Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Skin is a distracting wrapper...

"Skin is a distracting wrapper to the flavor of a person’s soul."

(Directed to the Black skin versus White skin theology)

Imagine humans being able to eliminate the distraction of the physical skin and just be “gray” humans walking around on earth. We would then focus on an individual's true personality and characteristics. As a result, we would lose the concepts of black versus white and beauty versus ugly, but it would only be fit as karma to our historical affairs involving the discrimination based off of them.

So in essence, we would all start from zero. Everything before that point would be history. Then we could coin the issue of the black race versus the white race as an inferior and a useless level of thinking as a whole. Unfortunately, there would be no more significance for having pride in one’s race; cultures may still exist based off of location of a group of people and their trends, but race would no longer be a driving force behind that.

Note: I say “unfortunately” because I as an individual enjoy celebrating my race and culture. It is healthy to be involved with people you share common ground with to meet a common goal. Most of us feel it is necessary in order to function and collectively progress in this world.

On the contrary, I don’t believe in taking it to the extreme of saying my culture or race is better than someone else’s, because that would only lead to war. But the world would be boring without war to oppose peace, right? If everything was “good and peaceful” on earth, the thrill of media would not exist. So I do believe in the concept of yin and yang; it is necessary in order to keep balance in the world. But the historical matching of opposites to other opposites: positive=white and negative=black, has led us to our current way of processing everything. And personally I’d rather be an advocate of the peace found in totally denying that theology.

But back to the response of us “thinking gray”: After the shift in thought, we in our inquisitive nature, would dissect the matter and strive to find the root of that mentality to ultimately lead us to an answer or solution. At the same time, finding an answer may not be beneficial because if the human mindset remained the same when we switched from “black and white vision” to “gray vision” we would still want to find someone to blame and punish or shun to the death; causing an immediate divide in the thought of us starting from zero. But if we blamed ourselves as a whole for the problem we would not shun ourselves or go to the extreme of killing off ourselves; it wouldn't make sense. We would want our state of humanity to excel.

It is possible that we could press refresh and have a new beginning but only if we scrap our flawed ideals of the past while at the same time use them as a basis of what not to become again. Once fixed in that mentality, we humans would see each other’s souls for what they are, establish a mutual respect for each other’s diversity and finally know how to wear our skins correctly.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Nature in New York

Last Month, I performed along with Slam Nahuatl and other features at an event called "Nature In New York". It was a talent-packed show with lots of energy. Well the story behind this one was spur of the moment (like everything else in my life) but beautiful.

I was listening to a new found friend Chris Dunn perform a piece that he had 'no words for'. I listened to him perform the song and something moved me to read my poem to it while he was playing. I discovered that if I slowed down the pace that I read it at, it matched his rhythm. So I approached Chris after he got off of stage and asked if he would play that behind my poem while I recited. He happily agreed and we even got our friend Jamie to play the drum with us. So it was complete, his wordless tune finally had lyrics to make the song complete!
Here it is. Enjoy!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSVnG7-Hmv0

(Jamie, get well soon brother, you have more music to make with us!)