The Creative Process Can Happen…

The creative process

Can happen

On 4 x 6 index cards

The creative process

Can happen

After smoked splifs and beers

The creative process

Can happen

In e-mails regarding

Something else

The creative process

Can happen

During praying with

Burning candles

The creative process

Can happen

In a boredom - residual fear

Cutting off the oxygen

The creative process

Can happen

Hearing the snow running

Off the roof

The creative process

Can happen

Toasting bread out of hunger

The creative process

Can happen

In the hour wait

For next train in the tunnel

The creative process

Can happen

In battle to lose

The depression

The creative process

Can happen

Falling back in love

With walking alone

In a park at night

The creative process

Can happen

When something must

Be posted every Sunday

By Lurithen R. Fraser 2/2010

The Balloons, the Church and the Song

A flaring one color rainbow of soft indigo hovered as sky on the fourteenth of last Sunday. The scrapped up hills of snow stained with tar, concrete and motor oil were diminishing underneath themselves, capillaries rippling, towards houses, down into gutters and into the roots of trees enclosed in sidewalks. The two twenty-eight bus would arrive in five and the walk is always a pushing slope toward the stop.

The MetroCard® was deposited and a two-seat space by a window occupied. The destination was the last stop 242^nd Street Van Cortland train station. It is a twenty minute trip however every stop the bell rings or someone is getting on. We entered into Riverdale Avenue which runs parallel to South Broadway. We will not stay long on this strip of road however it is an important stop.

It's Getty Square where someone opened a commercial sandwich shop next door to the Y. The Y the one you cannot find on the YMCA's official website. The one that my best friend and I joke about every time we pass by from Shop Rite®. The Y that posted a job opening, in The Book at Employment One Stop, that required of you to have martial arts training, a security guard license and dance instructor experience all for seven dollars and fifteen cent a hour.

In the square at two thirty on a Sunday nothing was happening except one person turning the corner down from South Broadway with big red and silver helium filled balloons. Yes it was that day for teenagers and young mothers to have construction paper cut outs with crayon written notes that will be taped or magnetized on refrigerators until Easter.

The person with the big red and silver balloons holding them with a grip blocking her profile would be a footnote for the rest of the day explaining the volume of held hands on Seventh Avenue, impromptu kisses at stop signs, long lines for late lunches at diners because 'that is the place –that holds the story of a late night after the club and tripping out and dot dot they met lighting up each other cigarettes.'

On the bus there was no evidence of this day just men and women coming from and going to church services, getting to work to relief someone of a shift or going to that particular store because the meat is not fresh at bodega around the corner. The week had past leading toward this day but the appointment was with poems and music on the sub level floor of a Methodist Church on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue.

There was an aisle divided by folding chairs east and west layers of six rows. Three coffee urns and canned fruit in eight ounce Styrofoam bowls sat on a table in the back off to the side. Was there a carpet? That cannot be recalled because the grand piano stood up in front black and worn but ready to play another day. It did in this room with stained glass windows of saints and angels that faced the next door neighbor's brick wall.

The first performer was a singer. She shared – in truth forewarn that her voice was not in its greatest shape. However because it was this place, this crowd of old friends, familiar faces and of course we were in a church – all is forgiven when good intentions are abound. Her song selection woke me up not from sleep but from what I had forgotten and why red and silver balloons were plain faces in a big picture, Hallmark® window displays were just blurs while walking and chatting and what February really marked.

The woman stomp her foot to find her rhythm while holding a piece of sheet music. She sang:
Lift every voice and sing, Til earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise /High as the listening skies, /Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. /Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, /Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on 'til victory is won…

She was off-key but that did not matter. She was not African-American but that did not and will never matter. She sang a song that was created from struggle, hope and redemption. She sang a song that will always matter because humanity is still struggling in the Congo, Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan and right here in America. Redemption is constantly fighting for its name Peace but this world on this Planet Earth thinks redemption synonymous with revenge and retribution.

There is a song within us that wakes us up to where we have been with all the tragedies we have left behind. There is a song within us that keeps us from going numb on that day that particular day of love.

A Three Minute and 46 second Documentary

I am pushing through at 12:36 am to post this Doc. It is a short piece. An experimental piece because this is my first time using Windows Live Movie Maker to edit film. So here it is with nothing much else to say. Last note: When watching the film please put the volume way up because I was having technical difficulties with sound along the way.

This is a poem/narrative of the documentary
Wednesday a snowstorm with girth and attitude
Tumbled at our front and back doors
The precipitation encapsulating
The walk to the bus stop oiled with obligation.
Job, school, doctor's appointments,
And returning home to start all over again
This is the next morning
Thursday
A photograph in motion from a part of this bus' journey
The bottom of a hill in a mountain that faces another state
The bus hums one song.
Two people in cell phone conversations
The frantic rummaging through overstuff bags
With overdue bills and candy wrappers
Headphones bleeding Hip Hop and Salsa
This is a ceaseless melody with chords pushed on thick neon yellow strips.
A piercing ring that snaps the droning engine in our ear
It is a slow stretching of sun to create the east.
But we know what direction we are going
There is trust in this bus
There reliance in this driver
Because this everyday
The High School students got off five stops ago
Leaving a space for someone to lean their head
Against the Plexiglas windows and nap
One knows the rhythm in the road underneath the wheels
Route 9A is the path they will seek if ever
Bewildered at a crossroad

Written by LR Fraser 2/2010

Reading outside of the pages to possess an idea or a concept for the doctrines within

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_anderson

This is an article from the February 8th 2010 issue of The New Yorker titled "Neighbors' Keeper". Written and Reported by Jon Lee Anderson.

This is about a woman in Haiti named Nadia who is helping and providing for her neighbors. I am not a religious person by any stretch of anyone's imagination. I am spiritual and have high regard and respect for the various religious and spiritual doctrines which nurture humanity soul with love, courage, peace and humility. This article has nothing to do with religion or spirituality however I take from it a new understanding more so an idea when thinking of religious and spiritual concepts. The idea that I am referring to is Jesus.

After reading this article I thought - a thought which could be coming from my inner child -the keeper of my imagination taking focus and courage- that this woman Nadia a deportee from US and a criminal could be Jesus. Not the Jesus of the bible the man himself but the ideology of Jesus-the Jesus who broke bread and feed thousands; Jesus who tried to bring humanity back into the fold of human existence.

I have always believed that we are all creating our own bibles with parables, psalms and disciples. Our lives are writing old and new testaments. Our bibles are the graffiti tagged all over whenever you read a newspaper article, or listen to that song. Our bibles are not just in the pages journals but in screams, laughter, dance, death, birth and internal conflict, addictions, celebrations, wars, tears, work, career, tears, travel, illness, healing, misunderstanding, meditation or effort to just live.

I share with you this article hoping that it leads you to a new idea on spirituality of self or humankind.

Here are excerpts from the article:
Nadia said she had grown up in Miami with her family. She was thirty-six, "going on thirty-seven," she said, and had been back in Haiti for only the past two years. I asked her why she had returned. She gave a rueful smile and said she had "been bad" and had had "immigration difficulties." In the past week, she had become a principal means of support for her community. Every day, she'd come into the center of town and tried to return with food and other essentials.

Nadia spoke English and Spanish and Creole, but, she told me, she felt more American than Haitian. When I asked her what her favorite television programs were, she laughed and said, "Oh, 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and 'Punky Brewster'!" Her mother took her and her siblings to the U.S. when she was six, on a boat with other Haitian illegal immigrants, going first to Cuba and then to Florida. Her father was in prison in the United States, and joined them when Nadia was fourteen. Soon afterward, she caught him sniffing cocaine in the house, and he had tried to beat her. Her mother threw him out. When she was still in high school, he shot someone and escaped to Port-au-Prince. Not long afterward, she heard, he was shot dead after a drug deal in Delmas 33—about thirty blocks from where she lived now.

As a child in Miami, she had wanted to be a marine or a model. "My mother kept promising to take me to Barbizon, but she lied, she never did." Nadia smiled. Life had been difficult. Her older brother, she explained, had fallen ill after a vodou curse was put on him. Her mother had returned to Port-au-Prince to nurse him, but he had died. Nadia's mother had brought the illness back with her, and died soon afterward. That was in Nadia's senior year of high school. She graduated, but after her mother's death she and her sister had had to move out of their rented house.

For a time, she said, she studied "H.R.S." at Tallahassee Community College. When I asked what that meant, she said, "Human resources services," uncertainly, as if she couldn't quite remember what the initials stood for. She had also studied cosmetology, and got a certificate for call-center work. She had three children, two by one man and one by another.

In 1992, she was arrested and spent five and a half years in prison. The charges were for forging a Treasury check and for armed robbery. She told me at first that she had been arrested in a car that had a gun in it which didn't belong to her. Then she looked at me and said, "I fell in with the wrong people." After prison, she was deported. In 1999, she returned to the U.S., hoping to see her daughter, who she said was being abused in foster care. She was picked up by police for entering the country illegally, and spent seven years and one month in the federal correctional institution at Tallahassee. In June, 2007, together with other detainees, she was sent by special plane back to Port-au-Prince. They were greeted by Haitian policemen, whose faces were hidden by masks, and placed in detention. "I was afraid, because I didn't know what to expect," she said with a shudder. "I don't know why they had to wear masks." After a couple of weeks, a cousin came to fetch her. Not long after, she rented the small house in Fidel and had been there ever since, earning a little income by cutting women's hair.

Nadia hadn't seen any of her children since her last arrest. Her youngest had been a baby when she went to prison. All three had ended up in different foster homes. Nadia's greatest wish was to return to the States with her nephew (the son of the brother who had died in Haiti), to be reunited with her children, and to have a job. "I can work at anything, I don't mind what," she said. "They say that if you pay your dues you're supposed to be given a second chance. Isn't that right?"

Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=5#ixzz0ers74AYm