life is still a dream...

tomorrow begins the last month of 2007. it’s all gone by like wind; blustery some times, breezy at others. with this end, there are various beginnings and some really painful endings.

i was in california for the thanksgiving holiday. it would have been an amazing and deliciously blog-worthy trip filled with family, Love and ridiculous amounts of beef bacon (my fav), homemade macaroni and cheese, stuffing, turkey and CJ’s hot-water cornbread. instead, it was a weird mix of joy and devastation due to the sudden death of “Cousin” Erika.

hers is the third journeying i learned of by people under 40 in the past two months, two of whom died of “natural” causes. (there just seems something unnatural about dying that young.) after 2+ days of complaining of chest and leg pains, i am told erica passed as she prepared to go to the hospital for evaluation. it makes me frustrated that information and access to such basic information – that these are historically signs of stroke or heart attack – eluded her and the people around her the morning after thanksgiving when she passed. the drama that ensued after her death has yet to sort itself out but we are praying it will soon. she deserves prayer and memory. the rest at this point…

the final night of my visit was spent at KPFA radio in berkeley where legally blynd members (jubu and ronnie) and “fam” paid tribute to the late jimi hendrix. it was off the chain! the slide show below captures a little of it but the energy in the room was amazing... all of the talent... MAN! from there, sweetie and i grabbed my bags and headed to the airport for my red-eye back to my life in austin.

my graphic design jobs are slow going and present clients are slow paying this time of year. so, these days, i am working temp jobby jobs as much as possible. someday soon i hope to recover from unexpected expenses related to my aging car... not to mention rent still has to be paid, we still gotta eat, gas prices are still rising and my children who still NEED. so amid the 10 hour days, the 3-4 hour family time and the 4-6 hour freelance nights, i am also trying to return to the space of positive energy and intention that led to movement in my career. i haven’t read a book in weeks and i feel starved for creative time and attention. (where is my MUSE?!?!?)

this month, i have to start planning for the SAAW 2008, and get to working on my show. (yes, y’all, i have a show coming up.) i will be working with iandiam.com to create a custom blog to document the progress of it. picture it… me under the skilled and strict direction of florinda bryant and the constructive guidance of amanda johnston… my words… dance… percussion and strings… ahhh… THAT’s a dream. stay tuned…

so much Love,
*muah*
shia

life is but a dream...

moments ago, i clicked away arduously at an entry that detailed my more than fabulous trip to cali (LA and Oakland, with sweetiebubu, my dad and brother, my nephew, Aya DeLeon, James Cagney, Amiri Baraka, the TV pitch, the screenplays and every other larger than life experience). but about a paragraph away from "send," iExplore had an error and sent all of that language into cyber-oblivion.

so i took a moment to realize that that was not what i was meant to post then i reorganized and added a bunch of "Skegee" folk to my myspace "top" friends. (those that i am in contact with anyway.) i learned within the bliss of the past 2 weeks, the end of my 37 day birth-day celebration, that two of my CLOSEST guy-friends from Tuskegee class of '93, left this life for the next. so rather than prattle on and on about the somethings and the nothings that have filled my life with such joy and pain, i dedicate this last in my birthday celebration series to the memories of Christopher Talib Price and Julius "Jules" Whaley... who filled my life with joy and pain. i am SO grateful for the memories that they left me with. Chri-is was COOL people. always made me laugh. and i was the only one he would let drive his bug because i could drive a stick. JULES, which i remember saying in the same way they said NORM when the character enteres "Cheers," was our emerging revolutionary. he was gentle and kind. both brothas were just BEAUTIFUL people. Jules and i had reconnected through the magic of myspace within the last six months (i think) but i was elated to have shared a few more smiles with him. i never ran into Chris beyond Skegee but i understand he was absolutely the man i imagined he'd become.

i hope they both know now what i hope they knew then. that i am grateful to have loved them as friends and as human beings. my prayer is that the people they left behind find as much celebration in the memory of their lives as they might feel in the pain of their passings.

if you are reading this, know that i love you for it and that i am grateful for your time and attention. there are no promises that we will ever meet or meet again. but we should experience joy in each interaction. and walk away with a little more love than we walked in the room with.

love and love and more love to Chris and Jules and their families...

to my Skegee folks

to my Oakland Tech folks

to my family... to my communities...

*MUAH*

always LOVE,
shia

"We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting." --Kahlil Gibran

(also posted at www.myspace.com/groovenbuttafly)

37 Days/ 37 Ways!!!
Birthday Celebration Week 2

so my 37-day birthday celebration has rounded out it's 2nd week and it's been wonderful. when you walk around saying that you are celebrating your birthday, people are so nice to you. and i think i am a bit nicer too. i bought myself some roses that were on sale one of the days and ended up at my fav coffee shop reading and writing for a short spell. a guy in a nearby chair looks up from beneath his "hollywood" baseball cap and asks if they were for him. i tell him that i bought them for myself in celebration of my life. he admired that but feigned disappointment that they weren't for him. (long story short) as i packed my car to leave, i sped back in to give him one rose, with it saying, "this is not a pass, it's a gift, have a good night." he was speechless and looked to want/maybe need to say more, engage me more. but i sped out as quickly as i did in. my gesture was not to ask anything from him. nor to conjure neither ill-fitting nor comfortable conversation with him. it was late. i was tired. i wanted to gift him something beautiful. then i went home and made small vases with single roses in each, leaving them in my children's room and my mother's room. hoping they woke up to something full and beautiful.

Eid Mubarak!
Ramadan ended (for some on Friday, others on Saturday... controversial non/sighting of the moon) and Eid in austin was a beautiful collective of multi-ethnic Muslims praying together. the Imam gave an EXCELLENT kupbah (sp?) on the need for Muslims to be examples for what Islam is really about, even for other Muslims. that though hitler was Christian, he did not become the symbol for what Christianity looked like and that it was unfair for the world to do that because of Muslims with extreme views. (Allahu Akbar!) starting today, i am making up the days where fasting was thwarted by agruments or my "moon cycle" or brown rice before sunset. so i intend to feed some families and fast until my heart and soul (and Allah) are satisfied (not in that order) that i have fulfilled my obligation. this Ramadan came filled with blessings which i will share when the lights are green. Allahu Akbar!

i am organizing for my trip to cali just more than a week from now. i can feel, in this moment, ow amazing it promises to be. weeks one and two were amazing. i can't eve imaging what the Universe has in store for this week and the weeks to come.

*muah*
shia
(also posted at www.myspace.com/groovenbuttafly)

October 1st... It's my birfday, it's my birfday!
and i'm celebratin' for 37 days... (see pictures below)

so on october 1st, i turned 37... yeah, i said it. cuz i'm proud of this journey and that i am so alive on it. so much more to learn and love. so each day, for the next month +, i will be doing something in honor of the life i have lived, the lessons i have learned, and the joy i hope to continue to find and create along the way. on the day that you read this, i invite you to celebrate yourself as well. (my gift to you.)

check out the slide show from my first week. the weekend before my birthday, my children made me breakfast and we baked a cake together. then, on monday, my actual DAY, my sweetie called, woke me at midnight with a serenade then later sent me to the nail salon for a moment of pampering where my val (and lil harris) met me with cookies and smiles. then thursday, manda treated me to drinks and dancing at the studio. (never mind that there was barely anyone else there. it was all about buttafly!) then we went to samiyah and kiana's to further uplift the evening. friday i volunteered for the ProArts BAM, saw inspired performances by zell miller and chandra washington, which was a gift in itself. and i rounded out the celebration week with the soulfest at the millenium center. i'm trying not to bore you with narrative cuz i got pix!!! say tuned for next week's post. (week 2)
*muah*
enjoy!

free will + astrology
your choice, your Universe...

so if any of you are like me, you are at least moderately interested in what the cosmos is doing/has to say about you. and you may or may not know that each week, a new horoscope is posted on www.freewillastrology.com where writer/author rob brezsny poetically educates, entertains and informs that "higher," cosmically connected you. i like this rendering because it is in a language that i understand/that speaks to my most creative/spiritual/intellectual sensibilities.

well, this morning when i checked out my horoscope (libra... october 1st... eh-hem... *cough*... birthday coming up... *cough, cough*... on monday... *cough*... *sneeze*... WHEW! please excuse me. darn molds and ragweed!) anyway, as i was saying... i usually disregard the homepage as the necessary cyber front door to enter into the space i really want to be in. (no offense mr. brezsny.) but today, after reading what's going on in Libra astrologically this week and affirming my planetary quest, i mistakenly clicked back to the hompage. (shrug) i figured it was a gift, so i read it. i was so inspired by the page, purposefully called Liberate Your Imagination, that i pasted it below. if you have a moment, READ IT! really. it is a gift.
abrazos y besos,
shia

Liberate Your Imagination
Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of our brothers and sisters believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Is war really peace? Is slavery really freedom? Is ignorance strength? How did it all get so insane?Even many of the smartest among us seem to have lost their vision. Cynicism has become a supreme sign of intelligence. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are popular.

At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain't easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers.We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.That's especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame.

I know you know what I mean.

Aren't you psychically assaulted by dangerous images every day? Don't the media relentlessly blast you with their trendy doom and gloom fixation, barraging you with messages about how bad life is? Doesn't the entertainment industry force-feed you insipidly paranoid scenarios in the same way a French foie gras farmer crams eight pounds of corn down the gullet of his prize goose every day? Aren't your eyes and ears constantly scalded by blistering harangues to buy stuff you don't really need? Isn't the sacred temple of your imagination pounded ruthlessly by smart bombs whipped up by evil advertising geniuses in their Madison Avenue laboratories? Hasn't your ability to envision the astounding intricacy and richness of the web of life gotten hijacked and hooked on decadent fantasies about new possessions that would allegedly make you happier?

Your imagination is supposed to be the engine of your destiny. It is the wizard's wand you can use to design your future. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Every human creation on this earth has begun as a vision in someone's imagination.Your imagination is also your very own all-purpose joy stick, your snakeskin bag of magic tricks. It's your remote-control channel-changer, and the only reliable rearranger of anything anywhere anytime. It's your X-Factor, your wild card, your wicked funny instigator, your Goddess-sanctioned trouble-maker -- your swarming, terraforming, always-morning brainstormer.

Love desperately needs your imagination. As psychologist James Hillman says, "For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."Your imagination is the single most important tool you have in your daily fight to be free. It is the source of every act of liberation you will ever need to pull off.

But how can your imagination flourish--how can it dream up scenarios that energize you to create your own version of heaven on earth--if you are forever deluged by dazzling psychic toxins that sting and sap and wound your lust for life?

Too many of our brothers and sisters have fallen victim. Their swarming terraforming always-morning brainstormers have been cruelly fooled into acting as if their deepest desires are impossible lies. As a result they live incoherent lives corroded by chronic anxiety.I for one am no longer willing to tolerate the epidemic obsession with big bad nasty things and flashy trite empty-hearted things. I say it's time for us to re-consecrate and regenerate and lubricate and liberate and take back our imaginations. Here are my demands.

DEMAND #1: I demand that Amnesty International launch a crusade against a form of terrorism I call the genocide of the imagination.

DEMAND #2: I demand that you periodically go on a media fast. For a week at a time, once a season, avoid all TV, movies, novels, yalk shows, newspapers, magazines, and Internet.

DEMAND #3: I demand that you learn to tell the difference between your own thoughts and those of the celebrities who have demonically possessed you.

DEMAND #4: I demand that People magazine do a feature story on "The World's Fifty Sexiest Perpetrators of Beauty, Truth, and Rowdy Bliss."

DEMAND #5: I demand that you wear underpants on your head and dance naked in slow motion whenever you watch movies on TV about tormented geniuses who create great art but treat everyone in their lives like crap.

DEMAND #6: I demand that you refuse to be entertained and entranced by bad news--by stories whose plots are driven by violence, abuse, terrorism, bigotry, lawsuits, greed, crashes, alcoholism, disease, and torture.

DEMAND #7: I demand that you seek out and create stories that make you feel that the universe is friendly and life is on your side. You could hunt down stories about how, for example, rising rates of intermarriage are helping to dissipate ethnic and religious strife worldwide; how the violent crime rate in America has been steadily declining for 30 years; how death rates from cancer are shrinking; the birth rate among teenage mothers is the lowest it's been in six decades; acreage devoted to organic farming is increasing rapidly; the number of refugees and weapons sales all over the world are way down from the level they were 15 years ago, and how the actual bare naked truth is that levels of literacy and education and political freedom and peace and wealth are steadily growing all over the world.

DEMAND #8: When you're too well-entertained to move, screaming is good exercise. Which is why I demand that you scream now and then whenever you're soaking up slick crap generated by the imaginations of people who are devoted to money, power, and ego instead of love, reverence, and play.