Monday, April 25, 2011
Walking: Not of this World
I think of that as I walk the world today in awe of what’s beneath my feet
and everything well above it
There’s a purpose for today's walk
as I am in search of a summit
Where I can submit whatever in my life amiss
before what is amiss in my life makes me plummet
And it’s in the process of finding my way to this summit
that the world began to honestly admit
the way that some people today exist
The first thing the world showed me was a women
walking out of her apartment dressed to impress her fellow worker bees
As she walks by I say good morning and hi
but she is to busy
and in to much of a hurry
to even look me in the eye and reply
So instead of saying hi
she gives me a slight apathetic wave
and continues on her way into the maze of the rat race.
Now did I miss something or is something out of place?
Maybe for to long my mind has been in outer-space
cause it seems out of this world to me
that she was in such a state that she couldn’t stop and elevate her eyes to mine
and find it within her to smile and say “good morning, good day,”
or in any other way conveys the slightest value of another persons existence
Our interaction was only a few seconds
but those few seconds made stop a second
and listen to a world that beckons to be heard
thus as I continued onward
I made a point listen to the worlds words
Because a role model of mine said to learn to be in the world but not of it
I think of that as I walk the world today
in awe of what’s beneath my feet and everything well above it
There’s a purpose for today's walk as I am in search of a summit
Where I can submit
whatever in my life amiss
before what is amiss in my life
makes me plummet
And it’s in the process of
finding my way to this summit
that the world began to admit
the way that some people today exist
The next thing this world showed me was a man of about 5.3,
who woke up angry that he had to clean a pool
instead of being in school
and you could tell by the look in his face that this wasn’t cool
Yet he was not drowning so much in his pity party drool
that he couldn’t stop smile and open the pool for me.
Oh sorry their is a gap in the story, lets me go back and fill that in:
After fighting Rudmongors through the forest of apartmentia,
crossing the plains of pissoffius,
and flying on top of a dragon up to mt. Poolantis
I arrived at the submit where the Pool Orgor Guarding the Gaint gate,
after explaining my epic journey,
let me in, enabling me to begin to write the worlds words down.
So flash forward to now
Now this guy had been cleaning and fixing this overflowing pool since 5 this morning
while we are all snoring
picking and pulling out it’s dirt and leaves
while relieving it of an overabundance in water
I guess it’s not always true that the early bird catches the worm
because not a single worm of wisdom or revelation squirmed in this worthless water
So why even bother go to work?
The truth hit me in a flash so fast that it hurt
That this guy had to do what he had to do,
to do what it was he wanted to do
Thus for the sake of his dreams and goals
he was glad to do anything
to get everything
and that’s when everything came full circle
that this guy, and that woman, as well as me
are in the same world just trying to be
something
And it wasn’t that that saw me and saw nothing
but that her dreams and goals
were gathered together in where she was going
in that moment
That’s why instead of using the energy to say hey to me,
she was using that energy
to prepare herself for where she was going to be eventually
which may not be where she necessarily wants to be right now in her life...
Or shoot,
maybe she just didn’t notice me saying hi!
But regardless...
It was on this road to the submit I saw darkness,
but upon arrival to that summit I saw light
A darkness came from within the world,
but the light was not of it
for the light that lit the light bulb of this bright idea came from a place well above this
So as I come down from the summit to submit to you these words
I hope you receive them in the world
but not of it
In a way you never before,
have heard...
The Movement Continues...
- Rhetorical Artz
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Waving
one arm wide open
the other arm...
waving
waiting for that special wave to wash me in
I'm body surfing
and when your body's surfing
it can't just take any old wave
it has the be the right one
In the past
whenever I would go body surfing at the beach
their was a feeling I got
just before the right wave would rise up
so when I saw it
I didn't have to wait and determine
if the wave was great or not
I just knew
Cause when I would body surf
I could close my eyes and connect with the ocean
as I became one with the water
and in that moment
me and the Ocean were married
and the waves
were our sons and daughters
and the clouds
became my rich step-father
that would shower us with money
whenever we were broke
so that our family wouldn't evaporate
due to a bad economy
When I would body surf
I could open my mind and connect with the ocean
as I became one with the water
when that moment came
me and the Ocean were married
raising tidal waves of sons and daughters
who would wash me away
in the joy of seeing them grow
as they'd go into the lands of their adult lives
submerging the world in smiles, love, and laughter
giving boats of people hopes something to float on
even those who were land locked
in the feeling that all was lost
All this at the cost...
of a couple early gray hairs
So I stand here
one arm wide open
with the other arm
waving
waiting for the day that I can marry the Ocean
and open wide
with all our passion and emotion inside
waves of sons and daughters
given from the heavens above
It hasn't happen yet
but when it does come
and I get that feeling that the family body of water
of my wife, daughters, and sons are approaching
I'll stand there
one arm wide open
and with the other arm
waving...
The Movement Continues...
- Rhetorical Artz
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Inspiration: A small part of a bigger conversation
Friday, April 22, 2011
The Unquestioning Mind of a Miracle
please stop asking so many questions...
Because true miracles happens to those who shape them
When we were born,
we were given a dogie bags from heaven
filled with leftovers from the fruits of the spirit
that we had already eaten and inherited
as the Maker of those miracles manifested
into those spiritual fruits within us a body of clay
clay crafted within us
so that we could shape miracles into our day-to-day
Yet instead of using it we started abusing this gift
as we drift through an analysis paralysis of trying to perceive the process of how Miracle happens
believing that we can consciously capture it, master it
and bottle it into a top selling self-help book for only 9.99
People of the west,
please stop asking so many questions...
Because blessings happen in disguise
like masked vigilantes
and to ask a vigilante to remove it's mask
is to move it towards death itself
thus becoming the architect
of it's destruction
We are an obstruction to justice
The justice of blessings bliss
And no it's not just some outside circumstance
outside of our control
it's just us that are doing this
and it's a crime
a crime worthy of capital punishment...
for the heart
Cause blessings in disguise are the arteries that keep blood pumping into the heart
keeping it alive
and trying to find out the human hideout
in which they hide
is like doing an open heart survey
and tearing the heart apart
all out of an unbridled scientific curiosity of where it was
in this world
that Blessings began to start
People of the west,
please stop asking so many question...
I'm not saying to stop asking questions altogether
just to stop asking so many
Cause now-a-days
it's become more as if were holding some Q&A session
with a preconceived agenda of asking and answering questions
that will contain something
that was never meant to be contained here
that will explain something
that was never meant to be explained here
that will clarify something
that was never meant to be made clear
here, on earth...
I'll answer this one question for you...
by saying Miracles DO happen...
But the biggest one of all...
didn't happen here first
- Rhetorical Artz
When Plants Talk Back
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
Friday, April 15, 2011
An Uneducated Approach to Learning
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The issues at hand
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
The United State of Our Society
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
Educated learner vs. Uneducated learner
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.
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 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?
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.
Friday, April 8, 2011
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
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Oppositional Attitude
So I laugh
Sometimes I just want to sit
So I stand and raise my hands
So I smile
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...
Which I really couldn't understand...
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
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
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
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...