Notes From A Nonconformist For All The Conjurers
“Artists and spiritual teachers, musicians, shamans, they are the ones who are holding the world together. Because they go to the other world and bring back the energy… They are actually bringing the frequency into this world”
-Michael Beckwith, spiritual maverick and teacher
There are things about your parents that you get intuitively but it can take many years until much later you’re able to articulate them. When I was young my father had a lot of outlandish seeming ideas. He dressed kind of crazy compared to other kids parents. My mother was the same. She was game for anything. Traveling, any kind of holiday or celebration, and of course music, dance, art, and poetry. My mom loved artistic expression and especially theater, the theater of life. She kind of showed me how to see this because she was and is so naturally theatrical.
My dad on the other hand really had a firm belief in nonconformity. In a lot of ways it didn’t matter what you did just so long as you were marching to the best of your own drum. Now that didn’t mean my dad was sentimental or particularly excited for me when I was exploring my own path. It just meant that he had certain mantras or sayings that he repeated in earnest. Things like “you don’t need to wear what other people are wearing” “I don’t care what their parents allow their kids to do” and just a general tendency towards being oppositional or contrary.
I couldn’t express it at the time but most of the Black male musicians I grew up surrounded by had their own kind of life manifesto a way of dancing along the cracks of life and a system they knew was broken and unforgiving when it came to Black people. So they spoke in riddles and rhymes, living poetry. I understood them but to try and translate their sentences word for word didn’t work. Because it’s a combined feeling and language thing. Our language doesn’t work like Western language.
It seemed outlandish but really it’s the world that’s been outlandish, especially for Black people and other marginalized people. So we need a new language, a new music, a new dance at all times to navigate living in a world of trip wires. I come from conjurers, music magicians, shamans, and music magicians. I wrote a book exactly in the style of conformity. To develop your own healing artist path, purchase a copy of my audiobook. It’s my own version of nonconformity in an audiobook.