Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

5/4/2018

That Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love, would prove a challenge to get published had always been known. Potential traditional publishers had no problems admiring its bold creativity and uninhibited spiritual intensity. What most could not accept was something traditionally troublesome when it comes to artists and the marketplace: the financial risks involved.

With all respect to healthy doubts and sensible reservations, so far as Luther and I were concerned the years of energy, labor, and determination already invested in Elemental by the time 2006 rolled around equated to something more than a calculated transactional value. From the perspectives of our deepest meditations and intentions, the completion of Elemental meant contributing to the cultural legacies established by creative artists like those who made possible such movements as Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This last, especially, was one which had already stamped our destinies as Luther had studied with artists of the Harlem Renaissance and I had already co-authored Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

The center image for this art graphic features the first two stanzas of a poem by Aberjhani from ELEMENTAL (p. 22) titled "Past, Present & Future Are One" based on a Luther E. Vann painting of the same title. The third-eye illustration seen above was drawn by Jason Maurer when the poem was published in the former SCAD newspaper The Georgia Guardian in 1993, 15 years prior to the publication of ELEMENTAL. The combined creative synergy demonstrates how ELEMENTAL has helped to inspire and empower others from the beginning.

But once creative passion and committed partners empowered us to finally produce a physical book, we reached two important conclusions. First: we recognized the need to articulate, both for potential buyers and booksellers, as definitively as we could, the goals and values inherent in Elemental. Secondly: it seemed obvious the work could be adapted for different mediums. These considerations resulted in the following statements:

ILLUMINATED LOVE

1) The vision behind ILLUMINATED LOVE is that human beings and the environments we inhabit are inherently multidimensional in ways that are typically ignored but which can make our lives richer and more fulfilling than generally recognized or consciously experienced.

2) The mission of ILLUMINATED LOVE is to express through visual art, poetry, and music the creative and spiritual harmony that connects shared public spaces with individual need and existence; and, to demonstrate the multidimensional nature of the same.

3) The objective and/or goal of ILLUMINATED LOVE is to provide a product that functions as a source of entertainment, as inspiration, and as an enhanced tool for the study of employing complementary creative genres within an appealing multi-media format.

When envisioning Elemental as a staged musical or as a video production, I described it thus:

...An exploration and documentation of the way human beings occupy public spaces in interpretative contrast to how they experience inner spaces... It illustrates the way collective intention makes communal interaction possible while individual need and impulse maintain the integrity of a person's separate being.

For example, the Luther E. Vann painting "Christ Listening to Stereo" (p. 27) is of a youth on a bus in New York City (please see image below). The image reveals how the youth is at once physically part of a larger setting while remaining, via his personal stereo, completely apart from it. Immersed in his music, he claims a connection to the artist who made the music and who allows him to not only share in the expressed creative passion, but to utilize the same as a kind of soundtrack for his own anticipations, memories, desires, needs, or fears of the moment. Very similar and yet very different scenes are enacted in such public spaces as parks, malls, back yards, office buildings, clubs, and street corners. They all make the individual part of a larger whole even while many individuals continue to exist primarily as isolated fragments of that whole.

The image used for the cover of the novel Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player is from a section of Vann's painting "Christ Listening to Stereo."

From One President and Generation to the Next

Some might consider the timelessness of the project a good thing in regard to aesthetics but then questionable for the way Elemental's implied commentaries on social and political conditions of a decade ago remain relevant today. In this sense, it continues to illuminate how our least and most desirable practices impact humanity's quest for mutually-advantageous coexistence.

Another example: the ebb and flow of dismay and inspiration from the time of publication until now might be seen in criticisms of former President George Bush's administration as the book was heading to the printer in early 2008. Likewise: less that a year later, after its publication, came Barack H. Obama's unprecedented election to the White House followed by eight years of spectacular innovations and shifts in public consensus regarding everything from race relations and gender equality to environmentalism and economic reforms. And now: current POTUS Donald Trump continues to implement policies resulting in a tug of war between the Oval Office and American citizens committed to resistance.

From one president to the next and one generation the next, Elemental has always proposed for leaders and followers alike a path of informed awareness built on common ground:

The states of interaction with one another and estrangement from each other represent states of being, or levels of reality, that the artist seeks to capture and identify in order to understand their possible implications and consequences in the modern world. Social conditions and activities indicate different outcomes. Some appear to thrive in powerful socially rewarding ways—such as economic advancement or political prestige––while others seem to quietly wither away, turning into the infamous "damned souls" of the world existing in states of perpetual despair leading to the destruction of self and others.

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.

Admittedly, those words might sound a bit more grandiloquent than intended. That does not mean they are any less sincere or applicable.

Powerful and Cherished Allie

This celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book of art and poetry is not to suggest that such a volume holds the key to solving all the world's very serious problems. It is, however, to suggest that humanity for too long has remained too comfortable investing faith in fear and violence. Student walk-outs in protest against gun violence in their schools, calls for police policy and training reform, the #MeToo movement, and resistance to government policies which threaten to widen even further the gap between "haves and have-nots" prove the need and desire for something more healing and beneficial than relentlessly suffocating trauma.

We celebrate Elemental because it identifies not just a potential but a capability already within our reach. It helps take the edge off the impulse to destroy what we fear to understand and allows sufficient time to remind ourselves of this: Love, Knowledge, and Beauty are not our enemies. Whether dressed up as art, poetry, or a simple smile, they have always been among our most powerful life-sustaining allies.

Aberjhani
© May 2018

0 Comments

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

5/2/2018

0 Comments

May is Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love Month at Bright Skylark Literary Productions. (Title art graphic collage by Aberjhani)

"He used the word 'nourishing' to refer to Vann's work. And the more I looked through the work seriously, and took my time, that term [seemed] quite apropos. The art and poetry of Elemental nourishes the soul, the mind, and the aesthetic."
--Ja A. Jahannes (from remarks delivered May 29, 2008 at Celebration of Release of Elemental: The The Power of Illuminated Love)

Every now and then I get a good sense of what it might feel like to be a phoenix waking up as a pile of ash and bones which suddenly burst into new flaming life. It was kind of like that recently while continuing my ongoing recovery from the hurricanes of 2016 (Matthew) and 2017 (Irma) to prepare for the 2018 stormy-weather season.

In the course of going through yet another pile of unsorted thumb drives, DVDs, CDs, and mini cassettes, I discovered a lost treasure: a DVD filmed by the gifted polymath Benjamin Bacon (known to friends and colleagues as BeBe) labeled "Elemental, Early Morning Light Productions, by Luther E. Vann, Final Cut, Jepson Gallery, Savannah, GA, May 29, 2008." It is not something which will ever challenge the global impact of director Ryan Coogler's game-changing Black Panther film, but it has added immeasurably to the 2018 10th Anniversary Celebration of the publication of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love (ISBN 9780972114271).

The video, shot just as YouTube and social media were developing their considerable digital muscles, captures in raw fashion a singular moment in the history of cultural arts in the United States. The program that evening included my friend Luther's debut effort as a videographer, a short bio-documentary titled Coming Home, in which he recorded me reciting the poem from which the video took its title, and chronicled his days in New York City pursuing his craft while living in the basement of a friend's apartment on Washington Square.

Artist Luther E. Vann honing his skills in the basement of a friends apartment in NYC circa 1973. (Photo by Chris Torres. Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

In addition to Luther, program participants included: Dr. Ja A. Jahannes, musician Travis Biggs, The Telfair's Friends of African-American Art (who did so much to make the evening possible), its then director Steven High, curator Harry DeLorme, and many patrons, supporters, and fans. They all combined intentions and resources to demonstrate art's ability to endow a diverse community with a single beautiful purpose. That potential is one which has eluded too many in 2018 as educational institutions and organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts have seen their budgets butchered at a time when what creatives gift to society possibly has never been more needed.

The current political assaults on freedom of the press and individual expression make it even more important to savor the kind of rarity represented by Elemental's launch ten years ago. Moreover, the event takes on greater and greater significance because some of the key geniuses who made it happen are no longer with us on the physical plane and others have taken on new missions in different cities or countries. Vann died April 6, 2016, and Jahannes on July 5, 2015. (I last communicated with violinist Travis Biggs a few months before Luther passed but since then have not received any responses to phone messages or emails).

Sensory Brilliance

Dr. Jahannes' contribution to the celebration remains particularly memorable because with his eloquent, insightful, and often humorous comments on the art and poetry of Elemental he both "stole the show" and gave it back to the audience as a perfect gift. He had been asked to introduce the Coming Home video precisely because of his familiarity with our work both as individuals and as a team. In his words:

"Aberjhani and Luther Vann have dynamic synergism in their poetry and their paintings...'Luther Vann's paintings will enrich our community for years to come,' said Steven High in a preface to Elemental. So will the poetry of Aberjhani..."

He spoke with infectious ease when comparing Luther's work to that of painters as diverse as the Norwegian master Edvard Munch and the iconic Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. He did the same when pointing out parallels between it and musicians such as the classical composer Antonin Dvorchak and giants of jazz John Coltrane and Miles Davis. An accomplished photographer himself, Jahannes further described as Vann as "a remarkable storyteller" and "a sensory artist" whose images engage viewers' attention on multiple levels:

"He's a master of sensory brilliance. His work is visual, captivating, and viscerally engaging... If you look at these paintings, you can almost hear them. They are auditory. There are voices emitted by color and arrangement. They're kinesthetic. Energy [is] generated by the arrangement of pulsating hues... They are tactile. You can almost feel the texture by the way he layers and juxtaposes color and arranges symbols and images..."

These observations have since helped various scholars and art lovers to more fully understand what they are viewing when going through the pages of the book, or standing in front of Luther's work at the Telfair Museum of Art or elsewhere.

The Deep Road to Infinity

Long before Elemental made cultural arts history in Savannah, I had become an admirer of Dr. Jahannes's poetry and essay collection, Truthfeasting. For that reason, I felt more than a little honored by his generous comments on the body of my published works and was thrilled to hear him recite the following passage:

We take the deep road to infinity.
From the silence to the sound
to the cross to the mosque
we bleed through the hidden tunnels of history
tapping the jingle of empires and chains
to the beat of memory gone astray.

We take the deep road to infinity...

(from the poem "More Than You Know," Elemental, p. 16)

His willingness to lend his voice in service to something greater than either of our individual ambitions was a large part of what defined Elemental's thematic substance. It brought to mind the great Lucille Clifton’s famous dictum that when it comes to identifying yourself as a poet and actually writing poetry, "One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated."

The celebratory evening of May 29, 2008, marked the culmination of an almost two-decade campaign to breathe life into a project which had survived, and in part been shaped by, the turbulence born of two creative individuals' private, social, political, and professional lives. The luxury of having finally reached a point of relief nearly overshadowed the excitement of having achieved a long-sought triumph. We soon realized we had completed only one more stage of a perpetually interactive process which would, much like the book, continue to unfold in layers of color and sparks of revelation.

NEXT: Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2): illumination
Aberjhani
©May 2018

0 Comments

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

1/6/2017

0 Comments

“Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.” Postered Poetics by Aberjhani.

In the debate over the potential repeal of the American Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, mainstream media commentators commonly refer to the law as President Barack Obama’s “signature achievement.” Whether you describe that tendency as guerrilla decontextualization or simple disrespect, it mostly adds up to a miscalculation of the assessment of President Obama’s impact on American and world history.

Said assessment is one which historians will be determining for decades, but for now, by way of introducing the 3 poems that will soon follow, it is enough to note that the American Care Act is only one of many key achievements spearheaded by Mr. Obama on behalf of his American constituents and his fellow leaders in the global community. How is it commentators so easily overlook the fact that under his leadership a downward spiraling recession which nearly brought the country to its red, white and blue knees was effectively strategically reversed, dropping unemployment figures from double digits to when he took office to the current figure below 5 percent? How can they so casually forget that his accomplishments earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace?

Historic 2009 Black History Month American Legacy Magazine cover by artist Allan Burch featuring President Barack H. Obama (center), and pictured in the background starting from the left going clockwise: Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Original source: http://allanburch.blogspot.com/2009/02/barack-obama-for-american-legacy.html

That he became the United States’ first African-American president at the age of 47 is possibly less remarkable than the full two terms during which one generation was born, and another grew into maturity living without the assumption that a black American president––this one accompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters–– was by default an anomaly. The observation is more than just the most commanding fact to cite for Black History Month every year from this point onward. It is one of the most compelling arguments for ramping up improved lessons worldwide in diversity, cultural literacy, and peaceful coexistence.

Add to the above the skillful application of leadership principles employed by Mr. Obama to repair diplomatic abroad and whether storms of race-fueled violence at home. Look closely at the risks he took in effort to achieve a diverse workforce with appointments of women, gays, Latinos, Asians, and African Americans to influential offices. And although he obviously boasted a bit when it came to his role as Commander-in-Chief, he was amazingly effective in his position as Chief Comforter following some of the most horrendous natural and man-inflicted disasters in history.

Of the poems below, the first was written to commemorate Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election to the presidency. The second and third were written as it became apparent that his presidency was going to meet with serious oppositions of every kind: political, racial, personal, military, betrays, and more. Each of the poems are available in the pages of The River of Winged Dreams.

Hope and Audacity Revisited

The poem titled “There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity” was first published in The Savannah Herald after Barack Obama’s first election to the U.S. presidency. Ironically enough, the poem proposed that Mr. Obama was not to be compared to the great Abraham Lincoln, and yet one of the more noted responses to his re-election in 2012 was a challenge much like one Mr. Lincoln faced a century and a half ago. It was the challenge, whether symbolic or literal, of a growing call for different states to secede from the U.S. President Obama’s re-election was by no means a given. The battle to win was as epic a political struggle as America has ever seen, but U.S. citizens in the end made their choice clear:

There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity by Aberjhani originally published in the Savannah Herald to commemorate Barack Hussein Obama's first presidential inauguration.

Songbird of speckled feathers and new millennium eyes,
you trill notes of democratic vistas heavy with light.
Chords of miraculous notions enrich your blessed voice
with power to sing dreams into deeds well done.

Above your head Sallie Hemings’ children laugh rainbows.

You are neither Christ nor King nor Lincoln.
But what you are is willing, capable, and sincere,
there upon a bough of hope and audacity
as branded by history as any have ever been.

Knights of global tables toast the lyrics of your vision.

A grand son of two continents, your heart marches
to the glorious world beat of universal drummers,
and your American dream dutifully follows: one step
for peace, another for justice, two more for strength.

Harriet Tubman’s tears splash prayers for your success.

From where you perch, the trade winds of destiny
lift your songs like leaves of silken prophecies,
scattering the soft true gold of their melodies and joy:
to their rhythm a world sways, hums, and dares to believe.

(from The River of Winged Dreams)

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

“To continue one’s journey in the darkness with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind––the courage to demand that light continue to be light even in the surrounding darkness.”
--Howard Thurman

I.
Wreaths of nuclear ash
decorate civilian hearts
with unresolved blood.

Greed, crowned emperor,
rules the earth with cold disdain
for harmony’s path.

War poisons the land
like diseased minds downloaded
into bowls of tears.

Chaos, loving none
so much as itself, slurps and
spits dead souls like bones.

What is belief now?
What is faith that will not die?
What news from heaven?

II.
In midnight’s orchard
rose’s blossom the secrets
that heal daylight’s wounds.

Beats of broken hearts
flow waves of revelation––
open gates to strength.

Cradled in scorched arms,
a soldier’s moon keeps its vows––
shines persistent hope.

This love that God is
curves in figure eights greater
than both time and space.

Death wins nothing here,
gnawing wings that amputate––
then spread, lift up, fly.
(from The River of Winged Dreams)

(Postered Poetics title art graphic for Midnight Flight of the Poetry Angels by Aberjhani.)

“It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest.”
––Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

What once was blood streaks
your face with indigo tears
and lush midnight tunes.

Holding silver hands,
you compose a Tao of art
that heals broken wings.

Lips glow violet,
open to reveal tongues bright
with pearl metaphors.

A speckled halo
handcuffs the world’s best liars
to soft dark passions.

Music’s sweet labors
give birth to a springtime rush
of sighs rippling dreams.

Out of your mouth rhymes
blossom like warm paradigms
already in flight.

Golden, your songs,
and noble; spinning stars on
their axis of love.

On faith’s battered back
calm eyes etch prayers that cool
a nation’s hot rage.

Inside these scarred hearts
genius flows incandescent
waves of truth made real.

Hope drowned in shadows
emerges fiercely splendid––
boldly angelic.
(The River of Winged Dreams)

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Author-Poet Aberjhani is currently completing a collection of nonfiction narratives on the cultural arts, history, race relations, literature, and social and political conditions in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Bright Skylark Literary Productions
© 9 January, 2017

0 Comments

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

11/15/2016

1 Comment

"The universe said, 'Let me show your soul something beautiful." quote by Aberjhani from ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. (Postered Poets Art Graphics)

The edits on my current book in progress were close to complete when Hurricane Matthew came to town and rearranged my priorities. President-Elect Donald Trump, at the time still a presidential candidate, contributed his fair share of distractions as well but that’s another blog for another time.

Along with its unexpected destructiveness in my hometown, Hurricane Matthew also delivered a few gifts. One of the most important of those gifts for me was the rediscovery of research materials in the form of notebooks from the 1990s long thought lost in the shuffle of previous relocations. The material turned up while storing and salvaging valuable to keep them safe from the hurricane.

The discovery of the notebooks themselves became part of my account––now included in the previously-noted book-in-progress–– of surviving Matthew. One of those notebooks contains an unvarnished story of the birth of ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. Because of the death of Luther E. Vann, my co-creator on the project, earlier this year, the notebook was a startling find.

Discussing the Possibility

Had he lived, Luther would have turned 79 on December 2, 2016, so it seems appropriate that notebooks and early recorded recitals of poems from ELEMENTAL should have started popping up at this time. The excerpt below is taken from notes dated September 11, 1992, more than a year after I first met the painter and sculptor.

At this point, I had been experimenting with writing poems based on his art but this was our first time discussing the possibility of working on a book together. Also during this period, comparing our developing friendship to the meeting between Jalal al-Din Rumi and Shams Tabrizi helped me visualize the possibility of working with an artist who had been practicing his craft much longer than I had been plying mine.

Detail from "For the Love of the Poet" painting by Luther E. Vann featured in Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love.)

Called Luther around 8 tonight to make an appointment for our interview next week. As with the week before, I found myself extremely nervous about calling but then realized I was allowing silliness to impede our mutual progress. When I did call, he greeted me with uninhibited enthusiasm and all of my reservations vanished in the sudden light of his pleasure.

He took the opportunity to thank me for the poem [“For the Love of the Poet” based on painting with same name] I left him and Sandra last week.

“Man,” he said, “that was really beautiful. I don’t know if Sandra told you or not, but the idea we came up with—because your words seem so spontaneous, from a gut level––was to do a book together. If you can do something that spontaneously for all the pictures in the book, that would be just great.”

I repeated my tired line about my genius not matching his.

“I don’t know about that. Like I said, the poem has a strong spontaneousness and it has that same multidimensional quality as the picture.”

“Well, it really is an extension of the portrait because when I saw it, the words started writing themselves. In fact, all of the pictures and sculpture inspired me so strongly that I just started composing poetry right then and there.” [At an exhibition of his work]

Could it be we were really having this conversation? How many times had I sat or walked or worked while imagining the possibility of the very thing we were now discussing. The first time I saw his work, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I should compose a poetic commentary to match the images. What astonishes me more than anything else is that he seems to view my work the same way. How can that be?

Whereas in the recent past I’ve allowed myself to indulge in comparisons between my meeting Luther and great historical personalities meeting with the same, lately I’ve tried to refrain from doing that. But there seems to be in it some appropriateness independent of my own speculations. Shem Friedlander wrote of my two favorite Sufis that theirs “was a friendship based on the discovery of God through each other at a time when both beings had a lesson to impart to one another.” I think possibly it would have been more accurate to say that an overwhelming affirmation of God is what Shams and Rumi experienced through their friendship…

Luther has made a psychospiritual transition which I have, in a way, only casually reached for, while I as yet possess a sense of focus and drive (a bit weakened thought it may be) which seems to have atrophied within himself (quite understandably so give his spiritual disposition). Ours is, I believe, meant to be a true and good partnership. [end of excerpt]

Concluding and Beginning Anew

This post concludes with Carol Phelan Aebby’s poem, The Young Poet and the Painter, which is a rare kind of homage to my work with Luther written in the bibliographic profile acrostic form originated by Andre Emmanuel Bendavi ben-YEHU. The poet’s voice captures a lot of the mystery and wonder that many artists experience when striving to honor a difficult but ultimately rewarding task.

Aberjhani
© November 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

1 Comment

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

1/1/2016

0 Comments

S14 Painting copyright by Tomas Alen Kopera with animation by George RedHawk

Astonished might be the best word to describe my response to the extraordinary gif featuring the reportedly blind Native American George RedHawk’s amazing animation of Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera’s 2014 oil on canvas titled “S14.” That it had been posted by the TedX Colombo chapter along with the following quote from The River of Winged Dreams doubled the intensity of my surprise:

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

“Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” ― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams http://t.co/wOyhpOTmZa
— TEDxColombo (@TEDxColombo) October 14, 2015

The image of the flame-breathing eagle (or possibly hawk?) atop the head of a man appeared to me like an angel of the more fiercely hybrid variety described in traditional texts of the King James Bible. I was struck by the parallel that the TedX Colombo group drew between it and the quote. And then the sense it made not only became very clear but reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s famous lines:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all …”
( Emily Dickinson )

Hope in this New Year 2016, after the carnage and heartbreaks that have dogged humanity since 9/11, cannot make a difference in the form of nothing more than passive contemplation. It has to exercise strength in the manner described by Charter for Compassion as compassionate action. But before anything else can be employed to make a meaningful difference, hope itself has to remain intact within the hearts and souls of individuals.

The word hope (or a form of it) appears some 29 times in The River of Winged Dreams and 39 times in Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry. On this first day of the year 2016 I find myself invoking the word not so much for myself––though there are many reasons I probably should––as for all those who may have reached a point where they feel there is no such thing as hope. Or if there is, that it is meaningless in the face of calamities currently overrunning humanity. Those who believe that to be the case are at liberty to give it meaning of significant applicable substance.

Consider, for example, the millions of refugees whose determination has gone beyond redefining their individual lives to changing the course of history itself. Think of the wrongly-imprisoned men and women whose faith saw them through years of agonizing injustice and whose examples of forgiveness inspire so many others. Witness those whose struggle to breathe the toxic air of outrageously polluted cities have turned their desperation into rallying cries for nations to take definitive action to correct the extreme destructiveness of climate change.

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The short excerpt below is from the introductory essay “Deliverance in Action” which was first published in The Bridge of Silver Wings poetry collection and later included as part of The River of Winged Dreams. It is shared at this time with the hope that humanity in 2016 can reverse the deadly trends of the past and create new life-sustaining legacies truly worth celebrating:

The truth is we do not always know how we go from falling off the edge of one cliff to running with determination beside the ledge of another. The Bridge of Silver Wings is what I’ve come to call the unknowable unquantifiable process of deliverance in action.

It is what saves a given soul when that soul no longer has any idea how to save itself. It may be described as Creator, divinity, the angelic, love, good fortune, dharma, grace, faith, or any number of ways that provide hints but no irrefutably definitive explanation. It arrives when there’s no logical reason to believe it shall and provides not only a sense of salvation but one of transformation. Whereas the conditions of a specific life may not undergo any kind of miraculous change, the manner in which a person perceives and addresses those issues do. With a revised awareness of what is required to bring balance, healing, hope, and prosperity back into one’s life, a person is often able to achieve exactly that.

The journey across The Bridge of Silver Wings can be extremely frightening. At the same time, it can be filled with the kind of joyful revelations and thrilling affirmations of one’s self and destiny that are experienced only when one dares to take it.
          (from The River of Winged Dreams)

Is the happiness that everyone wishes each other at the beginning of a New Year possible? It certainly would not seem to be for the millions around the world who find their very existence threatened by potential immediate deletion with every second that passes. The good news on this day and every day of the year is that those conditions do not have to remain the same.

Aberjhani
© New Year Day 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

0 Comments

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

From One President and Generation to the Next

Powerful and Cherished Allie

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

Sensory Brilliance

The Deep Road to Infinity

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2 of 2): illumination

​From One President and Generation to the Next

Powerful and Cherished Allie

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

Sensory Brilliance

The Deep Road to Infinity

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

From One President and Generation to the Next