Simple Sunday Sharing

I am a Writer.  It took me a long time to completely embrace that concept of myself.  To call myself a writer, I had to acknowledge my position in a creative space with other writers.  Recognize an alliance with others that identify themselves as such…How could I even hold a candle to the exceptional published authors of all the wonderful stories I’ve read, much less RELATE to them? I’ve been reading other writers since the age of 4, the passion for the written word came early for me.  It was easy to recognize my passion for reading, the decision to take it to another level and embrace the “writer” in me emerged much later on.  I’d started writing a novel with a wonderful friend at the age of 11…or around there.  We would meet before and after our track and field practices, dishing new ideas, developing our characters and discussing possible conflicts between them.  It was an inspiring process.  We abandoned the story as time went by, we embraced other talents an at that young age, found the time and the effort involved in completing the work too much to handle while we were performing dance and creating choreography, running for a Track and Field team and doing the day to day of  preteen life.  I still have the drafts of that story somewhere.  Every time a clean up of my life’s clutter became necessary and the Hilroy copybooks and loose leaf papers that were our story resurfaced, I always reverently perused the pages and carefully slid them back into the folder, to remember the time when I discovered that I wanted to be a writer, not just read other writers’ work.  I look at that story and that processes as the initiation of my passion…sort of like a first tongue kiss that was sloppy and wet and surprisingly stimulating even though I had to wipe saliva from my lips afterwards…a rite of passage.  That unfinished story was the bug that bit me…I preserve its carcass as a reminder and as an inspiration; what I’ve started and didn’t finish and what I thought myself, even then, capable of achieving. Today, 26 years later, I have completed a full length novel I can be proud of. Love’s Groove is 325 pages of love and communication and sex, as created in my mind. (You can only imagine!!! LOL) Within the pages are characters that live and breathe, if only in my own reality.  I finished this novel 2 years ago and it lives in my hard drive and in my heart and I can proudly wear the label of Writer, because I started and finished that book.  I am confident that one day others will read it and be just as enraptured as I was with the entire thing…I’ve already planned two sequels for that story…

I am a Poet, and I didn’t know it, until another poet forced me to recognize that truth.  Even today, I am in awe of that living process.  I took my desire to share the power of words and expressed them with poetry.  It was not until I decided one day to compile all the poems I’d randomly written from time to time and concluded that I had a “collection” in my hands…over 50 poems written by me over a period of 18 months.  What I thought was practice with a different medium, or better, another way to express the snippets of inspiration  that came to mind has manifested into another layer of who I am and what I do…With Passion and Words.

This story is not over…Two years ago (Yes, Lots happened for me around my 35th birthday…Its been an incredible journey) I met Roger E. Lear,  a veritable Music Man and on Myspace.  (Check him out, he’ s on my facebook and at Myspace with SCR. Also, hear what he does at www.banginbeatsbyrel.com ) REL and I developed a friendship easily, we had (have) a lot of things in common.  The passion for music that moves the masses, the value for words and how they are expressed, and a true desire to live a blessed and authentic life.  We cultivated this friendship and consistently encourage and support those things in each other.  This past summer, I took a leap of faith and committed to a wonderful project with REL.  We’d discussed the idea of creating a spoken word CD many times before it really came to pass, I believe that when I’d finally decided to embrace the REALITY of it, was when I started considering the labels I attach to myself  as a creative.  I was a Writer, although unpublished, not one person on this planet can take the rewards of that accomplishment from me.  I had to accept that.  I was a Poet, and even though it surprises me still, that I can convey my ideas and feelings in such a medium, I have embraced the fact that I already have a piece of work that reflects my proficiency as a Poet, I have many works and continue to create more every day.  I had to accept that.  REL made me consider yet another label…was I ready to become a Spoken Word Artist?  A Performer of Spoken Word?  A large part of me felt that because I was not yet publicly acknowledged as the other creative labels that I had chosen, it seemed too far fetched to even consider taking on a new label.  (I have since come to understand that it is my fear of failure that prevents me from embracing all my talents, and a lack of follow through that keeps them to myself.) I embraced the idea and then followed through and today, I am gifted with 7 “finished” fruits of our labor, the remaining 4 yet to be harvested, still ripening on the vine of creativity, emotion and love…and  I get to anticipate their coming every day.  I wish everyone could know how that feels…it is such a falling in love again experience; this process has moved me in a most fundamental way.

Thus the Creative Fire burns faster within me…it burns longer.  I am fertile ground to cover and ideas, and poems and stories are manifesting in its wake.  And I am still afraid sometimes that I wont succeed, that I’ll run dry…still sometimes I am uncertain if anyone will want to experience my vision of love and beauty and sex and human exchange.  I wonder if anyone will recognize the God I speak of and live with everyday.  So I kept my talents to myself while striving to share them…until now…

Last Friday I prepared, and I performed with LinX  at Goree.  Stephen Zip Loks Hennessy hosts this event every month.  (Keep an eye out Montreal) This is a wonderfully warm atmosphere with nothing but comfort and positive vibes at the root.  We had a small but enthusiastic crowd, which only added to the intimacy of the event. I started with “Welcome to Tashe”.  This is my signature, my biography in about 6 minutes with incredible REL Production in the background…that piece reflects who I am, today.  Well, let me tell you, I Was Nervous!  LOL!!!  Yo, I had the energy, everyone was engaged even before I got started but once my music started and I was forced to function from the side of my brain that turned the improv off and the flipped the rehearsal on…I missed my cue, and lost my timing and went BLANK about one minute in…Blank I tell you…Lost, and I know that piece inside out.  Then I did exactly what I did here, I told the audience.  I explained my pause, and then asked for the permission to start the track over, so that I can deliver the message as was meant.  I asked them to let me try again and they invited me to do exactly that, with encouragement and support and anticipation of what was to come…for the value I gave it, they understood, and from that point on, it was right.  A Beautiful woman named Thamarr, my Poet Partner, and I finished the segment with a duet about Sisters… Sisters, embracing other Sisters for their sameness as opposed to judging what’s different…A powerful piece I hope we can record some day…the piece was well received, and I am so grateful for Thamarr.  It was a great way to end the night.

Performing is not new to me, I’ve  done it in one way or another all my life, but I always get nervous.  As a spoken word artist (New Label…te he he) the part of me that wants to be a “aural delight with perfectly articulated words and expressed feeling” panicked like a deer in headlights.  Until the Natural part of me jumps in to recreate the scene.  The Natural part of me is in partnership with God, she never misses…The performance went well and I got to do 4 curtsies and smile at everyone in the room and the clapping still hadn’t stopped.  The feeling was sublime…my message was received and appreciated…my art was too.  I think I love being a Spoken Word Artist.  I’m going to do it again and again…and in between I will come here, and write to my hearts content, sharing, sharing, sharing…what I’ve learned, what I’ve seen and experienced and what all of it means today.  None of us are anonymous anymore, and more and more each day, we come to understand what it means to empathize, turn our feelings on and walk in another person’s shoes.  I am confident that I will write something that makes another person’s day, or brings some type of clarity, or closure, or insight to the person reading…so as often as I can,  I will come here, and nurture this little connection to the world with words.  And Share…

Now I understand that the sharing part was not the story or the poem or the spoken word. The labels are just that, labels.  It is Me that I am sharing.  That is why I’m sometimes afraid.  The authentic me that loves communication and every medium thereof…Perhaps, I may decide to paint one day, or maybe write a screenplay and then play a role in a movie…and it would all be for the purpose of sharing that part of me which cares to touch the human condition with some tenderness, some laughter, some love…I’m putting myself out there…Refusing to keep my talents to myself, no matter how anyone feels about them.  Sharing my message of love, because I know its a wonderful message.  Expressing the creative part of me, because it’s abundant and passionate.

I’m putting myself out there, picking up all my labels and wearing them on the same jacket…Sharing who I am with the knowledge that I will be rejected by some, but I will also be lovingly embraced by others…I am different from no one, we all deal with that reality every day. It is my hope that you all receive me with Light and then take from the Light; that my purpose to uplift and inspire is fulfilled with every word.  The success is the sharing.

Here I am.  Everyone is welcome.

Be Blessed, Be Sexy, Choose Joy…

Tashe