Hand to mouth

Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.
~ Hermann Hesse ~

Both my books, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing and Wisdom for the Soul of Black Folk are still available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. These books are my bread and butter so if you haven't bought yet please do so and support a struggling self-publisher. You can also order directly, especially if you want them signed.

I've not expended further time or dwindling resources on developing other publications i had planned; the economic downturn is not the best time to expand production of something with as low a turnover as books. So those have been deferred indefinitely. I've been otherwise occupied with maintaining my patois website, Langwij Jumieka and other domains.

In October, after years of sending out resumés and applications, i was fortunate to land a part-time job as editor/designer for a monthly newsletter put out by the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, which is the lowest level of local government in the District of Columbia. It helps pay the rent though it doesn't cover it entirely. My immediate boss is Commissioner Michael Yates, originally from Jamaica. Another Caribbean connection brought me another part-time position working with a Maryland heritage tourism non-profit, but that was short-lived due to internal constraints.

So i subsist hand-to-mouth, living on the edge, good thing my needs are few and my lifestyle simple. In a more ideal economic dispensation not wholly defined by monetarism, i'd be more than adequately compensated for the non-paid work i do. Never satisfied with things as they are, i've begun to explore Edgar Cahn's Time Banking and Co-Production, systems of mutual credit that are based on equitable exchange of service. That will probably be my next big thing.

I haven't had much time for anything else. I try to keep up my yoga and zazen routine and get some reading done on the train or while resting between sets at the gym. I've finally gotten around to reading Ken Wilber and am completely sold on his integral vision. It has given me a firmer and more defined framework for much that i already intuited and that i've tried to represent with SoulVentures and I-sight. I keep my counseling skills honed by the occasional consultation and by reading Wisdom Cards at Takoma Park Metaphysical Chapel once a month. After 29 years, i'm inspired to paint again. I've already bought brushes and acrylics, a new medium for me having worked almost exclusively in gouache.

These are exciting times and we have so many tools at our disposal. We are now more intelligent and more prepared than anyone who has gone before to take the next evolutionary step.

Another one

Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.
~ Gaston Kaboré ~

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?
~ Philip G. Hamerton ~

The new book is out and i've planted promotional seeds, waiting patiently now for something to sprout. Barnes & Noble have said they'll start with 75 copies but i've not seen evidence of an order yet.

The experience of producing a book for the so-called urban market has been interesting but not surprising as the responses received to date have been more or less as expected. Seeing me in person, folks do a double-take as my visage does not tally with their idea of what the author of a black text should look like. The forthcoming ones will ask what prompted me to undertake such a project to which i reply that being Jamaican, a predominantly black culture, i feel capable of recognizing wisdom that resonates with black folk. Both black and white have questioned whether souls have any color, which i think not, but i make the distinction that black folks' souls collectively share in a particular ethos, mythos and experience which would predispose them to respond favorably to selected information. My spiritual training, literary sensibility, transpersonal psychology study and multicultural exposure all combine to prepare me for this task. In any event, wisdom is universally applicable beyond the narrow confines of limiting identities.

There have been many anthologies of black quotations before this but they have been limited mostly to African American sources. One of my intentions was to broaden the scope so folks could know there's a whole lot more out there. Some of this content is familiar only to black literati and cognoscenti. We get a more complete, balanced picture reading the words also of Carthaginian theologians, Ethiopian philosophers, Martiniquan poets, Senegalese griots, Jamaican pioneers and African, Afro-Canadian and -European writers.

In the dedication, i acknowledge Anansi, Akan deity of wisdom and Caribbean spider-man, whose stories i absorbed as an infant even before i was able to read Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin and Mickey Mouse. Many are unaware that Anansi is the direct forebear of Brer Rabbit.

I've started work on the third anthology featuring quotations from LGBT sources, called Wisdom for the Soul of Queer Folk. Let's see if i can complete it in time for Pride 2008.