How is your heart, dear soul? Let us consider you for a moment. It is one thing to feel the world's suffering and grief for a moment or a season. It is another thing to choose to live your life wide open to suffering, so that you may cradle it with Love and soothe it with song. To let your heart be braised. To feel completely so that you are moved to make medicine and to be medicine. To set about healing the human soul. To gaze deep into the horror and remain Love. Most do not choose this path. Some are able to be revolutionaries for a moment, or a season. We ought not judge their endurance. What matters is the source from which you draw your action. For, a revolutionary without Love is a mercenary. Able to be bought in so many ways. For instance, by conformity's comfort. Our aching need to not be sanctioned, to not be shunned from the pack. How many moons have you been alive? Do not count them. Count the endurance of your ancestors, your pueblo, your earth-time peers that has allowed you to be and stay alive. We have been chosen to bear witness to humanity's heartbreak. To become vessels in which the water of infinite tears is turned into the wine of remembrance and resurrection. What will you do with this moment? Seven generations ahead wait for your answer. I may not be here tomorrow. I am here today. Today I ask, in the name of freedom, how is your heart?
Jaiya John
We Birth Freedom at Dawn
Preorder now at jaiyajohn.com
Last chance to register! Donation based. We look forward to seeing you at The Gathering.
UPCOMING EVENT DATES:
JULY 16. 10AM PDT. The Gathering World Tour virtual poetry / book reading ceremony. Donation based. (GET YOUR TICKETS NOW)
SEPT. 7-8. BARCELONA, SPAIN. The Gathering World Tour poetry / book reading ceremony. Tickets available shortly.
SEPT. 25-26. WASHINGTON, D.C., HOWARD UNIVERSITY. The Gathering World Tour poetry / book reading ceremony. International Black Writers Festival. Tickets available shortly.
JAIYA JOHN'S
THE GATHERING.
A WORLD TOUR.
a poetry reading ceremony and
book collection sale and signing
I am excited to join you in person this year in your community to read from my collection of 19 books and unpublished work, bringing to life the spirit of the medicine words. I say reading, though incantation and prayer are truer. Thematically, these readings are on collective freedom, and take on the flavor of each audience from gathering to gathering. A rich weaving of cultural fabric. These gatherings center Indigenous, marginalized, dehumanized people and communities, and are remembrance songs, bringing us back to our Indigenous ancestral ways of gathering and being together. As this tour is part of my global Soul Water Rising rehumanizing mission, we stir the soul to remember itself as we garden our collective liberation and the end of oppressive systems and ways of life.
I am also honored to include, at some of the gatherings, live Sacred Conversations with revolutionary souls who inspire me. During these gatherings, I also commune with the audience in questions and conversation. And we build into this healing experience what we are calling Aftercare. After the reading, we care for each other as I make myself available for sacred listening and embraces, tears and laughter, photos, and book collection purchasing and signing.
As a part of Soul Water Rising's Book Angel Project, whether or not you attend a particular gathering, you have the opportunity to purchase books that we then gift to vulnerable souls with whom we gather along the tour.
The Gathering is a people's freedom movement. The tour is happening in cafés, bookstores, libraries, prisons, hospitals, shelters, community centers, women's centers, college campuses, HBCU's, Indigenous reservations, art galleries, art studios, museums, parks, amphitheaters, auditoriums, theaters, festivals, and stadiums. Call out to us. We go where we are called.
You can play an organic role in this. If you desire for the tour to come your way, email me through our tour page at jaiyajohn.com. You or someone you know may be able to help identify aligned venues, communities, and audiences.
Tour dates and locations are announced on a rolling calendar as sites are secured. This tour is a culmination, crystallizing, and new season of my life's journey, work, and calling. I am awed and enchanted to read for you and embrace you in a healing way.
We will see each other soon, in Love, at The Gathering.
Big Love,
Jaiya
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CURRENT SALE: GET THE COMPLETE BOX SET OF MY 19 BOOK TITLES AT 37% OFF WITH FREE SHIPPING AND TAXES INCLUDED.
My books are available at booksellers worldwide and directly from the author at jaiyajohn.com (eBooks are exclusively at my site). Thank you for posting your copies, readings, and creative images and videos, and for sharing online reviews. It all breathes life into a book's life. I hope you will gift these books to your people.
Also at jaiyajohn.com, enjoy my books, eBooks, audiobooks, talks, sleep stories, and piano music. I also offer creative writing support phone sessions, keynote speaking, talks, and book/poetry readings.
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My heart is tender and strong, open and protected, grounded and in flight. My heart is a place of amazement, otherworldliness, possibility, love, grace, grief and sorrow. My heart keeps me here, in this place of light and dark, yin an yang, poison and medicine. My heart keeps me human and holds me to Spirit. Bless the hearts of the world, all of them, for they are the medicine, the way, the light.
My heart is on the corner of woefully grieving and hopefully beating. The pain of the world now is so intense. The hemorrhage of humanity in Gaza takes my breath away, while good people I love fight every single day for mere survival. Food, water, fire. And yet I can't drop the torch in defeat, as I know they either live to go on, or die and go home - both out of my hands and fully in God's control. So I stand at the corner, my heart alight, grieving woefully and beating hopefully.
Thank you for asking 🙏