Overcoming Extreme Poverty…
I had lived in Tompkin’s Square park for a month and found eight remarkable people whom I made a rough documentary about called, Dear Mr. President- A Love Letter from Tompkin’s Park, believing that my mission and why I was there was to meet these eight people and give them a voice. There was one of them in particular called Omar, whose rage and true articulation for the state of being poor and homeless in the United States was so universal in tone, that I knew that I was being led to people who, if given a platform, might be heard… because each embodied the circumstance or problem in society which they spoke about. I saw that this Energy led me to people who could not be hypocrites because their situations mirrored their expressions.
For almost two years after finishing what I felt was the last of my “reporting,” I found myself putting together all the understanding of a life time of investigation into a summation… almost like being asked to create a doctoral thesis on all I had experienced and then defend it to an invisible and visible realm.
This done, quite recently, where people other than myself seemed to be sent by the universe to verify my findings as effective and true. This was the last place I lived with Akil and which ended with an opportunity to voice and articulate the talents of these people in a Calgary under Erek Mateo (a blessed friend) and Nick his partner.
I left the last place I was staying when the signal was given to me that it was time to leave.
I knew there was no more reporting so I wondered why, on Easter week, I was once more wandering the streets of New York with a condition so severe that it demanded complete rest and piece of mind. The First day, I met Akir, who I had said to Akil represented to me, the mirror, or twin concept. In my consciousness, we are bade to map out exactly which dimension we are in by linking the names of people we meet, the cause and effect and the story that we have been reading, following and, in my case reporting. Akir had not seen me for 8 years and our joy was mutual and his spirit gave me the message I required from him… His name is Akir Plan and I knew after having not seen him for eight years, that my meeting him again after leaving Akil, that the universe was telling there that there is a plan.
The next person I met on the streets was Nexus (which means connector) and it was a joy and he, too, gave me information. The third day I went to Pelham Park, to nature, knowing that i was going through a portal… I slept peacefully in the forest.
When I came back to lower Manhattan, I met a guy called Adam, and so I knew where I was. Then I saw a sign, it said ‘the anointed voices.’ I knew that all my work had been about how to release the collective stream of consciousness, how to give people who had great potential the power of their voices back, so that these potentially great people of the future would become the great people that they could become.
I was being given signs to meet up with someone I called Albert Einstein because of the brilliance of his truth, some one who had housed me for four years in which we had worked and fought together in nightmare conditions of understanding not only how the world could be be destroyed by lack, debt and this continual cycle of violence and self murder, but also who was aware of another reality and dimension existing side by side with this reality. I did not wish to come here, the experience there had been so brutal though brilliant that it had traumatized my very souL
But I was being led back here, as if there was something left to do.
I knew what it was. For over 19 years A Santana has lived the American nightmare, having experienced the lower east side before it became these wealthy enclave that it currently is. He had lived in the world of this system of crack heads, immigrants and social injustice, but unlike many who caved into the pressure of existing in such conditions, he had elevated his consciousness by reading investigating and creating a beautiful garden with a group of friends. And fought for all these years to help his community by introducing plays, flags of the countries which adorn his garden and to educate his community about how to better themselves and have a sense of universal pride while battling within himself how to survive in a system that deemed to be trap for many of the “poorer” people of New York. The same people who are actually the backbone of American society… the rocks, the Peters of the Jesus story.
Before I met up with Albert E, I found myself being compelled to visit Tompkin’s Square park, where I had hoped that the people I had interviewed where no longer there. But there was one, Omar. Here I was once again walking the streets and here was Omar.
He had not changed but he had become more Kingly, stating that he was really ready this time to talk about what he has seen on the streets and that although he felt the first Dear Mr. President served a function, he felt that he had not been ready, nor mature enough in expressing his views. “Bring your friends with the camera,” he had said quietly, “I am ready to talk. I am not going anywhere…someone has to talk for all these people who sleep on the streets…I have seen so much and I think I have the voice now to address the world.”
He was wearing a Jesus necklace made of iron, it was Easter day, and I smiled knowing that I must tell Erek or find people to film Omar, who I know is destined to be a star, a true star, a true king because he would not abandon the truth of his experience nor his being the voice of the people who mirrored his experience.
Then I met Albert E and he opened his doors to me and we spoke.
The project Generation X university which he had been working on for 19 years was ready, after a long battle he was ready to assume the his role as a voice after battling with the collective hurt of doubt.