Dear Artist is Jaiya John's mystic Love letter to artists and to all souls, to enrich your creative life. A full-blooded, sensual, intimate honoring and celebration of the divine spark of creativity in you. Jaiya's letter reads like a private sharing from an old friend, offering an affectionate voice of purpose and clarity.
You may be startled by how deeply your tender heart feels seen, listened to, honored, affirmed. Find in these pages tide pools of poetry and passion. Wade into any rejuvenating page and soak your weariness.
Jaiya traces back to your beginning in life, to touch with Loving medicine those points in your journey that harmed or nourished your river of soulful expression. These offerings will help you dissolve your barriers, transcend your fears, and transform your challenges into a composted kind of peace.
The passages also activate the collective, communal, interdependent nature of creative expression. For your art is not only about you. It is also about your ancestral place and duty in this sacred web of life. Art is how Life Loves itself.
Dear Artist is concerned with resuscitating the human soul, helping us remember our sacred ways of being together and honoring the beauty of this world. It is a revival for artists, activists, revolutionaries, healers, students, teachers, and anyone who yearns to ignite the embers of their passion.
Jaiya's Love letter reintroduces you to your original soul condition: vivacious, awestruck, unimpeded, fully alive. If you hunger to find and liberate your truest voice, to free your tears of grace, to express what your ancestors could not, Dear Artist serves a feast for you. If you thirst in the desert of your disillusion, Dear Artist is a well water, bright and clear and plenty. This is no art instruction manual. These words will have you naked, making Love, making art.
Author Biography:
Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on Ancient Puebloan lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, author, and poet. Jaiya is the founder of Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression. Soul Water has donated thousands of Jaiya's books in support of social healing and offers grants to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of numerous books, including Fragrance After Rain, Daughter Drink This Water, and Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution. Jaiya writes, narrates, and produces the podcast, I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John, and is the founder of Sacred Word, a global initiative reviving traditional, ancestral gathering and storytelling practices to fertilize social healing and liberation. He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University and has spoken to over a million people worldwide and audiences as large as several thousand. Jaiya is a former National Science Foundation fellow and holds doctorate and master's degrees in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations. As an undergraduate, he attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan Holistic Medicine through independent research with Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.
