Aberjhani
While many people like the idea of exercising unconditional love, most eventually find it too draining and impossible to sustain, often because the attempt to practice it is misunderstood, discouraged, brought under attack, or made a target of willful abuse. As sad as it may be to admit, in our modern world people are far more accustomed to hearing news of war, genocide, murder, disasters, famine, and disease than they are to hearing anything about acts of love or grace.Collection: Love
All the world loves a ghost. The evidence of that simple statement can be found by looking in nearly every direction.Collection: Love
Whereas the insufficiency of a love neither sustained nor supreme cannot be ignored, the same should not be taken as cause to avoid one's total spiritual contractual engagement to this world.Collection: Love
Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time. --from poem Blood and BlossomsCollection: Mother
Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.Collection: Love
The Emancipation Proclamation...can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.Collection: Life
As painful as life can be at times for people all over the world there is some component of existence, or nonexistence perhaps, operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we've forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love.Collection: Love
Mainstream medias representation, or its guerrilla decontextualization, of black mens lives in particular can set the stage for erroneous assumptions capable of damaging an individual or a nation.Collection: Black
It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.Collection: Men
How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History LessonCollection: Peace
I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.Collection: Choices
Feet sandaled with dreams tread paths of vision leading to wisdom’s sharp peaks.Collection: Dream
Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.Collection: Tears
Life possesses an amazing array of profoundly sad faces.Collection: Life
The political, social, and spiritual impact of the life example set by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela might be measured in part by the profound and unique gestures made by people in different countries to honor his life upon learning of his death.Collection: Spiritual
Valentines Day itself, like most holidays in the modern era, has been heavily influenced by commercialism that focuses on the appeal of romantic fantasies.Collection: Valentines Day
The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.Collection: Believe
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.Collection: Dream
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.Collection: War
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.Collection: Writing
Learning to cultivate an awareness of the known and unknown within one's being often leads to a healthier and more realistic sense of self.Collection: Self
With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.Collection: Soul
The word 'survivor' carries a weight of remembrance that has broken the minds and bodies of more than a few men and women. It also contains a humbling light of recognition that compels many to do whatever they can to help reinforce the efforts of those who might be 'at risk' of not just giving up on their dreams, but of giving up on their continued existence.Collection: Dream
Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.Collection: Art
And now we step to the rhythm of miracles. --from The Light, That Never DiesCollection: Light
Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.Collection: Voice
An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.Collection: Love
Where humanity sowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed.Collection: Love
Even when muddy your wings sparkle bright wonders that heal broken worlds.Collection: Healing
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.Collection: Dream
Then came the healing time, hearts started to shine, soul felt so fine, oh what a freeing time it was.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Creative
The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.Collection: Motivational
History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.Collection: Love
Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.Collection: Fear
A river is nearly the ultimate symbol for the very essence of change itself. It flows unceasingly from one point of being to another, yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life's endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates life's beginnings, along with all the muted and explosive moments that surface between the two extremes.Collection: Life
Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.Collection: Silence
Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.Collection: Nature
Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or maimed their lives and then simply went on their way.Collection: Brother
As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.Collection: Change
If life is a birthday cake let my face be smeared with its icing of cognac and kindness.Collection: Life
Passion presented with a greater challenge achieves a greater goal.Collection: Determination
The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.Collection: Dancing
Authentic inspiration endows individuals with mental or spiritual energy which they are then able to transform into positive action. It can make all the difference between a man, woman, or child allowing despair to permanently paralyze any dreams they may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.Collection: Dream
I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.Collection: Dream
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.Collection: Garden
With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.Collection: Angel
We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.Collection: War