Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A  passage that begins, "Today I will write poetry for you..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere... 

TEXT OF BOOK EXCERPT READ IN THIS EPISODE:

TODAY I WILL WRITE poetry for you. You will be my poetry, writing me. Today is writing all of this poetry. Sun is rising again and again inside this day. Light has learned a new Love song. Now, beneath the shade tree with blossoms of purple fountains, I usher this river through. Now, with a tender breeze patting my face with the same Love your brown hands pat into the white belly of tortilla dough, now this joy moves through. 

Life is a song soaked in beauty. Life is a dance with no rules. No hours. No curfew. Just callouses building and breaking open again. Just the mist in your eyes. Eyes of a forest fawn. Eyes of dew. Plunging eyes, swimming great lakes of soul. And your brown hands, supple and survived, your brown hands kneading dough, pleading Love into bread, bread into Love, Love into hunger, into bodies browned by Love, into lives leaning against kind moments of Love. 

And I taste the bread your Love has made. Sky sings inside my bones, inside my breath, in the streams streaming my blood. You wake my ancestors. Everything is drumming now. Drum song is a vibration melting away what is not life from my life. 

Come, place your brown hand in my brown hand. Today, we walk the Red Road, earth like blushing coffee. We walk the hills, green and billowing. We walk beneath oaks and eucalyptus, redwoods whispering wild languages. We walk along creeks and lips of lakes. We walk a million sunrises. Watering all living things with tears of Grace. We walk Creation, kneeling to smell and stroke the smallest grain. The bread you make is the rising of Love in every soul it feeds. Earth Loves you, sainted one. Your brown hands are how this life holds itself. In Love...

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