and the beating goes on

hillary is so hard to love. and hard to hug ...

the u.s. presidential race keeps revealing more about america and her people ... i think obama was on the right track when he suggested that hillary wants to bamboozle and hoodwink the average american.

she can tell the american people anything. and they buy it. she can say she was never for NAFTA despite factual, actual evidence to the contrary. she can claim she has 35 years of experience that she never had. she can create "commander-in-chief threshold(s)" that never before existed in the english language and the american political process. she can whine about who gets the first questions on nationally televised political debates. she can pull the gender card. she can compare obama to ken starr. and she can align herself with the republican oppononent, john mccain.

and this is what she knows: the average american will not go on the internet to check for themselves if the facts are correct on NAFTA. the average american will take her at her word that she has 35 years of experience. the average american is more inclined to believe a white woman whose face has been public fodder for at least ten years rather than a black man (whose face in a turban has been circulated by hillary clinton in this campaign).

she knows that the average american is a lazy thinking, fear guzzling bigot.

and obama challenges americans to be better than they are.

you do the fucking delegate math.

ohio is the most racist state in the electorate

if i had a talk show that's what we'd be talking about. i'd get all kinds of victim-of-racism-experts to come on and talk about how the primary in ohio only reveals that it is the most racist state in the union.

i was really diggin white people until ohio. ohio reminds me of all the old school racists you know. and dumb fucks. you know people who don't know shit about shit except maybe their local bar and how hard it is to keep their job and their house. people who don't know where iraq is and couldn't give a fuck about what's going on there. people who are scared of what they don't know, never seen, and can't comprehend. i think there's a few black people in ohio like that too.

let's just give ohio to canada.

your breath smells like love

in my quest for the love of my life a.k.a. the love of myself a.k.a. the love of God a.k.a. the love all around us ... i read a lot.

some links to books i found helpful are in the column to your right. i didn't put a weblink to the bible cuz i haven't found the right website. but yes, i have embarked on reading the bible. i am no christian fundamentalist ... lately i am considering myself a student of the universe. i want to understand the universe (a little) because that is where i think love is.

all this to say that in my studies and readings common threads are emerging. the most obvious is of course, LOVE. unconditional love. all the prophets talked about it AND it is also part of many ancient traditions in north america, kazakhstan, india, china, congo, iran etc. etc.

i do yoga but now i also read yoga. and the textual foundations of yoga are just as fascinating as the physical applications .... in the current book i am reading the idea of the breath was illuminated for me.

i'll tell you the dots that got connected for lil ole me:

1) when i was in therapy about a year or two ago i told my doctor about how angry i get from time to time with uh human beings in the world. ya know, on the subway pushy people piss me off and in the supermarket slow ass people get on my nerves, and ya know white people sometimes when they are just being themselves made me wanna choke em out .... yeah anger management issues - i'm not really that embarrassed by it. well the therapist told me to try a breathing technique ... count to ten and breathe and focus on the breath blah blah blah i tried it and it kinda worked but it took so much mental power ... but i didn't stick with it and i didn't really GET it. at the time. this was just the realm of psycho-therapy.

2) but i connected that suggestion with another reading i did in another book. don miguel ruiz talks in the mastery of knowledge and in the four agreements about loving yourself and being thankful that we even have breath to breathe. he goes on further to say breath is the very essence of life. when we are more actively conscious of our breath we are truly living. he encouraged readers to take time to just breathe and listen to their breath. this is the toltec tradition.

3) of course ... eat/pray/love incorporates the yoga principles and also talks about breath and sound in mantras ... and i heard this theme reiterated again. this is one anglo-american woman's account.

as i read desikachar's, 'the heart of yoga,' all of these - the toltec, the therapist, the individual testimony, the yogi - random worlds collided ....... into one breath. he writes, "the quality of our breath is extremely important because it expresses our inner feelings. If we are in pain it shows in our breathing ... the breath is the link between the inner and outer ... normally we are not conscious of our breathing ... " and many of us may be familiar with these yoga terms and concepts: breathe into your muscle, breathe out your toxins ... and to many it sounds like fantastical magical hooha mumbo jumbo bullshit.

it is very real and very possible to me. and this is where i invite you to experience the love, grace, peace, and happiness you can feel simply by breathing.

you do not have to believe me and i don't want you to. i know this is true because i have practiced becoming conscious of my breathing. i have learned how to breathe INTO muscles and you can learn too. the truth will stand so i challenge you to put my claims to the test; maybe just as an exercise to prove me wrong or maybe cuz you want me (and a million others) to be right.

in your own life you can begin to focus on your breathing. learn different breathing techniques and see how they feel. practice it with or without the meditative aspects? practice it more consciously in your own yoga. don't ask a bozo on the street - do some real research at the very least. i can clearly recommend desikachar's book (see link to the right).

but my most important point is actually this ... the dots connected for me because i was honest with myself ... i had to admit to me ... that the breathing doesn't work when my mind is truly not focused on it ... but that is the hard part. earlier i mentioned how much mental power it took to use my breathing to reduce my anger (the therapist's suggestion). i quit and gave up on it because it was TOO hard. the answer is simple but the way was HARD. i also think i quit because i wasn't sure the amount of effort would be worth the results. but now i believe ... now i know that if i keep pushing myself and practicing my breath will lead me to happiness.

i have caught rare glimpses of that life, that other me ...

when i was focused on my breath during yoga i have felt how life coursed from my lungs to my fingertips ... when i truly focused on my breathing i felt how i eliminated waste much differently (not to be gross but keepin it real!) ... i acknowledged in those rare moments that breathing is transformative ... i was aware of the breath of God only when i was focused on my breath in the moment ...

being in the moment is another common thread emerging in all of my readings ... yoga teaches us through our breath and body to be present in every moment ...

but right now i am in this moment and i will save all my ideas about "being in the moment" for another blog. and this moment is all about your stankin loving breath.

welcome to the party life

alone.

it's a single party. you the only one who got invited. you the only who came to dance.

you make a decision. and you are the only one to live with it.

you must breathe with it in your own body.

you must have faith ... that at the very least ... you simply did the right thing.

LOVe, me

what the world needs NOW!

you may wonder why i harp on this LOVE bizness so much ... sigh. well, i almost didn't write this blog. i almost let the lack of love i read in the newspaper, i see in my job, and i hear from our youth overwhelm me and take me down ... into a sinking black cloud of hopelessness.

where is the LOVE?!

so i read today ... that a vietnamese (not that it fucking matters) man in alabama tossed his four kids off of a bridge and sent them to their deaths ... the kids ages ranged from a few months old to 3 years ... they even showed a picture ... where is the love?

right beneath that little tidbit i read that the police arrested a woman (i am assuming she is white since they didn't mention ethnicity at all) because they discovered the dead bodies of four females in her house (?!!!) ranging in age from 5 years old to 18 ... where is the love?

i work with young people. this week ... one of my students is being put out of his aunt's house. his mama is in jail. his sister won't take him in. he has no job right now. he is about to be homeless. and he is in despair. no one wants to be homeless. he is 19 years old. where is the love?

my other student came in this week to tell me that she was raped. she is 20.

where is the love?

the great debaters ... no denzel

barack is no denzel washington. but uh he is just as cute. and he is a great public speaker. but he probly couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. then again ... these politicians are the BEST actors.

i watched the 'debate' on shit i forgot what day. not much of a debate ... more of a reality tv show in which a news anchorman asked some questions of the candidates. it's all a farce but it was kind of entertaining.

the farce part is that nothing in america really changes when the president changes. nothing. ever. since the beginning of america. that's cuz we live in a two-party prison. the two parties aint very different. and also the electoral college takes a lot of the democratic punch out of this so-called democracy. the senate and house of reps would need to change ... well, if we really wanted change.

i just can't stand hillary clinton. she backed the iraqi war cuz it was politically expedient. that's all i need to fucking know.

john edwards is looking like a radical ... and obama is looking all-american ...

what does it really mean?

things change very slooooooooooowly. but america is not what it used to be. and i think we can all sense that even if a woman or a black man does not become prez in '09 ... a change gon come.

and for a woman (me) who had no faith in america, humanity, white people, or the u.s. government this is encouraging news.

you should be (a little) encouraged too.

self-reflexive racism or vomit in my mouth

it comes back to haunt you.

treat a human like a dog. and the dog-who-used-to-be-human will bite you in the ass.

i am almost sick of talking about this shit. some people wanna argue racism don't exist. meanwhile i been living neck-deep in racist shit everyday of my life. i am certainly sick of living it. but since i got to live it; i got to tell it.

also, i'm an intelligent person .... and i'd like to be able to build a case (and i could if i set aside a few hours) for all you non-believers but as don miguel says, the truth stands. i will not make a case for racism. i have experienced and witnessed its truth. believe me or not.

and what i know to be true about it is this: when you are a victim of racism you come to hate the racist. i AM the dog who wants to bite some white people ass. i am JUST like a dog. the thought of hurting white people gets me PUMPED. i start salivating and sniffing in the air. i give out a little growl and then i lunge for the fucking jugular.

yo, white people, this is real talk. and given that racism has not gone anywhere we might try this new tactic in race relations: BEING HONEST. many a negro, descendant of a slave, and/or black person has FANTASIES about random violence against white people. some of us call these "slave-flashbacks" or "jim crow moments" or "colonial recollections." whatever the fuck you wanna call it ... there are emotional wounds from racism. past racism and current racism.

these emotional wounds actually just re-open and get more infected as we live our day to day lives. cuz AT LEAST ten times a day i am reminded of the world's racism. all i got to do is turn on the TV .... or go to work. or pick my daughter up at her busted public school for colored children. i get bitter bile in my mouth just writing this. i AM bitter.

but i don't want to stay that way.

see the irony of racism is that racists can't figure out why people hate them. white people think that only slave-owners perpetuate racism. but by denying racism you perpetuate it. cuz you just burying your head in the sand while the race war rages around your ass sticking in the air.

some racists don't understand that there are a lot of angry dogs out there. some of us are just angry about OLD shit but cuz the racists have never had to take accountability or serve at the hands of justice the emotional wound is as fresh as if slavery happened yesterday. because america just silently and stealthily meandered from slavery into this sloppy de facto apartheid colored people are PISSED THE FUCK OFF. see, we know. we KNOW!

even those black folks who act like they don't know. deep down they do know. and that's why they running to be white - they hate themselves. we know that america has treated colored people as if they were dogs. as if we were not human. we all know. so we hate.

and we burn. and we rage. and we take it out on ourselves. and we hate whitey. and most of all we come to hate ourselves. and this ....... is american history.

BUT BUT BUT ... you know i'm bout the love, you know i am working towards forgiving white people ... forgiving all racists ... i guess ... i know there is no ultimate reward in truly 'sticking it to the man' but i can't help but feel a little gloating satisfaction that we are still gonna do white people one better ... we gon show em we better ... and always have been ... because

we will forgive them. the ultimate expression of our true humanity.

i just need a little help from you, Jesus.