a Song from the Beginning 

I drew this image several years ago for a final project in a Song of Songs course. It was a poetry collage piece responding to “I am black and beautiful” in ch 1 of this wisdom/poetry book in the TNK. If I could guess right, the hairs on my professor's arms and brows raised–whether for the image itself or a fact that I had cut up the actual Hebrew text from the book we were assigned to collage the background–I’m not sure. Either way, this was probably my first experiment with what I can now describe as religious art and iconography. 

“a Song from the Beginning” returns in this summer series, with a new title and added media. It is a recall to the SBNR, pluralistic interpretations, or Byzantine Hoodoo’s imagining of humanity’s place and responsibility to life among and external to us–as a species among many, as a material force made up of the same universal particles that make up the rest of this world and this cosmos–yet with a conscience that helps shape and define this world.

So as I sit with this image thinking about its journey from that course at Brite Divinity School in 2019, I ask: how might we examine our own lives to see how we can best contribute to the wholeness of others? How might we engage in constructive dialogue that works through differences, histories, and systems that shape our current perspectives? How might we continue to deconstruct our embedded ideologies and biases to live into the goodness, abundance, and reciprocity offered to us from the beginning?