Catching the Light

“When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.”

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Book:Catching the Light

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“We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness.”

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Book:Catching the Light

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“My path is made of poetry and music, characterized by rowdiness and sunflowers, and given life by everyone I have met along the way in this process of becoming human. (When I say "everyone," I don't mean just us ornery two-legged beings.)”

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“Eventually, we all make it home, and we each make an individual path by any means.”

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“In my community, we are taught that leadership qualities include humility, compassion, a sense of fairness, the ability to listen, preparation and carry-through, a love for the people, and a strong spiritual center that begins with a connection to Earth.”

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Book:Catching the Light

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“It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That's how I came to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened.”

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“The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.”

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“When the world as as knew it ended, we stood up again in the ruin, and found a way to keep walking through tears.”

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“It is in times like these that we face the most cunning of tricksters. We might even find a trickster in the seat of power.”

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“That was struggle enough; however, there was another plane of consciousness on which I was fighting every night that I lay down to rest. As I slid into the borderlands between waking and sleeping, negative beings attempted to pull me into their darkness. I learned to escape them by using words to make a ladder to bring me back.”

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“When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it.”

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