Love is Life: new book excerpt

And We Birth Freedom at Dawn book launch events

LOVE IS LIFE
Excerpt from We Birth Freedom at Dawn

Some believe that Love and hatred are equals.

Hatred is never be satisfied. Love is born satisfied. Hatred when responded to with hatred only grows more hateful. When responded to with Love, hatred has only two options: It can grow more hateful or it can transform into Love. As long as hatred remains hatred, it cannot be fulfilled. It is a raging calamity, lost in its own self-punitive vortex. It is a voracious ghost, starving but never being filled. For what it seeks—destruction—by nature is not filling but depleting of soul. The true hatred cultivators are vacuous of peace, for hatred has a singular nature: suffering.

Love, by nature, is born satisfied. When responded to with other Love, it can only bloom deeper into its field of contentment. When responded to with hatred, Love can only be sparked into a more compassionate Love. Only by allowing hatred to flare in response to hatred can a heart not be satisfied. But then that heart is not Love being unfulfilled. It has first yielded to hatred, and now is unfulfilled. As long as the heart is saturated in Love, that heart is fulfillment, is satisfaction.

Love is our essential DNA. Hatred is a virus. It can sicken Love’s vessel, overtake it. But hatred cannot live without Love. Once the host, Love, dies, hatred too expires. For hatred must breed on something, in something. Hatred is dependent. It sucks from the teat of woundedness to feed its gruesome appetite. It’s gnashing is futile, for it devours Love, a nutrient that cannot nourish hatred. So hatred is a maddened leech fastened to Love’s tender belly. It will go where Love goes—always leeching, always lurking.

Love though can live without hatred, for Love is Life. It is Life’s surging breath, that effusive element, that luminous pulsing. Shining so, it attracts all things, including hatred. Strong Love wilts that hate-weed, incinerating its foul design. Hatred is a bully on the yard. Love is the yard. Bullies are eventually exposed as farce. What is earth and true remains.

Hatred closes the heart like a suffering fist. Love opens the heart, a flower blossom undeniable. Love gives birth to life. Hatred gives birth to destruction. One is light, one steals light. Hatred fools itself into believing that domination will bring it peace. What it gets instead is a burning spear, soaked in hatred that wants to return home . . . to hatred. In this way, hatred is a self-mutilator, a hacker of its own limbs. It spills its entrails on the rusted gate of its own enclosure. It is a closer. Of all that is open.

Love is Life. Hatred is a noxious cloud passing through the sky of Love. Love remains the sky before the cloud comes, while the cloud is present, and after the cloud passes. Love’s sky is larger than hatred’s cloud. It contains hatred’s cloud, which can disappear, dissolve into Love. Love cannot be dissolved into hatred. It can only be eclipsed by hatred. Love is essential nature. Hatred is not of that essential DNA. It is an interloper, insidious, persistent, relentless. But it is not the nature of Life. It is the blemish on that nature. Some believe that Love and hatred are equals. Another truth speaks out: Love is Life. Hatred is a shadow made noticeable only by the light and life of Love. This eternal sun is our baseline, our default, our original setting at conception. This is how we began: in Love.

Jaiya John
We Birth Freedom at Dawn
*Last chance to preorder below.

BOOK LAUNCH ACTIVITIES

SEPT 24
VIRTUAL GLOBAL BOOK LAUNCH
11AM PACIFIC (REGISTER)

SEPT 26
WASHINGTON, D.C., HOWARD UNIVERSITY
INT. BLACK WRITERS FESTIVAL
11AM PANEL, 5PM READING (DETAILS)

SEPT 26
WASHINGTON, D.C., SANKOFA BOOKS
GLOBAL BOOK LAUNCH WITH
DR. THEMA BRYANT (REGISTER)

OCT 5
VIRTUAL GLOBAL BOOK LAUNCH
9:30AM PACIFIC (REGISTER)

I am excited to announce that my new, two-volume book, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, is scheduled for a September 26, 2024 release. Thank you so much for supporting this book launch by preordering your copies now below.

WE BIRTH FREEDOM AT DAWN
VOLUMES ONE AND TWO
PREORDER SPECIAL

Preorder Volumes One and Two.
International shipping available.
(BUY HERE)

Purchase the complete collection
of my 19 published books. 40% off.
International shipping available.
(BUY HERE)

BOOK SUMMARY

If you have read my prior work, you know that all of this is just a Love letter from the Great Mystery to our earthly yearning souls. As such, with these two new volumes of poems, stories, essays, prayers, and devotions, I desire that you feel the intimacy and urgency of where you and I now find ourselves. Since late 2023, as horrific massacre, new and old, slow and swift, in many forms and lands, has at last captured our collective human attention, our pain and grief and resurgent Love have gushed through my heart and being night and day. Like many of you, my every cell and molecule has been both decimated and revived. I have given myself to this, our profound upheaval. I have crumbled our heartbreak into the sea of this unbearable season, this ongoing sermon of sorrow and solace. In these soul waters, I have soaked up our manna and nectar to bring home to you.

These two volumes are the entire balm I have been able to gather for you. We Birth Freedom at Dawn is a book and birth water. The title came to me as I ran up a steep hill on a recent summer morning, sun blessing my skin, sweat baptizing my ascendant birthing time to push and deliver. Our ancestors have been with me in a hushed and cradling way during these months of mourning and morning. As this title came to me, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman in particular settled in my bones and blood and breath. These two sturdy grandmothers have wet eyes as they hold us now. It is their insistence that we be free of our oppressive ways that has ushered forth these tribal words.

Sojourner and Harriet… Have you ever seen two monarch butterfly mates dancing in sunlight? They may to our eyes seem incredibly light of wing. Their flight, though, is a consequence of unimaginable struggle and endurance. And yet, here they are, still dancing, still joyful, filled with the orange of sun, bringing forth their generations.

This title, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, is what its offering is: A radical call. An invocation. A summons. To stir and galvanize and mobilize us. The word We is for our collective humanity. Birth speaks to our unconquerable Divine Feminine and its reclaimed role as we go forward, for the conception, gestation, and birth labor. For we already have this freedom. We do not have to chase it down. We have only to bring forth what is already in us and of us. The word Freedom: An acknowledgement of my life’s work and ministry, including my earlier and kindred book Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. And Dawn, a hopeful word, for our freedom soon come. It is not long now, dear soul. Not long. Our dark night of the soul too has its end.

This title is a declaration and decree. A promise and prophecy. An awakening and activation. A chant, hum, ceremony, remembrance song. To speak and feel this title is to call forth this freedom alive within each of us. Our freedom is stirring, nascent, divine, and truth. Soon, the fawning sprout begets the forest, and the raindrop begets the river. I pray these words bring back from the brink the many who are on the edge of despair, fear, hopelessness, terror, and fatigue. To allow us to see and feel and be what is coming and indeed what has always been here in the fertile earth of our sacred architecture. My God, these words are prayer.

2024. 5 x 8. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. Volume One, 258 pages. Volume Two, 260 pages. Inspirational / Social Issues / Personal and spiritual growth and healing.

Preorder Volumes One and Two.
International shipping available.
(BUY HERE)

Purchase the complete collection
of my 19 published books. 40% off.
International shipping available.
(BUY HERE)

Dr. JAIYA JOHN'S
THE GATHERING.
A WORLD TOUR.

a book/poetry reading ceremony and
book collection sale and signing
along with keynotes and talks

I am excited to join you in person this year in your community for keynotes, talks, and gatherings as I read from my collection of 21 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 40% OFF ($195 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 life/writing phone sessions, keynote speaking, talks, and book/poetry readings.

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