Your Creative Life

Daughter Drink This Water book excerpt

PHOTO BY JAIYA JOHN

Bless you today, Dear Soul,

All my prayers and dreams for you begin and end in Love. I would like to share with you this passage on creativity from my book, Daughter Drink This Water. I pray it sparks your fire and leaves you divinely delirious.

Also below is a new video trailer for my global mission and upcoming free February 28 poetry ceremony in Compton, California. I hope you enjoy the video. I was moved and humbled.

With Care,
Jaiya

Creative Life

“Soul is a profound ocean. What rises from it is mist for you to release. If you do not, this mist grows heavy, hardens, then falls back into your ocean. Your soul-ocean grows burdened this way. When you create, you are honoring your soul, and all the rivers running through you.

Creativity, the ultimate dilation we call Love, is a sacred birthing. And in birthing, you are born. Birthing changes you. It is a sacrificing of selfhood into the hungry mouth of the collective. You are at your most vulnerable and powerful as you birth. Being wide open is a state of potential. Things enter and leave you. Spiritual offspring are loosed upon the world. Creativity, which is Love, is a divine fertilizer, imbuing life with life. Choose to create. And be gentle. As you birth, you are being born.

Through creative expression you can shed a thousand skins and bare your soul to its own birthing. You can taste honey rain in the desert and make Love with all that is, on a mountaintop. You can drown your identities in a water drop and forge new fire with each kindling word. If you let your soul go swimming in black lakes of ink, in curling rapids and fonts, something beyond reason happens. Ecstasy.

In your lifetime you will find things
that make your heart leap.
Make that your art.

Creativity is your soul’s way of rejoicing. And rebelling. And saving itself. Creativity is fertility, the birthing of things. Life is a ceaseless dying. Without continuous birthing, you and your life reach a point of desolation. When was the last time you danced to the music of your own soul? It is time again. It is always time again.

They told her to be tame and timid.
So she danced until wild things joined her.

To say, I am not creative, is to miss seeing yourself. To be alive is to be creative. Your cells are all dancing, singing, creating. It is not a matter of whether you are creating, but how wonderfully. Wonder. Fully. To create is to breathe. Are you breathing apologetically? Or are you breathing as though you are entirely made of air? No boundaries or capacities. Just be with everything.

Everything is dancing, singing, praising. Can you feel this sweet music called life? Throw away your old clothes that muffle all glory, all expression. Be naked in this miracle. Have no shame. Touch your life like a potter’s hands make Love to wet clay on the wheel. Don’t just create. Give birth. Be birthed. Stain yourself in earth and water. Feel this turning. Weep your life away.

If a song doesn’t sing, it suffers. You are a song. If a dancer doesn’t dance. If a blossom doesn’t bloom. Resisting what you are is a root of much suffering. Being what you are is life.

You are a poem. A song. A dance. A ceremony. What I mean by this does not matter as much as what you mean by this. Stay in touch with your words, your rhythm, melody, harmony, and rituals. Gather your wild meanings and feast on them. Clean and prepare them well. Staying well is a life of gathering, and of releasing. If you aren’t feeling like a song, maybe your music has been muted. Clear away foreign, false noise and it will return. If you do not feel like a dance, how has your movement been stilted? Go to the origin of your paralysis and gently wake your soul.

You have poetry in your bones. Suck the marrow. If you write a single word and your heart lives in it, you have written a masterpiece. As you plant your olive and lemon groves, your almond and fig trees, also plant your poet-trees, trees bearing fruit whose juices stain the soul.

Your soul at peace is poetry. If you hear the right poem in the right moment, with the right light, the right heart, you can be reborn. You are poetry. Recite yourself. How you treat yourself and others is your most authentic poetry. Recite all the Love poems this life brings you. Use your softest voice. Worship this way.

Life has four elements or teachers, four directions. An artist has four heartbeats, four callings: Remember the world. Witness the world. Testify the world. Imagine (create) the world. Life is an artist with no fear. This is why it keeps birthing beauty.

Let dance be your testimony. It is your soul that dances. Your body just goes along for the ride. Feel the Creation song. Listening is a healing art. Movement is a form of prayer, a door opening, the draft created, an earnest invitation for change to enter your life. Spin, leap, twirl. Let your passion breathe. And let go. Release is an art that pays in peace.

With life, you are given paint and canvas, and the freedom to create works that hang in the gallery of your soul. With your tenderness, you are painting a single, immeasurable mural of Love. Drop all other concerns. Make Love and healing your art. Your legacy. Your life.

Soul growth is a fine art with no name. You know its presence by the divine music it sings. Curate your own soul. Grow a gallery that wonderfully displays and preserves your prized truth. Resuscitate your soul. Love projects are the best kind of art. You are a masterpiece.

Harmony in nature is a continuous state of celebration. Celebration is the breath of joy released by anything when in harmony. And what in your life should you celebrate? Everything. If you are not celebrating, you are suffocating. Celebrate, and you resuscitate.

Celebrate relentlessly. If a single hair on your head behaves, tell it, I am so proud of you. Then invite it to go wild, to go dancing. Celebrate a positive thought, a new habit. Celebrate your breath, your skin, your daily endurance. Celebrate the many Love rivers coursing through your life. The way sunlight treats your heart. The taste of food. That you can taste life at all.

Write letters to the spirit in you. Start one with, Dear Dance, please come alive in me today. Another with, Dear Curiosity, how about we discover something new? Write your letters freely, by the thousands, with words or simply the ink of your heart.

Keep your creative, Love spirit open and flowing. What a thing it is to birth and be born. Life is a sculpture. You are its sculptor. Make something beautiful. Don’t chase creativity. Grow calm, still, quiet, and open. Creativity will bloom. Don’t force. Feed. Art is a Lover. You know your part. Touch everything gently. Let your thoughts run out to the meadow and play. Wind paints water as thoughts paint your soul.”

Excerpt from Jaiya John’s book Daughter Drink This Water: A Book of Sacred Love. 2018. Available at jaiyajohn.com and worldwide where books are sold.

UPCOMING EVENTS

FEBRUARY 28 (FREE)
POWER TO THE PEOPLE:
POETRY CEREMONY
AT CITY BBQ, COMPTON

MARCH 7. (FREE)
STIRRING THE FREEDOM WATERS:
VIRTUAL POETRY CEREMONY

APRIL 5. THE GREAT REMEMBERING:
VIRTUAL POETRY CEREMONY

*ALL DETAILS AND REGISTRATION LINKS BELOW

VIDEO TRAILER:

FREE EVENT. REGISTER NOW

Power to the People, a free community gathering for resistance, revolution, and revival. Saturday, February 28, Compton, California.

Do you feel weary, overwhelmed, isolated, discouraged by the state of the world? Come join us as we feast together on down home-seasoned spoken word, spiced with the flavors of revolution, resistance, and collective caretaking to make our ancestors proud. Poet, healer, and freedom worker Dr. Jaiya John brings his global rehumanizing mission to City BBQ & Catering with a unique soul ceremony of sacred poetry reading, heart-to-heart Q&A conversation, and book signing. Jaiya will be “pouring medicine” for the Compton and LA community, reading from his new book, Wildflowers Praying at Midnight, along with some of his other 21 published books and maybe even some fresh, unpublished work.

As an ancestral Baba, doctor of psychology, and former Howard University professor and collegiate basketball player, Jaiya uses the transformative power of poetry and spoken word to open millions of souls around the world to their own divine brilliance and capacity for healing and growing. Jaiya has a gift for bringing your emotional soul waters to rise, helping you release what you are carrying and breathe again. This gathering is Loving nourishment for the community as we move through a painful season of reckoning, grief, and uncertainty in the face of oppressive harm, violence, and division.

Come grub on City Catering’s soul food and coffee, meet Jaiya, take photos together, get soul-fed, and feel the energy of being in Loving community. FREE EVENT. REGISTER NOW



MARCH 7. (FREE)
STIRRING THE FREEDOM WATERS:
VIRTUAL POETRY CEREMONY
(REGISTER)

Join us online, Sunday, April 5th, for The Great Remembering: a two-hour transmission of the heart and virtual poetry-reading ceremony led by internationally recognized medicine poet, elder, and freedom worker, Dr. Jaiya John.

Hosted by Alexandre Jodun, Alyona Kobevka, Carl Rabke & Erin Geesemen Rabke (From A Healing Bridge, & Embodiment Matters), this virtual gathering will be a co-creation of sacred space oriented towards deep-listening, embodied presence, and meaningful togetherness. We will bask in the fresh poetic medicine of Dr. Jaiya John and his deep presence, evoking the "The Great Remembering" and what truly matters in these critical times. Jaiya will offer readings of his published books, including from his latest book release, "Wildflowers praying at midnight;" and, depending on the soul-currents that are moving, Jaiya may also share some of his unpublished writings. We will also open space for Q&A (with Dr. Jaiya) and any heartfelt reflections.

We welcome poetry lovers, soul-activists, grief-tenders, broken-hearted ones, carers of this world, and essentially, anyone who is interested in reverently participating with tipping the scales towards a more beautiful, loving, and just world. Whether you've had the blessing of gathering with Baba Jaiya in the past, or if this is your first time, we can humbly say that you're in for a nutrient-dense treat. Please, come join us.

WHAT’S SHAKIN’
HERE AT SOUL WATER RISING:

- My most popular book Daughter Drink This Water is available on Audible, along with my short story Ashia: A Soft Story of Pilgrimage and Peace.

- 40% Wholesale discount on my books. Offer my books at your shop, boutique, studio, library, course, training, or book club. Exclusively at my website.

MY BOOKS are available at booksellers worldwide and at my site. Get to know my books at jaiyajohn.com. 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. Seed by seed we see our garden.