SELF Made Divisible: I, ME, MY, God, HOLY Spirit
(The Artist’s Transcendence)

Mine is a life of serendipity and whimsy, one foot in the water, the other on the sand. It entails a means of instinct, perception and reaction, manageability and survival.

Having lived in New York for close to forty years I have survived on the basis of my African heritage, ownership of my status as Ghanaian, an identity which allows for an interconnectivity with other immigrants, mostly Europeans, an acceptance of the foundation of a life lived in the country of the United States, city of New York.

There was a self-awareness early on that I delved into moments of meditation and fantasy in my childhood. I would sit in the dark and meditate on school crushes, circumstances where I would envision thoughts of girls from school.

I also had a talent for making drawings, a reality which has brought about a career in the arts. Much of this requires moments spent thinking. Process by which I now claim a role as writer has kept alive in me an interpretation of what is fantasy and what is real.

Life as an artist encourages a means of juxtaposing fantasy with reality. The artist circumstantially aspires to an imagined reality. Who is he? What is he? He becomes torn when faced with the daunting aspect of employment and housing.

Artists all through history have been born either into poverty or wealth and have seen their lives manifest from destitution or proceeded to fame and success.

Transcendentally, the artist deals with magic and spirituality. The creative process gives way to the creative power. More and more, how the artist channels this power determines his progressiveness or self-imprisonment and fate, a harsh reality of living in limbo.

The role of the artist is someone who is boxed in and has to free him or herself from such predicament. He is born of a fate he thrives from and at the same time has to fight against.

Double edged sword is symbolic of the life of most artists. They have a sense of pomposity and ego. At the same time they are faced with humility and defeat.

A lot of what transpires in the artist’s life is determined in his childhood, mother/father relationships, self-identity, sexuality, schooling and friendships, all determine who the artist becomes as an adult.

The artist thrives on the mirroring of his personality. This results in faux friendships and love affairs. The artist is always at a struggle with his role and identity.

As a child I enjoyed a close relationship with my mother. One of the many gifts she blessed me with was bringing me to the church. I learned how to pray, receive communion and sit with other children during Bible studies.

In retrospect I feel there has always been a holier spirit watching over me. I have indeed consulted my notion of God, the Supreme Being and Creator, in prayer.

My past experience as student in a Catholic school and parochial high-school has set a standard in how I live my life knowing there is another reality certainly greater than me and more important than my aspirations here on earth. I have often been inspired by priests and pastors.

The past year I started meditating, a novice at first I gradually embraced the idea of seeking a holier conscience and as the life process got increasingly difficult, the meditative experience shaped me and helped me look deeper inwards. Overtime I am now in a continuous dialogue with God, enabled by a book of affirmations I read and going to church on Sundays.

Spirituality as a way of overcoming the life trip is available to each artist. We manage this with love. What love is happens to be a mystery to most. One can imagine how getting to know and understand God is almost impossible.

I watch now as I have achieved transcendence. Given the meditation process I now have an identity for God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Surprisingly a female voice overwhelms my conscience when I meditate.

Knowing where I have come with respects to the life struggle I feel blessed by the reality of God in me, how I deal with the day, the Zen reality of staying in the moment, breaking free from the fatefulness of living in a box, therefore attracting newer light in the people I meet, having the strength to reject others and the overall ability to grow and mature.

Worship and Humility

Piles and pillars, machines that weigh on me a ton, what sense is there in this? Do I have power potential? Can I be delivered from tension, mountainous men who test my spirit, bring me to the point of letting go, giving up, setting myself up for failure?

Come out, I say! Come out! And into what world do I enter? Is it not the possessed and possessors claiming a right? Am I not a contributor who builds in them an unusual strength - that by walking faithless, uninspired I make myself available for their maddening will, conniving ways?

Against all of this I have no choice. No one speaks for me. Continuous attempt at self-governing shows no merit. In this body is the supposed heart, indeed there is proof of life. There is fury. What it amounts to are bouts of anger and frustration, my mind yearning an explosion.

How do I conduct health and wellness when at every turn my body pulls me into despair, rendered threadbare, full of anxiety? Internal walls of existence have undergone a sickness, defeat which begs I lay in the fetal position and envision madness, the world turning over onto its side emptying itself of goodness, comprehension and pro-activity.

Can I say, “On with it”? “Get up and go”? Who and with what speed do they drive me out of bed onto the roads I have left untraveled or at least saw repetitiveness in the everyday what was an ordinary life from the edge of normalcy to extremes of struggle?

Faces never represent people. Those I know and meet are within margins of good-intent. Each one brings with them an idea, a supposition that I am loved, life is sweet and much is desirable if and when I take time, find favor in this, the absolute understanding if I give love I get love. These faces mirror my misery and hopelessness, a world where everyone drags themselves into a circumstance they have no control.

So the wheel turns, we meet at its center, the broken-hearted as well as those who feel an accord with balance, praise themselves as heroic and are at a means of success and stardom for our ever-changing circumstance. It is a ball of complexities that makes us. We come from change. Many manifest the will with which a person knows where they once suffered and how they now thrive.

What is this knowingness all about? Where does it come from? Who warrants defiance? Why do others wallow in nothingness? There is a self to each and every person. A percentage of how we value this self defines who we are. We live in a gilded age. However a tumultuous underbelly beckons.

The trouble with us is that we have divided among ourselves who considers themselves precious and others who benefit from idolizing the moneyed and beautiful. A greater God oversees all of this. He is optimum, an entity each and every one of the successful look to for inspiration. Why seek resonance in idols when we as understated and worrisome can also find absolute happiness.

Granted some are blessed, truly blessed with physical beauty and superior minds. We can understand our fascination with them as joy, much like seeing the sun set or partaking in a cruise. Other than that never should we look for the answers in false gods. We are all a part of this machine, more we cultivate and confide in a force other than money, power and superficiality; we see light beyond our perception.

What this life becomes is the journey to inhabit that light, what we perceive in physical beauty and wealth. How can we find that very thing which supersedes and transcends all that is tangible? Our bodies pass on to another realm. In this life we glorify all that is our physical being. What moves us, sends us on a life-long trip is the search for a higher power.

Look for this within the self. Learn not to give of yourself to entities that promote subservience. We are all susceptible to life and death. The immortal and beloved is within. When we learn to navigate this circumstance, we would have given of ourselves to something greater than us. It could be nature. It could be a philosophy. But it’s never in another person. You give love to another person. He or she is never magnanimous enough to be worshipped.

To worship and give gratitude to is to know humility.

For the sinner in me, I seek a higher light

Kofi Fosu Forson

Under the weather of all the sorrows of tomorrow, from whom may I borrow faith and trust
Let alone free myself of this shame and disgust as the sky has emptied itself of rain water
Now become a daunting space overlooking me weak, worrisome and spent

What God would want me in heaven? Why should I care the sun has yet to declare itself hopeful,
Loving and sheltering as my hands grow cold. Not a thing I wear brings me to dare think I’ll be free
Of this misery, sadness and torment hanging above me, weakening my soul, causing me to lose control

Many months now I crawl into bed after walking back and forth within this four walled dark room
With a window big enough to fit my head and so I stretch out to look see what I could find in the world
But all I see is a field with no trees, nothing to see just a dump with mounds of sand

I come from a country of three, I, myself and me. And within this living tree, there are no grandfathers
Or fore-fathers of history. The person I was before has been wiped clean from this earth leaving me
To exist in this space and time. And to this I say I am the president of my pain, governor of no gain

There are those days when captivating sunshine pours through, washes over me and I’m forced to think
In the eye of this sun is a force, an almighty force that is God, a reality unbeknownst to me but as I sit,
Kneel, fall on my face I am overwhelmed because I sense newness, a hope for a life to come

And so I wait for those days, times of uncontrollable light that fills me, turns my thoughts around
From the sinner in me, the person living in bondage, bound by hopelessness with no concerns
For the future or the life to come. But on the times I sense that light I know of a world that waits for me
And so I learn to dream, quiet and alone my thoughts turn to love, the love in me. What is this love?
It is the energy that builds in me over time spent wanting, wishing for something, someone, anyone.
But I know it is not just a person, place or thing I seek. It is not the pleasures of the world I want

Who I seek is God. And who is God? He is my source of light. He is the greatness I give of myself.
He is overwhelming. Man above me. Power I live for. Voice I hear. To him I call. With him I stand tall.
So look for the light. Speak to it. Find the eye in its center. Let it watch over you. Let it be your guide

My mind is taking me to the world outside. I am becoming, turning into a symbol of love and hope.
I am sensing bountiful love. It fills my heart. It may lead me to love another. But until the day I fall in love
I’ll be generating love from my heart, spinning on the axis of my true identity, living a day at a time