JOY LIVES. It is not a rare artifact to be extracted from the arid earth of our days. It is not to be encased behind dulled glass in the cabinet and only taken down and dusted off in the finer moments. Joy is the heat cascading out from the flame of our faith that we can be joyful. We must tend to the fire of our faith. We must believe that joy lives in us without pause, through loss and pain and all conditions.
Yes, even during the foul breath of personal attack and in the wet tide pools of sorrow, joy is the very nature of our being. The spirit of life is joy, an eternal heat of wonder and expansion. When we disbelieve that we can be joyful, in any moment, we kill the flame that releases joy’s thermal light. Joy can only be released through our self-permission to be joyful, through our courage to be joyful in the face of living.
Joy must be watered and sung to. It is a flower spirit, a purring persona that responds to our stroke. It is faithful, though it needs us to give it birth, grant it space. Open all the windows we keep closed in our minds. Joy needs us to douse it in the poetry of laughter, to braise it in smiles freed without public reason.
This world teaches many lessons. Vastly we have chosen the lesson that laments—the listing of all causes for shuttering joy inside the heart’s pantry, sealing it from the light of choosing that would let its warmth come forth in ribbons. We have learned to witness life and yet not truly see its stream of reasons to be the joy that we are.
We spend lifetimes enacting funeral processions in the mind, in each mundane moment proclaiming: Joy is dead! We practice sad soliloquies for joy, enacting its burial repeatedly, throwing cold dirt of misperception over a corpse that is not there. Joy can never expire inside a living soul, though it can well be brought to sleep by our neglect.
Behold the bird that rarely flies, and only when all conditions are suitable. That bird is us. Our flight is joy and for this we have been given immutable wings. What can be mutated is our understanding that we possess wings for flight. What is divine within us waits to be celebrated even at the crack of wounding. For even clouds say something about the sun: its presence, absence, or many moods. Only by sunlight can we discern clouds as they traipse their forms and shadings across sky stage. Only by joy do we know the texture of our sorrow and thus find our way back home to peace.
Joy is that sun ready for us to let it illuminate our melancholy, to burn it away, or let it fall as healing rain. Joy is not a condition of our outer life. We need not scheme or search for it. The awesome breath of our conception made us joy, then we were born and quickly wrapped in many blankets of notion. We learned to gather those blankets for ourselves. Now we are swaddled too deeply in ideas of conditional joy. We have smothered the faith-fire of perpetual joy. It can be resuscitated.
All that is left before us in this recovery is to burn these many blankets, to relearn nakedness of being and all the roads of awareness leading back to the clearing where the burial stops and joy lives.
Joy Lives.
Jaiya John. Fragrance After Rain.
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JAIYA JOHN'S
THE GATHERING.
A WORLD TOUR.
a poetry reading ceremony and
book collection sales and signing
Upcoming tour dates:
APRIL 6. Oakland, California (tickets)
APRIL 11. Virtual worldwide poetry reading (tickets)
APRIL 26 and 27. Navajo Nation (tickets)
I am excited to join you 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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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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