In the beginning, two spirits roamed every soul. One was Love. The other, fear. Fear, being restless and unsettled, mutated into two other spirits: supremacy and inferiority. Both of these would inhabit every human soul and space, forever. Waiting. To be fed.
This is a Love story. A Love for freedom that blooms into a willingness for revolution to eradicate oppression, supremacy, and inferiority. In his newest book of sacred contemplation, Dr. Jaiya John plunges us into the naked soul of social revolution, the divine nature of freedom, and the human reality of being a revolutionary. Freedom is an origin story, a message for today's global realities, and a tale for all times. A prayer poem from the ancestors.
Since his orphan birth in the New Mexico desert, Jaiya, formerly a professor of social psychology at Howard University, has spent his entire life contemplating, learning, teaching, and reaching for personal and collective freedom. This book is his offering of a lifetime for those brave, humbled, sacrificing souls called to give their lives for freedom work. Revolutionary labor can be lonely, isolating, discouraging, and depleting. Freedom is a Love-soaked trove of affirmation, appreciation, reassurance, and renewal.
Freedom is for poets and professors, parents and activists, leaders and students, and for anyone whose inner healer rises and roars, stirs and sings. Anyone who dares to help birth a new world of human dignity, a world that dissolves the old structures, systems, ideologies, and spirit that incarcerate and traumatize generation after generation.
Freedom is a wild flock of verses, each offering its own distinct medicine: window, door, compass, shelter, quiet, hope, clarity, courage, oasis, revelation, assurance, encouragement, faith, music, dance, prayer, light, laughter, tears, nourishment, rest, solidarity, strategy, ancestral presence, generational duty, reminder of Love. Freedom is presented in deep-breath verses that float on the page in space, unbound from one another. Savor this book as both an inspirational, reflective, daily devotional, and an academic and strategic resource. Drop in on any page for your daily bread and grace. Freedom is poetry, proverb, and prophecy as much as practice protocol. In the tradition of Jaiya's book Daughter Drink This Water, Freedom will replenish the intangible wellspring that is your soul.
Author Biography:
Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on Ancient Puebloan lands in the 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 that has donated thousands of Jaiya's books in support of social healing, and offers scholarships to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of numerous books, including 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 Freedom Project, a global initiative reviving traditional 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. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.
