Aberjhani Quotes

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.

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.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.

September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001

Feet sandaled with dreams tread paths of vision leading to wisdom’s sharp peaks.

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.

In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.'s ‘I Have a Dream' speech is one citizen's soul-searing plea with his countrymen––Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America's ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social disease.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind most of our colors are amazingly the same.

An author accepting language's invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively--even if with much dread--in ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

Now come the whispers bearing bouquets of moonbeams and sunlight tremblings.

And now we step to the rhythm of miracles. --from The Light, That Never Dies

Then came the healing time, hearts started to shine, soul felt so fine, oh what a freeing time it was.

Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.

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.

The thorn is a bridge spanning the muddy depths of agony and sorrow so that one may on the other side dance to the drums of the rose of joy.

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.

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various 'individuals', or groups of 'individuals', experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their "pursuit of happiness" to outright obliterating it.

Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.

Life possesses an amazing array of profoundly sad faces.

Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.

His [Ben Okri's] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them: To what extent will we allow the indefinable dynamics of something called "destiny" to maintain grief and horror in the world? How hard are human beings willing to fight to achieve and sustain justice, equanimity, or joy? And should progress be called such when it devours what is best within the human spirit?

With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.

Many may very well continue to ask why more value is placed on technicalities of a law than on a man's flesh and blood life, especially when there is any amount of "doubt" at all regarding his guilt or innocence.

We can cry for years but sometimes gotta smile too.

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.