LET'S DO IT AGAIN (Original Full-Length Album Version) - Staple Singers

FORmative yEARS.....

I am sitting here listening to Donny Hathaway singing "I Love you More Than You Will Ever Know' and I am so caught up in "The Rapture". No disrespect to Anita Baker, but more a Tribute to the music from my formative years. The songs that helped to create, shape and mold my formative ears. I am not a test-tube baby, but youtube, maybe, just maybe...lol I can come with the intent to listen to some old school, car wash kinda jams, trying to get my jook on and wind up lost on a two-way street to love. But that's alright with me, cause I know bout them lonely highways. I learned everything I know about love during my formative years, which would be early to late 70's. Then to find that the songs from when I was trying to be "fast", was the mid to late 80's. Now, I know why "I do the things I do"....lol...

I couldn't tell the difference from hymns and ballads because they all had soul and were the gospel truth. I just could sense the music: could see it, could hear it, was touched by it, developed a taste for it and I could smell the smoke, cause this music was and is fire.

My father was a preacher and "If loving God is Wrong, I don't wanna Be Right" was his most electrifying and captivating sermon; Luther Ingram (1972)and I was 6 years old.

GIVE US FREE....

My friend DAVID HODGES said "You either have freedom our you do not. Maybe we are too weak to bear freedom" and you know it is really fucked up, when you think about it, The People, Black People, they aint got no real freedom. They aint free to do shit. I mean, Michael Vick, a Human being and a grown ass man, had NO AUTHORITY, by rights of ownership, as to the raising and treatment of his and notice I said, HIS animals, His property, while on HIS property and the disposal of said property. {Okay, this is where I place a disclaimer: I do not believe in the mistreatment of anything, but i know shit happens.}

Can you count the many Black Men, Women and Children, who were bought, sold, slaughtered and dumped in either the ocean or mass graves? Upwards of the ....how many grains of sand are there....yeah, bout that many.

Do you know how long "Negroes" had to fight for the rights afforded his Dogs. He had to pay for "animal cruelty" and was locked up. While these motherfucking crackers, yeah I said it, aint had to pay for a motherfucking thing and they committed and commit CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. Took what was not only owed to you, but even took what you was innate within you, in so many cases, by taking your life.

But, for real, animals have more privileges than human beings. And to say that some animals can't be raised to fight and it seems that with the conditions of this civilizations, people are being Born To Kill, this is really fucking crazy. I bet there is someBODY, sitting somewHERE, laughing there fucking head off at this stupidity.

Okay now we know, marijuana is illegal, right...right. Okay, alcohol (with an emphasis on "malt liquors") and tobacco and guns are all legal. THEY CAN and WILL KILL YOU and EVERYBODY AROUND YOU. Drunk Drivers, Second Hand Smoke and Ignorant Trigger Happy Motherfuckers with Pistols, all of these are adverse side affects used to help aid in population control. This way, they are sure that X-amount of folks will die.

So, what they are saying is that you free to kill yourself, but you don't have the liberty to get "HIGH" so that you can overcome those things that may have you a little down. You don't have the right to take advantage of the MEDICINAL uses of this herb, until after ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO has fucked you up so bad that you NEED Marijuana to ease the pain. What fucking sense does that make? Really, when you could have smoked a joint in the very beginning. Let's just call it an OUNCE of PREVENTION.

You are no more free to choose as are the cows, chickens and pigs that are being fed hormones and steroids and all kinds of dump crap. Well, I take a little bit of that back, you do have the right Not To Do Anything, now you do have that right, and the above mentioned animals do not. Besides you can always take a gun and just kill yourself. But, truth be told and it need be, by being consumers, nah, you dont. There is alcohol in lotions, toothpaste, foods treated with all kinds of chemicals, well let me just say this: Say your grace and ask for the benefit and nourishment of things consumed.

That is why the elders taught you to say grace, it probably had little to really do with religion but more to do with protection. We have gotten away from that and it seems that I have gotten away from the topic....Let me put this marijuana down....LMAO

I just realized, they gave you THE RIGHTS, you have the RIGHT TO REMAIN muthafuckin SILENT, now that is some funny shit to me....DO YOU UNDERSTAND THESE RIGHTS...and if you say RIGHTS when you drunk, it sounds like REICHS. <<--things that make you go hummmmmmm!!!!!!

Sounding Like Sinque in Amastad....GIVE US FREE........if you gotta ask somebody for it.....You ALL READY KNOW....Damn...I gotta put this fiyah out...LMAO



ONe LOVE EVEryBODY.....

why are we so mad?

Why are we so mad at the 'white man', hell we taught them everything they know, from burying the dead, which is what our history is to them, to raising the dead, which is what our blackness did for them....During the Black Plague, it was Africans who help to stabilize and repopulate a dying Europe. Every land they claim to have discovered, they discovered our presence. So what could they have done without us, not a thing, so why are we so mad at the 'white man'?....we aren't..We are really mad at ourselves..

We are mad because we believed. We believed that they were true to their word, despite what their actions showed us, we believed, because we had been true to ours. We never thought that they would be so angry at the thought of having to come to us for their salvation. In return they tell us to wait on a savior, someBody outside of ourselves, that they know for themselves aint coming. But if we believe, because they know that all things are possible, when we believe. that is the power of our being. Jesus aint have half the power he has today, till we believed, till we took on his cross. But they didn't count on them Mexicans coming back, all named Jesus, now that is still some funny shit to me. Does it bother anybody else, at least make you go hhhhmmmm wait a minute, so Jesus is Mexican and he sneaking cross the border to work in your yard?!?! This aint playing out like they thought it would, oh what 'bout 300 hunert years ago...they didn't think that one day the chicken would come home, they use to joke and laugh about why did the chicken cross the road, now they making laws to keep him from crossing the border...but how shyt just don't change.

And them Bible Brothers: Cain, you can just stop being a menace to society, or they can just stop talking about you like that. I know it was the fruit of ur labor that fattened ur brothers sheep...and that ur brother would not have been praised were it not for u...it was more about ur co-operation and should not have become a competition...hell it don't take nothing to watch over sheep, just ask the pastors, the overseers...He bought was talking shyt, not realizing just how fucked up bragging can get ya, but you were older and should have just walked it off, let him have his MOMment. Besides it was yall business, your story, but it is becoming our reality...You just gotta make it right so that maybe now our young brothers will stop killing each other on the streets and learn to be brothers...I know they CAiN cause they are ABLE...And we can once again be family.

One on One

Sometimes I just sit and talk to myself all day long. It is at times the deepest conversations that I have. You see sometimes, other folks only want to go so far up the road and you can usually loose them at the 'cross roads'. The point where you question the answers to things that you never before questioned.

According to Frantz Fanon, who states in his book "BLACK SKIN, WHITE FACE" that "Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."

So, it is alone that I deal with my core beliefs and that is fine with me, because since I was a child, I believed in me and it was only through failed indoctrination that I realize that I have not lived a life in sync but more or less in silence. Now I sit and I talk to myself and amazingly, the power of self that guides me out from the chaos of outside noise is phenomenal. Many can not digest the truth, because they are so busy regurgitating lies. So it makes it difficult to talk to them, so I talk with myself. And it is funny at times, because a part of me, represents a world in which I was born and that motherfucker gets stuck between the rock and the hard place a lot. She appears to still be chained to stupidity, for the po'baby has nursed at the bosom of oppression for too long and like a child, just needs to be weaned.

But there is no need to alienate any part of my being, because to be wholly, I must be whole. There are no voids here, and I can not avoid all of me, when I talk to myself. I thought that I found a way to fit in, but what I was trying to fit into, I could not believe in, therefore I found a way to leave. And when I separated me from the chaos, I found, that within my own life, I am something so sacred, that parts of me wanted to keep it a secret, but just couldn't keep it from my self.

We are taught to "lean not on our own understanding", and from that we have allowed others to dictate and rule our minds. But it is my own understanding that I not only lean on, but that I trust to guide me, to teach me that which I need to know. The things that are pertinent to my life, my love and my experiences. I refuse to focus or to accept that I must wade through shyt, before I am to bathe in the streams of natures goodness. I did that when I was born. You see this is where the term, cognitive dissonance explains to me, what is happening. This is where my ancestor, Frantz Fanon, appears, because the self, knows when I need direction and in comes Frantz to lead me to righteous understanding. In High School though I studied French, now it is Frantz that speaks to me. Pure and Simple.

Dealing with myself, don't get me wrong it aint easy, because there are so "many me" in this here head of mine. But there is divine order and respect, not confusion, for I was once taught that "God dwells not in confusion". Which just led me to another question, if God is everywhere, how is God not in confusion, isn't confusion in itself a state of being? Yeah, now you see what be going on...Up in Here, Up in Here!!!!

Being that I engage with my truest being and my ancestors and have embraced this perfect love I found, I find the treasures of my tomorrow from the lives that I have encountered yesterday, all in this place that we call now and all while talking to myself. Sometimes you have to do it One on One.....

SHE

Somewhere she, the wombman, was told that she had to go through a man to get to God and there in 'lies' her burden. "Her heart should be so close to God that a man has to seek God in order to find her", a truth spoken by Sister Maya Angelou. All of the scripture references to the "greater is he that is in me" is referencing she, because he was originally a feminine pronoun and now we have been conditioned to associate it, he, with masculinity, which creates and imbalance in our world. A battle to regain control over that which is innate within. It is really crazy that once we became separated in our own mind, then through the use of scripture, enmity was introduced. In her efforts to maintain balance, to be whole, she continues to hold on to her man, while he has gone onto live without her. The man in which she must hold dearest to, is not beside her, but within her and he is she.

Word Up...

I thank God for the courage to encourage
others as well as myself
At the end of the day, a kind word may be all that one has left
In the beginning was the word
and if the beginning is like the end then a word is still all that we need
all that other stuff, they are just consolations, they are just tokens that tend to represent our greed
If you don't have anything good to say, why say anything at all
those words you chose to speak, may be the difference in your rise or fall

Welcome to My World..

I have always believed in Love and it is Love that I will believe in. I live within a world, within a world, within a world; as do most, but I have come to understand that and I appreciate it. As much as I desire for there to be one world, I know that there are billions, so I make the most of the worlds that I encounter. You see on a dailey basis, we encounter different people, from different circumstances and often different natures and it is my nature to make them feel as comfortable as I can. I mean, I invite them into my world, because when I step into theirs, oh boy, the shyt that can go down. This one time I could not even find my way back, back to me. I became so lost, that I just had to cry. I cried an ocean of tears, so many that I washed up on my own 'sures'. I was sure that I was home and I promised that I would not leave again.

As much as I like to engage, and I do love company, I just don't like getting too far from home. But this will be easier because I have come to understand that home is where my heart is and my heart is within me, so I will never be lost, even when I do not have any idea where I am. I am alright, because I am alright.

I have always just wanted to tell folks that love can exist without pain and that you can fully appreciated good times, without there being any bad times. we always talk about the up and down, the good, the bad, love and hate....that there are opposing forces in the world...well I may be that force because I am opposed to that...most of my life I have had a blast, or I would have had a blast if I were not expecting something bad to happen...if I were not anticipating the opposing force, so it seems that I was forced to oppose myself...some form of psychobabbling bullshyt....You see if it is all good, if it is all love, then there is no room for anything else. It is all joy, because you count it all joy, right, that is what we are taught.

Then we were told to look out at nature and we will see that there is sunshine and rain, but these are not opposing one another, they are working in unison with each other...the sunshine has a function a very specific function as does rain, as does snow as does sleet....etc. they are seasons and they have there cycle. But the tree is still the tree, and the grass is still the grass, it just puts on the clothes that Mother nature leaves out for it. Much like we use to do. It all works together and is on a forward motion, nothing really impeding or getting in the way of anything else....growing...

So with that I will grow as will my world. Trying to remain in a certain phase may be what impedes us and does not allow for the growth or the evolution of our being. Trying to be contained when we are uncontainable. Placing limits when we are limitless, no limit soldiers...lol. I like that, living without limits, it is the free-est expression that there is and my world is just that and since this world is mine, I call it home...

I LOVE ME SOME HYMN

I love me some hymn,

The music that we make

The songs that we sing and the rhythm of our love

We have become the gospel

For through our smiles, we spread the 'good news' of true love

We would stand on top of the mountains

To profess our love to the heavens

But we don't have that to do

For when we walk through the valleys holding hands

That is a testament of our love too.....

Oh How I Love Me Some Hymn......