessboard and- after "having" to stomp on any chess pieces that get in their way- evolve to become societies knights, queens, rooks, or bishops.
The Uneducated Learner, on the other hand, takes what is being told and uses it to advance their imagination- the ability to create essential and personal ideals into concrete realities- while refusing to compromise their identity. By doing this, the Uneducated Learner opens up doors into a life directed by a divine consciousness. This often drives the Uneducated Learner to pursuing timelessly valuable meaning over money, branding money as a by-product of moving in infinitely meaningful pathways, instead of the opposite being the case. In taking this route, there is no need to step on anyone else to get what you want because that fails to produce anything meaningful (beyond possibly a temporary period of false bliss). This route often fills the Uneducated Learners' path with bumps, twists, turns, and one unexpected event after the next. Yet it is within the unexpected, the unknown, and the uncertain that the Uneducated Learner both consciously and honestly lives life. 
However society, specifically the Educated Learner, tends not to look very highly on Uneducated Learner for this. To them, how the Uneducated Learner lives ought not to exist. For society has only taught the Educated Learner how to live linearly. Therefore, the non-linear lifestyle of the uneducated learner- that doesn't have a well defined step-by-step method to moving towards fulfillment- is viewed as an anomaly, or even a glitch in the matrix. In fact for the Educated Learner, who has been taught since elementary school that everything has a beginning and an end, the path of the Uneducated Learner may even appear to them not as a pathway but as a mere fantasy, or a lofty dream.

End of the Uneducated Learners Journey?

There is no end for the Uneducated Learner. For to be the Uneducated Learner means to continually look out at life with an air of undying thirst for adventure. Thus what the Educated Learner makes out to be an unseen end, the Uneducated Learner envisions into a beauty beginning, and a new revolutionary road to ride upon. 
Through this road isn't easy, that is the path that I have chosen. I will enter the next stage of my life, after gaining my undergraduate degree, with a sense excitement, adventurousness, and an uneducated spirit of freedom. Because true freedom happens when one makes a conscious choice to walk amongst the world untamed by it's teaching, unhampered by it's horror stories, and uneducated by it's standards. So continues the exciting tales of the Uneducated Learner, where only life will tell, what will happen next.

The Movement Continues...

- Rhetorical Artz

Expanding the Essence of my Art

I came to recognize something about where my storytelling craft currently stands and where it is moving towards. Throughout the day, as I began looking through a lot of the content in my spoken word and hip hop music, I noticed not only that a lot of the messages are mirror images of one another but that even the approach the content takes to getting to the meat of their message is the same. I think this has to do a lot with where I have been both mentally and spiritually in my life.

For a long time now I have been on this quest to identify myself, and my relationship to the world(A quest that I don't see ending anytime soon). That quest, for the past couple of years, has taken a large focus on what it means to make(as well as how to make) the decision to stand as being authentically yourself(on the inside and outside) in both this society and the larger world(whether you really know yourself or not). A by-product of this focus has been that I have come to find and explore my own voice, which may sound weird to some. But there has been more moments then I can count when something beyond me speaks through my voice. When that happens, although I know it's not me speaking, it produces this refreshing feeling of hearing my own voice speak for the first time. It's similar to the feeling that you get after holding your breath underwater for a long time and finally surfacing to grasp for air, or the feeling you get when you step out of an incredibly hot car after being in it for hours on end.

Yet, the Spirit seems(throughout this year) to have moved my craft into a new terrain. In this terrain, I have been walking on the road of authenticity in my everyday life, instead of in the surreal or abstract sense that derives from my everyday life. As I've been on this path, I've noticed a slow but steady shift(through pieces like TV Empowers Me to the most recent piece I've done titled Oppositional Attitude) towards writing out of the current real life experience. That's not to say that I won't be producing those surreal and abstract type of pieces anymore, but that even those pieces(because of how they are beginning to walk into my day to day reality) are changing, as they are being put into the whole experience of life. The reason why I often wrote and will continues to write with such fantasy was because for a time period I didn't know how to mentally deal with much of this reality without looking at it from a lens of pure imagination. It was(and still is) my way of taking the world out of it's actual setting and putting it into a fictional setting that makes the world easier to reach out to and understand.

But that is beginning to gradually change. For the world that I used to mostly only reach out to before, I now see within the presence of what's happening in my life right now. I am living the path that I would only dream or idealize about being on before. And as this living has been happening. I am more freely able to see the connection between the day to day recognition and deeper rooted insights, which gives more a grounded breath to the stories told through me.

This might be a better way to explain this. In Speak Life Storytellers(The storytelling performance group I am in) we have three types of stories that we address:

Truly Fantastic: Stories which are not necessary true/non-fiction in terms of it's literal presentation but in the core of the message/theme that it's conveying.

Fantastically True: Stories that seem so incredible that they seem unreal even through they are.

True Stories: The straightforward, honest (yet still both imaginative and creative expressed) stories of life.

The stories that I have been telling have been at large both Fantastically True and Truly Fantastic, but have been less True Stories. Yet it is the True Stories that bridge the Fantastically True with the Truly Fantastic, or at least that is what the Spirit seems to have been saying to me. So like what I have always fallen back to doing, I will follow that voice of the Spirit. It's should be interesting to see what shall be forming out of this ongoing shift in the stories being presented through my spoken word and rap. Whatever it is, it shall always remain a channel for Love and Honestly. That is something that will never change.

The Movement Continues...

- Rhetorical Artz

Oppositional Attitude

Sometimes I just want to cry

til I die
So I laugh

and laugh lively

Sometimes I just want to sit

and pretend I don’t exist
So I stand and raise my hands

Sometimes the world get me so down

that I want to give up

with a frown
So I smile

bigger than the happiest child

Acting in opposition is something I've been doing for a while

And I think the reason why is because growing up
I began to notice that when people wanted something
they often never got it
But when people wanted nothing
that something seemed to always be want they got

Personally
this didn't happen to me all the time
just enough that I began to see a trend

A trend I saw many of my family and friends follow...

willingly
Which I really couldn't understand...

at first

Cause it just seemed so weird to me
to see someone who wanted peace
to be acting mad
or who wanted joy
to be acting sad
or who wanted goodness
to be acting bad

I mean if they really wanted those things
then why the heck would go and do...
the reverse?

But then I grew a tad bit
And as I did I had to admit
that I had come to understand it more

What I came to understand is that
insanity is defined as doing the same things
expecting different results
but ultimately
getting the same ones

Which would mean sanity
is doing different things
expecting the same results
but ultimately
getting different ones

So then doing something
in way that’s completely different from what your expecting
and getting completely different results
is better than doing the same thing
over and over again,
but getting
none...
of what you expected


Which told me that basically
somewhere down the timeline
humanity must have joined forces with insanity

Because it is insane
to walk around being cruel, or upset, or depressed
And expect to ever get anything less
than that

Yet...
people do all of these things
thinking that somehow
that will be rewarded
with kindness, or peace, or joyfulness

Look

I’m not saying that I haven’t done any of this
nor that I won’t do it ever again
What I’m sayin is that I have
and continue to hold
an attitude of opposition
against insanities transmission

Cause without an attitude of opposition
I don't see how anyone could live in a world
insisting
On holding one another through a grip of hatred
or kissing fellow human beings with lips of cruelty
Without having some means
of resisting it

So I laugh
even when I feel like I want to cry
And I live
even when I everything in me wants to die
And when the voice of despair
tells me I should just sit
and cease to exist
I stand-up
and raise my hand
in a fist

Cause otherwise how can tell my future children
much less my own inner child
that when everything in life that comes around
seems to be trying to pull you down
That smiling...
is still okay

Because sanity is defined as doing different things
while expecting the same results
but doing them anyway

So I implore you
although I don’t know you
Or necessary relate to what you’ve been through
Please
don’t give in the whim of this messed up world
But to that oppositional attitude
of wisdom within you...
be true

The Movement Continues...

- Rhetorical Artz

The New

Sometimes it's easier to throw away old knowledge or old material for a newer, more jazzy version. But in life it's important to appreciate the old stuff. For it's the treasuring of the old that allows us to truly shine a light of significance on the new. That's what this story is all about. Before coming up to the Mic the host challenged the upcoming performers to do something new. This story hits two birds with one stone.

The Movement Continues...

- Rhetorical Artz

Lyrical Liberation @ The Shadow Lounge

Be Liberated...

The Movement Continues...

- Rhetorical Artz

Speak Life Storytellers: Your Story (Improv)

Your life is a story...you decide how it ends.

The Movement Continues...
- Rhetorical Artz

The 1TAKE Mixtape Preview