My Word

I was standing in front of the mirror trying to memorize my own words. The words were in the form of a poem I had written years ago but had never committed to memory.
A friend recently asked why, and I had no good answer. She wondered why you wouldn't memorize your own poem. After all, these are your words. They flowed from your mind.
That made sense and so here I stood, repeating lines and lines of my poem like a mantra. I recited them in a rhythm to some invisible beat in my head.
And slowly, I felt some power rise within me, some feeling I had never felt when I read this poem from paper.
The power came from a feeling that I owned the words I was speaking. The words weren't on paper anymore.
They were in me. They had always been in me. They were in me the moment I first wrote the poem so many years ago. And they remained in me as I fiddled with the words in order to capture perfectly what I wanted to say.
Not only are you owning your words, you are owning your truth, your voice, your right to say what you want to say and let it hang there for the world to absorb.
Take it or leave it, you say. But I will be heard.
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington. (Forgive me but I'm about to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it). The movie takes place in an apocalyptic future where no one reads and books are rare. But Washington, a loner on some kind of weird righteous path, has a book, The Bible. An evil man played by Gary Oldman wants that book because he knows the power of the words contained in it.
At the end, Oldman gets the book, and when he opens it, there are no words. Washington is blind and he has memorized the entire Bible. The Word of God is in him, and no one can take that Word away from him.
Writers all their lives are chasing to find their voice. They dabble in the words of other writers, taking a little here and there, all the while trying to master who they are and what their truth is.
They're trying to find the words that will say who they are, the words that will synthesize their essence, encompass the experiences they had that made them who they are.
This is a long process that never really ends. But maybe it begins by owning the words you have written. Owning them and not apologizing for them. Owning them and yelling them out on the stage that is your life.
Only you can say what you say in the way that you say it. No one else can speak your words for you. And no one should try.

Stop This Train

Yesterday it was summer. Just the other day it was the beginning of another year and a few seconds from now I will have gray hair and I'll be staring down at the end of my life and figuring out whether I did anything worth remembering.
Time, as one of my friends told me, seems to fly by quickly, so fast that life is a blur and you're desperately trying to catch up.
You sleep too long in the mornings and you fear you're missing something, that the day is now too short to fill up with all the things you have to do or you want to do but don't have the gumption or the guts or the motivation to do.
This past August, I turned 39 and during that birthday week, I was at my mother's house, spending time with her and doing my own little quiet celebration (I've never been the balloon and birthday cake kind of guy).
One night, I noticed a high school picture of me. My face is thinner, hair shorter than it is now, with a slight mustache and no goatee. Large almost square-like glasses awkwardly frame my face. I wince.
I almost forgot I looked like that all those years ago (could it be nearly 20 years ago). I imagined at that moment what I would have said to my younger self. I wondered if I would have given him a preview of all the things he would face over the next few years.
You know, the lost frantic and fun years of college, the conversations you think were so deep only because you were slightly intoxicated, the drunk people who took you to a Waffle House early in the morning one night just for the heck of it, the friend you almost lost because you were too immature to notice your obnoxious behavior, the moment you felt your blackness acutely because for the first time you were one of a few blacks on a predominantly white campus?
Would I have told him about those first couple of years of true adulthood when you moved to a small town that had no bars or clubs and you were the first black reporter at the newspaper you worked at and you only realized that fact the Sunday you stepped into one of the oldest black churches in the area? Would I have warned him about the years where you wondered whether this journalism thing was the thing for him?
Would I have told him about the small dark moments when he felt God had abandoned him and he was all alone and no one understood his pain and he felt he had no friends who would understand him? Would I have warned him about that stupid financial purchase that wrecked him for years afterward? Would I have warned him about any of the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the missteps, the small triumphs, the beauty and the ugliness of the life he was going to live for the next 20 years?
I don't think so. Because all of that made me who I am. And here I am, 20 years later, a blink in the eye life has moved so fast. I'm just trying to keep everything in focus but nothing stands still. Because I don't stand still. I keep changing. The world around me keeps changing. Nothing ever stays the same.
Sometimes, I want to have that remote control that Adam Sandler's character had in the movie Click so I could pause or rewind, so the dumb words I said to that girl back there were never said or the decision I made never was made.
But maybe we waste the time we have wishing we could go back to that time before and change things and that if we changed things, our lives would be better. Maybe so. Maybe not. Truth is we'll never know because we can never go back. We can only move forward, hopefully having learned whatever lessons we were meant to learn.
I remember looking at that picture and thinking, dude, you have no idea what kind of roller coaster you're going to ride. But if I'd known, I would have never gotten on. Yes, I might have missed out on the pain. But I'd also have missed out on the joy. And that just won't do.

Saying Goodbye

I felt like I was at a wake but I wasn't mourning a loved one. I was mourning the closing of a store, one that I had watched slowly dying over a year or more as the book selections got thinner and the CDs and DVDS became nearly non-existent.
And this day was the last day, the sun shining through the large windows into a store where hardly anything was left. The middle of the store was like a desert, nothing but carpet for yards. Men moved empty bookshelves off the floor. I saw red brick where large wooden shelves full of books used to be.
A young girl bounced playfully off a blue wall in the now-gone music section. I didn't bother going by the coffee shop I spent lazy Sunday afternoons drinking a small white chocolate mocha and reading books I had grabbed off the shelf. The cafe had closed two months ago soon after Borders announced it was liquidating its 399 store.
And here I was mourning this place, this thing that had never spoken, this place I had never hugged, but a place where I sought solace after a long day at work, perusing new magazines, rummaging through the new books at the table near the front, and lounging in the too-comfortable seats scattered throughout the store.
Borders was a place of memories collected over years. I made friends here, some long gone and some still very much present. I had deep conversations with people in the coffee shop and read whole books I never bought. Here I looked longingly at a curly-haired law student I never got the gumption to ask out.
And I asked out another girl who unfortunately had a boyfriend but who nonetheless praised my approach of riffing off an Alicia Keys song (and no, I won't tell you which one because I'd like to use that approach again if you don't mind).
This is the place where I met a stranger and had a one-time connection I'll never forget and I still smile when I think of those wonderful moments we had together talking and laughing.
Borders was my refuge from the stresses of the world, the place I got lost in other people's words instead of the ones I wrote for a living. The place I discovered new voices and fell in love again with the ones I had forgotten in the blur of living.
So here I was in mourning as I scoured the last remnants of a once booming store, grabbing six books to buy for a $1 a piece. I breathed in the emptiness and locked into my head what used to be that wasn't there anymore.
And I walked out the door one last time and didn't look back because I have new memories to make.

Ain't Hard To Tell

The beat dropped, and my head started nodding. Immediately, because the beat was like that. And the rapper flowed like water with lyrics that teased my brain with verbal riddles I dissected later. This was love at first sight.
I was in high school, and though hip-hop poured from radio stations, I hadn't paid much attention until I heard A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory." Music CDs weren't around, so that group's second album was condensed into a small cassette that I wore out over the dozens of times I played it, as I tried memorizing every line Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit.
No swagger contest. Just two guys rapping about their lives over jazzy horns, funky basslines and boom-bap drums.
There's nothing like that first love, and there's nothing like that first heart break, leaving you bruised like someone beat the crap out of you. Feels like betrayal, like your first love slept with your best friend. But it doesn't matter. You go back because you're hooked to that feeling you had when you popped in the cassette.
You remember where you were when you heard Nas' "Illmatic." The haunting beat on "One Love," Nas' poetic letter to his friend locked up, Q-Tip's monotone the chorus. The bleak chorus of "Life's A Bitch" contrasted with the remnants of hope found in Nas' gratefulness for another year of life and the possibility that better days might exist for his future offspring. You remember you were in college with a group of your friends, the beat bursting out of the tape deck and rumbling through every inch of the car.
You recall every lyric of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's classic "They Reminisce Over You." Even now, nearly 20 years after you heard it, and your body instinctively moves to the beat. It feels good, feels just like love. It feels like you're home.
So everytime you turn on the hip-hop station, you search for that feeling and you end up wanting to curse because the music has changed, because the lyrics aren't there, because it's all about hot beats and hotter hooks. A Tribe Called Quest is long gone and the group isn't coming back.
You feel old. You're like your parents saying remember back in the old days when music was good, when hip-hop was like that instead of like this. Remember? You find yourselves giving people younger than you history lessons, telling them the first time you heard A Tribe Called Quest, and you get sad when they look in your face as if saying what are you talking about. This is ancient history to them but very much now to you. Because the moments are here, not 20 years ago, but here, still pumping through your veins, your heart bearing the bruises of being hurt all those times you turned on the radio and the hip-hop you listened to is nowhere to be found.
But Mos Def said hip-hop is us, didn't he? He said it lives in each one of us, didn't he? So why am I heart-broken? Why am I defining hip-hop by what I hear on the radio? When I hear Elzhi bringing a freshness to an old classic, I realize that hip-hop is both past, present and future intertwined. Hip-hop is ever expansive, evolving but also reaching back into the past to pull something new.
And I realize that this is me also. I'm hip-hop in the sense that I'm evolving just as much as hip-hop. I pull from my past, take what's useful and throw the rest away, and make something new. Making something better. Make a better me.
And just like that I'm in love again.

Keep moving

I can't keep still. I am a restless spirit sometimes. My eyes dart. I'm always looking. I'm always moving, unless I'm in front of the television watching mindless reality TV like the entertainingly awful "Basketball Wives."
I'm always waiting to see when the next shoe is going to drop. Such is life.
Sometimes things are going so well you're afraid when the bad stuff inevitably comes. I grew up with the idea that storms are always brewing, that days of sunlight are always interrupted by thunder and lightning. You always have to prepare to get wet.
So it was that this nice sustained period of goodness was going to be interrupted by a bit of crappiness. But the problem I had was that I couldn't enjoy the good times because I was girding myself for the bad.
That's not the way you live life. You live in the moment, dive into it and splash that happiness on your face for as long as it lasts. Because you need to have that happy memory to sustain you in the sad times. You'll have to have something to flashback to so you remember that even in the dark recesses of your deepest sadness, there's a glimmer of hope that better days will come.
Let go of the idea that things will always be the way they always are. Life is a twister and you have to twist with it, riding through the rough spots until you get to the peace that you know is somewhere in the midst of the chaos.
Just a few weeks ago, I found out a bit of bad news about the company I work for (while I was on vacation). But there's nothing I can do. I still have a job. I still have a roof over my head. I still have friends who for some reason like my weird ass.
And I believe that things are going to work out. In the meantime, I enjoy the hell out of life. Laugh as hard as I can. Smile until my face crinkles. Be as sarcastic in my monotone voice as I can. Write. Love. Be.
Keep moving because in this life, you can't stop.

Getting to Happy

Sometimes you don't want to smile. Sometimes you just aren't feeling it, the muscles in your face stretched thin by the stress you faced during the week.
Smiling can be hard when inside you want to rage, inside you want to punch someone, inside you want to cry or yell or throw a lamp upside someone's head.
There are days when smiling is harder than it seems, when the force it takes to make the tips of your lips go up instead of down doesn't seem worth it.
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was walking in Borders (my favorite place in the world) when an older woman told me I should smile. Apparently, I wasn't grinning enough. I wanted to tell her to screw off.
Don't get self-righteous. I'm sure there's a long list of people you wanted to tell to screw off as well and were tempted to replace the word "screw" with a much more succinct and vulgar verb.
And truth is there are days when you will feel sad and you will get mad at the world. And on those days, you will want to either smack yourself for some dumb thing you did or smack someone else for their stupidity.
This is life and this is the way life is. Smiling when you don't feel the joy that brings the smile isn't worth it. You might as well just frown.
Being able to smile in the face of life's storms is about having something more than happiness, something more than a temporary feelilng.
Being able to smile is about having a foundation upon which you face difficulties. It's about having an outlook that says this isn't going to last. This feeling, this circumstance, is not permanent.
Smiling is only the outer manisfestation of the inner work you have to do, as Terry McMillan puts it, to get to happy. You have to see life as half full and not half empty. You have to see that the darkness surrounding you won't last because there is light; you just have to chip at the crap in your life that's keeping you from getting to that light.
You either live or you die. And dying doesn't have to mean literally. It could mean spiritually. Death could simply mean allowing your soul to perish because you decided that this life isn't worth it.
Again, you either live or you die, and it's a choice you make every day. You live when you push open the walls of your heart and love. You live when you control your reaction to whatever crap life puts in your path.
You live when you feel the pain enough to learn from it and let it go, knowing that whatever the next chapter in your life only begins when you turn the page.
Smiling is a life-long journey of finding your joy, that effervescent thing that makes you you, and smiling comes from walking in the confidence that this is the right path, this is the right moment, this is the right you.

Walking

On Valentine's Day, I was sick. That achey-breaky feeling was all through my body and I could barely get out of bed. Hell, I had to keep telling my body to crawl itself out of bed so I could grab my phone and call my boss to tell her I wouldn't be coming in. My body said, umm that could wait. Let's just lay here for a bit.
Eventually, I did move...to the couch where I stayed for most of the day, fighting off body chills and sinus headache with Tylenol and chicken noodle soup. But I didn't feel like doing much of anything. This day, my body wanted to chill.
Being sick often forces us to slow down. We run through our days and we become blurs to ourselves, never slowing down to appreciate those seconds and minutes we have before us.
We don't walk. We race. Walking is that underappreciated aspect of movement. When you walk, you have to think a little about the steps you have before you, the breeze blowing through your clothes, the space between where you are and where you hope to be.
Walking, taking the journey from no where to somewhere, and sometimes, the weight of life makes the walking harder. But at other times, the joy makes the walking easier. And sometimes, it doesn't matter because the walking is the point.
Putting one foot in front of the other is more than half the battle. It's when we stop walking, when we stop moving, that we stop living, that we give up on life.
Walk, breathe, move. What else are you going to do?

Someday We'll All Be Free

Either before or after has there been a voice quite like Donny Hathaway, a voice so smooth and soulful, a voice that gets you right there, that unspecified, unspeakable, indescribable place that only you know is there because you can feel it.

It's that need for the kind of freedom that Hathaway sings about in this song. It's a longing for something that's not quite arrived yet. He tells me and you to hang on as the world spins and make sure that the spin doesn't spin you right out of existence, knock you on your ass. Because life is like that, the world is like that.

I feel better when I hear this song. Hathaway's voice is so soothing you want to float away with it to whatever world he is occupying because it has to be better than this. He sings like heaven has got to be.

The song reminds me of a poem by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie in which she speaks about wanting to "walk barefoot where barefoot has no name/a place where soul on earth is natural." And she finds that the place she has envisioned is already there inside of her.

I think that's where freedom lies. It's not always external. It's not always actual handcuffs and chains that bind us. It's us.

The time in which Hathaway sang this song was one of immense social upheaval. Blacks were fighting for their rights. Protests over the Vietnam War were heating up.

But the song is relevant today because it is centered around how we react to the chaos in our lives. That chaos could be political and social issues we are passionate about. And the chaos could be your own personal life, the stresses we encounter daily that drive us nearly insane.

"Hang on to the world as it spins around/ Just don't let the spin get you down/Things are moving fast/ Hang on tight and you will last." Because the hope is, our faith tells us, that someday we'll all be free. And maybe it's in telling our souls that that we are free already.

Because the truth is you can't be free if you don't think that it's possible. You can't be free if once the chains are cut off, you still act as if you're still a slave. You can't be free if you don't believe you're free, you don't feel you're free, you don't see you're free.

Freedom is not just a physical thing. It's a mental thing. It's a soul thing. As Ekere Tallie tells us, "stroll barefoot" into your lives "leaving behind thieves and tyrants trying to control it."

Coded Language

Words matter. In church, I learned over and over again that life and death are in the power of the tongue.

And too seldom we don't pay attention to the words we use or the ones that we hear.

Saul Williams reminds us of the power of words in the best sense. Let us take his message into the new year.