Finding Joy

We smile at strangers.

We open our lives’ doors to a season of growth and change.

We prepare appropriately, and we engage with others in a feast celebrating the invigoration of an existence now shared… and so sweet.

We laugh.

We dance.

We sing.

We affirm together the truth that “… with all its sham, drudgery, and broken 
dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

And somewhere in a distant thought ...

We acknowledge the persistent challenges that we have faced, and will face… as facts of our lives… courses to be endured… difficulties to be overcome. Yes they are. And we refuse to allow them to prevent us from living into the real possibilities that encourage us to be more than just unwitting victims of our fragile idiosyncrasies.

And with that in mind we necessarily silence the voices around us; both the artificial ones on our radios and televisions, and those from the people immediately around that incessantly bombard us with their scenarios of gloom and doom.

Racism Is Criminal Behavior

Racism is not just an expression of someone’s innate prejudice. In reality it is an expression of the unjust behavior that emanates from the rationalization and institutionalization of injustice in a society such as we have become.

Racism is criminal behavior. It is a violation of everything that we should stand for as civil society. Anyone may harbor prejudice; we are prone to individual likes and dislikes. However, to inflict harm of any kind, and by any means as a result of that personal dysfunction is cause for remedial legal action.

The focus on an offender’s complexion and the complexion of victims in our analysis of these offenses is essentially a distraction. It is a distraction because it redirects our focus to individual racial angst, rather than on the essential criminality of an action. This act of redirection serves those who would have us not seriously examine the real causes of such behavior.

To be absolutely clear, there are oppressive brutes of all hue. Criminals come in all colors and in all the variations of gender. This being the case, there needs to be a real awakening to the structural injustices that become institutionalized in our social and economic culture.

It is time to wake up to the reality that there are individuals and corporate entities among us intent on accruing to themselves everything their vain hearts desire at the expense of the well being of others. They act to accomplish their goals through every agency they can, and at the expense of the life and humanity of others. To such characters and corporations, “white supremacy" is just one of many excuses used to rationalize the inequity they perpetuate. To such persons the question: “How much is enough?”, is nothing more that an inconvenient itch that they must endure.

Beyond our focus on artificial differences between folk, we must fasten our attention on critical issues such as: the demand for just wages at home and abroad, more reasonable cost of credit for those who need it, responsible care and sharing of the environment, the demilitarization of our economies,  a real focus on equal access to education, and ensuring the availability of life-saving technologies to all people in a world that is becoming more and more interconnected.

Ultimately the peace and stability of our society is a function of a shared commitment to the establishment of Justice. We must not be distracted from this goal by “newsworthy” preoccupation with social drama. As long as we are human we will experience the foibles of unperfected character. We will in all honesty admit personal prejudices that, if exposed, will shame us. Shaming one another is however not a viable objective in pursuit of Justice for all. It is therefore imperative that we be constrained by the Rule of Law in our social interactions.

The work of Justice demands that we act according to established standards of civility in a society where no one is above the Law. No one.

A Mansion Called “Folly”

Ruins of Folly Great House - Port Antonio, Jamaica 

A few miles east of Port Antonio, a quaint little town on the beautiful northeast coast of the island of Jamaica, is to be found what has come to be called "The Folly Great House". In reality it is the ruins of a two story 60 room mansion that was built around 1905 by wealthy American Alfred Mitchel for his wife, who belonged to the Tiffany family, jewelers from New York City. They both lived in this ostentatious manor until Alfred's death in 1912. Abandoned a few yeas later, by 1938 the roof had collapsed, and the place is now a spectacle symbolizing the corruption of noble intentions by a mixing of incompatible ingredients.

The reasons given for the demise of this once illustrious abode of this wealthy family have taken on mythic proportions. One often repeated reason has to do with alleged shortcuts that were taken during its construction. The story is told that salt water from the sea just below the mansion was used in the mixing of the concrete, leading to corrosion of the steel components of the building. 

Some accounts dispute this assertion, going as far as to say that all construction materials were imported from abroad, including the water for mixing the concrete.  Be that as it may, what was once the pride and joy of these lovers is now a symbol of what results when the best of loving intentions is corroded by what I have called "the salted cement of incompatible ideals". In a poem titled "Uninhabitable", I wrote the following about Folly:

“Now here it stands
On a pastured rise...
A sad place... 
Wasted by the many generations of its emptiness...
Hope discolored... Columns that weep
Under the burden of helpless beams...
Day by day it falls apart
Materially... And in every heart that has ever known love
And sought to build a monument
With the steeled character of passion determined
And the salted cement of incompatible ideals...
Here it stands... A monument to passion... A concreted folly
Uninhabitable"

Lest We Forget

History serves as a reliable witness to tragedies which put to rest any philosophical or rhetorical back and forth about whether there is in fact good and evil in our world. The impressions left by the presence of these essentially opposite forces throughout the course of our experience are indelibly impressed on our consciousness, on the battlefields of this country, and battlefields all over the globe. The substance of those impressions is an unmistakably gruesome mix of the blood, sweat, tears, and brutalized flesh of warring factions.

The spilled guts, broken bones, and the haunting screams of mutilated souls, deny us any retreat into some specious academic comfort zone regarding this matter. The massacre of innocents will not allow it. The body bags from battlefields near and far containing the remains of our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our neighbors and their children, rankle our convenient stoicism. Those who would resort to their rhetorical acumen to deny the existence of these opposing forces are rudely aroused, and kept awake by the cacophony of war and its foul stench.

The heroes we celebrate in our individual and corporate lives are those who stood in firm opposition to the forces of evil. In this respect we remember the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King this month. Those who have represented the expression of evil must bear the eternal rebuke reserved for them.  

There are those among us who even now would salute Hitler; but they are in reality a fringe trying to survive against the moral tide of History. There are those who would resurrect the fascism of Mussolini; but they will inevitably find themselves marginalized and eventually swept aside by the thrust toward a more equal society and a better world. The putrid stench 
of slavery lingers in the air we breathe. The Ku Klux Klan still has its disciples, but they appropriately still hide their faces... In shame?

The forward march of History gains impetus when we identify and call Evil by its name… That which seeks to destroy the will to achieve the common good. The establishment of the common good is the goal of our civilization. It is a foundation of the kind of Peace which issues from the triumph of the forces of good over the presence of evil. We understand civil society to be a function of the recognition of each other’s right to the pursuit of our highest human potential regardless of circumstances of race, gender, sexuality, religious persuasion, or the socio-economic circumstances of one’s birth.

When we appropriate to each other as a human right the ability to thrive in ways that are non-obstructive to the strivings of our fellow persons, we regard that as a good thing. To live at peace with each other by the establishment of equity among us is good.

We know beyond equivocation that there have been, and that there remain among us persons and influences that do not share the values implicit in these notions. They foster in their own lives, and seek to foist upon others, the inequity that serves their twisted sense of being. They create misery. They are agents of chaos. We call such persons and their intentions and influences... evil. 

The Journey To Your Authentic Self

One’s name is a semantic basket filled with the seeded expectations based on how one is perceived, and who one is expected to be. In many instances, it is a summary of the hopes and dreams that are held sacred on your behalf by your ancestors. For these reasons many put appropriate thought and research into choosing names for their newborns.

Many of us are not aware of the significance of being called by a certain chosen word. Some of us love, and seek to live into the aspirations implicit in the word to which we answer. Some of us hate our names for a number of reasons and express a desire to change them. And then there are those who actually reject their given names and set out to rename themselves. Those who do so usually have in mind very specific historical, philosophical, and esthetic reasons why such a change is necessary. Of course there are those who have no clue that their names are actually words that mean something specific.

--If you do not know who you are... you will end up as someone else. If you do not know where you are going... you will end up someplace else--

The statements above express the ultimate dilemma of a lost soul. To choose to limit ourselves to the name or names that we have been given is to give up the power that we have to be everything we can be. That kind of nonchalance denies us the promise of realizing our fullest potential.

We have heard it said that knowledge of self is a gateway to the state of being we call God. This is true. When we, in our most vulnerable moment, demand a response to the question as to the name and nature of God ~ we hear the resounding answer - “I Am”... And when we insist on a more complete answer to that question we are met with the poetically bountiful- “I Am, that I am”. What else are we… but what we truly are? And who are you… besides who you really are?

Our most meaningful lives begin with the existential conjugation of the verb “to be” :

I am,

You are,

He, She, It… is.

A deeply meaningful connection with our sense of I AM is absolutely necessary to the operation of the Creative Power in our lives. That Power functions to bring into being our deepest desires. That Creative Power… not some bearded antiquity… is the Source, in all of us, of all we can be. It is from this Power Within that comes everything, good and bad, that manifests in our lives. It is from this Power that comes our ability to direct the course of our lives.

We are constantly experiencing opportunities to change, to grow. In the truest sense of the word, life is a journey of discovery. The mantra of the soul in discovery mode... the soul that would claim her or his power to be, is courage. Contrary to the belief that many have come to assume to be true, there is nothing inevitable about our destinies.

We have heard many people put forward the false notion that our journey and destination in this life is set. Some people believe that one's fate is always predetermined and that there is nothing one can do about it. To live meaningfully, we must divest ourselves of the untruth of such a way of thinking. As a way of effecting the release from such ideas, one must courageously apply oneself to the discipline necessary to do so. That discipline can be expressed as a commitment to a specific Mantra.

Mantras are understood to be powerful words/ideas that we repeat verbally and in our actions. To adapt to the Mantra of Courage is to walk step by fateful step into a future full of possibility. It is to moment by moment, event by event ~ deny the hold that fear would have on us. Through the repetition of a mantra, the meanings and manifestations of the ideas we want to commit to are imprinted in our subconscious. In time they become the template for the change that we desire in ourselves. With mantras, as with everything else, practice makes perfect.

Through the daily practice of our mantric exercise we are able to create a new template by which we connect with our most deeply held intentions. This eventuates because we are actually inducing a deep connection with the Creative Spirit… the Breath Of God from within… the Source of everything in the universe of our lives. That Breath “moves upon the face of the Deep” in our life experiences… deep discord, deep disappointments, deep hurts, deep confusion, deep fear… . It creates order out of chaos, it separates light from darkness, it directs us to “be fruitful and multiply”. The Creative Breath within us replaces the fruits of fear in our interactions with each other and the world, with the abundance of Love.

The more adept we become at connecting with this deeper consciousness of life, the more we are able to silence the ideas that are contrary to our most deeply held ideals. This deeper consciousness of life empowers us to name our selves.

Your name is a statement about who you are… or it should be.

Us Against Them... A Myopic Nightmare

In the absence of a codified and enforced system of values that seeks to guarantee the basic rights of individuals and groups to shared space, and to fair access to the resources in that space, conflict thrives. Whenever the most basic of our human aspirations, the need and the right to survive, is threatened by a disregard for the most fundamental code… to be treated as a fellow human being… we have the most fundamental reason for, and a cause of the violence that is all too often a parent of the insecurity that then arms us for more violence. In the presence and operation of a system of behavior that violates the humanity of others, the us against them mentality thrives.

The code: Do unto others, as you would have them do to you… must have universal application in order to be valid. It must not, and cannot make exceptions for skin color, class, national origin, religious belief, gender, physical disability or ability, sexual orientation, or idiosyncrasies of any kind or cause. The prejudices implicit in these various convenient classifications have been prime factors in the victimization of individuals and groups throughout history.

In their efforts to justify the claims that serve their unjust perceptions and behaviors, groups have articulated and appealed to less civilizing, and blatantly inferior statutes. But despite every attempt to sanitize these corruptions of civility, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no law more complete in its distribution of justice than that which is outlined in the code above… there is a reason we agree that it is the golden rule. In fact this code has been the very foundation of every viable system of justice predating the earliest recorded civilizations… prior to Hammurabi, and before Moses. The obvious moral validity of this rule stands out through the present day. It is the nail on which the protective coat called Justice must hang.

The engendering and proliferation of the us against them mentality is in its very essence a dynamic that results when a group or an individual perceives others as threats to their occupation of communal space, and to their access to the resources in that space.  The culture that proceeds from this kind of mentality corrupts the very perception of what community should be, and consequently every single relationship in every unit that makes up community. This expression of a corrupted humanity is the dynamic at work in societies that foster racism, sexism and genderism, and every form of economic and social inequality.

The conflicts that inevitably result from the violations of one’s humanity by another have tragic consequences. Us against them as an operating principle in any society leads to violence. It does so because the logical outcome of such a perception of life is a conclusion that says: Us or them! The angst that this corruption of the possibilities of our human experience stirs is aptly expressed in a speech that then Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia delivered before the United Nations on October 6, 1963:

“…  until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; …”


The assertions of the late Emperor of Ethiopia are as true then as they are now. They are as applicable to the world in which we now live, as they were then throughout colonized Africa.