The New Human

I am not a part of the privileged class as I write this. I am a black man. I grew up with a loving family with modest means, but culturally I have not experienced a ready bounty of extravagant vacations and summer homes. How do you love those whose bounty thrives at the expense of the oppressed or less fortunate. How can one love so limitlessly when poverty dominates their narrative. Often access to the luxury of this discourse is almost exclusively procured by privilege. Poor people don’t really get to pontificate lofty discourse; they are too busy fighting to survive. They don’t get to go on meditation retreats and satsangs luxuriating in silence and sauna. This is important, because loving demands that we live from a wealthy place and often those who have less are ironically required to assume the burden of loving those who have more. I write in part to give those who have been oppressed and marginalized hope that the arc of justice could easily turn in their favor but not without reimagining how they show up for themselves in a world where the odds are stacked against them. These are brown and black bodies, minorities, the poor, women and anyone who sits outside the immediate benefit and bounty of public policy. If you can re-imagine yourself, you can also re-imagine your economy if not even create a new economy. One cannot purchase inner peace or wholeness as a consumer product or service. You can’t buy your way into love and I dare say you cannot buy your way out of oppression without perhaps becoming an oppressor. You can, however, love your way from the grips of fear and if fear cannot hold you captive, you can obliterate your oppression. This is what this conversation is aimed at helping you accomplish. These words are not designed to resemble the treatise of a theologian or a scientist. I don’t want you to read through the lens of traditional intellect alone. Process this reframing of humanity through the lens of your resident and developing emotional intelligence. I also implore you not to read this as a work of psychology or academia. This is important because you will be asked to discover if not innovate that space in your heart and mind which allows you to improvise into your new you. You might not know exactly what that looks like just yet but Love will beckon you to consider what you may have never imagined. Speaking of love as I do here is a bold undertaking. We think of Love as though it is beyond knowing even though we invoke it as the currency of friendship, romance and family acceptance. If we cannot understand it, how can we even know if we offer or have it? I am grateful Love apprehended me and demanded that I not look beyond my own experiences or look over you to know Her. I am humbled to be forever playing catch-up to love’s latest revelation. These words come to you from the heart of a poet and a mystic. It’s more or less a discourse I have with life and its observable happenings. Quite often, it’s just me looking and listening. When I was a kid, I think we would call it “watching and praying.” It’s a kind of church language but it asks for the same thing – that we pay attention to what we see and hear and it asks that we be present with it. I’d like to have that same conversation I started in my twenties with you. This conversation is not just the typical back-and-forth between two people. But I don’t want to have a conversation with the intention to change your mind about anything. I am interested in complementing what you know and see just to see if, together, we might see something different and perhaps better—something that lives as an augmentation of what we are and what we know. This conversation is like jazz and you are being invited to love like jazz. * take a pause for a moment of reflection.