Is Always Be

Imamu Amiri Baraka taught, “Is always be,” I’ve interpreted it many ways because I’ve had time to contemplate what it means and why it resonates. “The changing same,” sometimes depresses me but mostly there’s assurance that I’m not the first to face struggles for freedom and self-determination in worlds fenced off from each other with barbed wire. Change like the Mississippi River can be managed and dammed for only a while before the inevitable reaches back to reclaim compromised banks and floods appropriated land again. Ice is melting and fresh water seeks salt water because it must, all the while improvising something different from what flowed down stream before. We’re like that; flooding land we use to know while carrying new organisms to a sea.

I used to think of her as water rushing 
on her way to some wet function, salt water, a composted organism. Then I reckoned her spirit as air – free and meandering, I’ve yet to see her rooted anywhere. Her roots reach upside down for sky and particles of cosmic funk, she is acrylic music making way without drying – dancing stories without ink. Phoning from inside wind to tell me she’s blowing in it; I rest between gypsy paragraphs waiting for my cue. I gasp before sucking whatever is available, exploiting a sense of urgency like time running on a clock with only a second hand and daily issues running too - like out like rhythm.

I’m learning to love without habit, to see without judgment and to listen without needing to agree or understand. I have not made a cuckold of my art for women, for fatherhood, religion, political causes or dope. I have ridden every rollercoaster in search of truth, humanity and the wisdom of what it means to be alive and authentic on Earth. My skein: this loosely wound head of dreadlocks is on the edge of making something that doesn’t yet exist or understand itself. The symbiosis of how loose geese form a V is and will remain inside information, outsiders refer to it as mystery or discount it as a hoax.

This morning something like “getting religion,” feeling the Holy Ghost or a trip on LSD captured my unconscious mind and wrapped me inside a wondrous cocoon of spiritual transformation. I was led corner turn by corner turn through a labyrinth of community love and protection by a community I only have an osmosis relationship with, a mix tribe of Mexicans and indigenous Americans. The ritual surrounding my experience made it feel safe and appropriate so that I wasn’t afraid or even concerned about myself. I’m not delusional and I wasn’t under the influence of any substance that would cause me to hallucinate, except I’m devoted to my creative work and where it leads me. Some ghosts in American air found my soul worthy of visitation and occupation and is using me as a way to channel something I don’t understand yet. It’s not the first time. I’m open to ghosts and I welcome their influences.

It’s impossible to pinpoint one particular cause for my heightened dream experience and I can’t rule out any potential cause so I’m simply telling the story as I can recall it today. Last night I went on a radio program at KFAI-FM and found myself in good company, including the ghosts of Gato Barbieri who had made his transition two days before, and Dollar Brand, a.k.a. Abdullah Ibrahim were featured artists on the program. The music as Emel, the program host said, “raised bumps on my arms.” I admit to recent nights when I didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted because of pain but I got in a nap that day. Nothing really extraordinary happened because this is normal practice for me: listening to incredible music by both living and ancestor musicians and reading ghosts note from my bookshelves. I’m settling on a cumulative effect from a lifetime of searching and receiving such correspondence as these.

When I was able to shake off my tiresome and befuddling sleep I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed uttering a phrase I had heard so often in my childhood. This phrase expressed what I portend to understand now, a molting into a new being, a “changed man.” Confessions like this were never simply spoken they were almost always sang in a particular cadence as to amplify the unusualness of the epiphany. As I sat there I literally “looked at my hands and they looked new, I looked at my feet and they did too.” Not to limit this to a religious cliché I also heard a Taj Mahal celebration of transition into or onto a higher plane, “I had the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown but now I feeling so much better I could cake wake into town.”