What's Happiness Got to Do with It?

“I’m struggling with living.”

It was not an appeal for my pity. It was a simple statement, trembling on his vocal chords, just as it tightened in my chest. Truth.

He paused a moment, and I wondered how many people have felt that through the millennia of human experience. What strange animals we are that we struggle with living. . . .

Understanding Miracles

in the treasure box of

 my darkness

love

waits

drunk

in

the  anticipation . . .

Boom Shiva: A Review of Rapture by YashAkasha

“Hip-hop . . . is to cause peace, love, unity ...” —   KRS-One

So opens Rapture, the debut album of YashAkasha (a.k.a., Yasha Wagner), a Colorado-based “medicinal hip-hop” artist and rapper. Just twenty-one years old, Wagner is already a veteran of the festival scene, deeply embedded in the culture of South American medicine work, and . . .

Parzival

How do you keep Hope alive

when the whole world has become

a corpse? Parzival says to the Fisher King.

The Fisher King, wounded in his cock,

says, unhealed, become likewise a corpse.

You’re asking the wrong Question.

The emerald that fell from the third-eye of Lucifer

Misunderstood

My Beloved and I intertwine like serpents

Coiling in the dirt

Or under a tree

Slithering spines sharing secrets and sunbeams

Hoping not to be seen

By Those who do not understand

For Love of the Music: A Review of Matisyahu’s Live at Stubb’s, Vol. III

Ten years after the release of his breakthrough album, Live at Stubb’s (which reached #1 on the Billboard Reggae Albums Chart), Matisyahu has again returned to the well-known Texas venue to record Live at Stubb’s, Vol. III. The result is a picture of artistic evolution, filled with the kind of...