Soul Arts Studio

04/27/2026

Whenyou go to bed at night, have for your pillow
three things— love, hope and forgiveness. And you
will awaken in the morning with a song in your
heart.
~ Victor Hugo

04/21/2026

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1190755738834770
YES! And exactly my experience and now sharing here as SoulArts next chapter creating soul essence songs….. (See music listening room on my website with one newest and most personal story from a very personal memory during a painful time at age 16 now sung from age 70. This song is timely and also painful so not for all to hear - which is why it's under comments)

04/21/2026

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

This is from Antonio Gramsci’s book, The Prison Notebooks, written while he was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. It describes an "interregnum"—a crisis period where old political/social orders are collapsing, but new ones have not yet emerged, leading to chaos.

It is tempting to lose all sense of perspective and hope when forces that have been building for generations reach the crisis point.

These events are overwhelming and despair becomes seductive.

But please remember that you have within you the spark of life.

This is the rebellious nature of a dandelion that grows up through a crack in the pavement.

It is the stubbornness of a mommy sparrow, warming her eggs in a nest built on the charred snag left behind after a forest fire.

We focus on the monsters and the chaos, often forgetting that these are the death rattles of a system collapsing.

But nature abhors a vacuum and the space created by the fall of old systems will need to be filled.

This is the mission of all who would see a better world emerge.

We must be ready to step into the gap and fill it with equality, sanity, and human kindness.

And we need not wait to begin.

While we cannot control the events looming like hurricane clouds at the horizon, we can look for the gaps all around us — within our own arms’ reach — and lean in to fill them now.

I am reminded of these instructions:

Do not be daunted
by the enormity
of the world's grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated
to complete the work,
but neither are you free
to abandon it.

04/21/2026

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not even arguing against any other state of being that could be possible after we die — but to leave anything out for later during this lifetime means to diminish the treasure of human experience that is all around us, all the time.

I’ll borrow from Mary Oliver here:

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

(Excerpted from: Poem 102: When Death Comes)

04/19/2026

A SoulArts oldie….

"THE SECRET OF MEDITATION" (An Article by Ronda LaRue). Serious read for those seeking - With CUTE CARTOON (credit Leigh Rubin rubescartoons.com) for those laughing... READ: http://www.rondalarue.com/spiritual-teachings/reading-writings/the-secret-of-meditation/

04/19/2026

Photo just taken. What do you think it is?

03/30/2026

Nina Simone destroyed her commercial career in a single performance, because the classically trained pianist who dreamed of concert halls wrote the first protest song that named the violence out loud, and the industry never forgave her for it.

The song was unlike anything in American popular music. The song named states. Named cities. Named the violence. No metaphor softened it. No patience was asked. The lyrics said "Alabama's gotten me so upset" and "Tennessee made me lose my rest" and "everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam" in a voice that was neither sad nor angry. It was certain. It was finished with waiting.

She performed it for the first time at a Carnegie Hall benefit concert at Philharmonic Hall. The audience was not prepared. The civil rights movement had produced songs of hope. Hymns. Anthems. "We Shall Overcome." Simone walked onstage and delivered something that sounded like a show tune and hit like a bomb.

The reaction was immediate. Audiences who had come for jazz heard a political weapon. Her record label released it as a single. Southern radio stations returned it. Not in the mail. In pieces. Stations across the South snapped the records in half and mailed the fragments back to the distributor. The message was clear.

Simone did not retract. She did not soften. She performed the song at every concert for the rest of the decade. She wrote more. "Four Women." "Backlash Blues." "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." Each one cost her bookings. Each one cost her airplay. Each one widened the distance between the career she could have had and the career she chose.

She had trained at Juilliard. She had studied Bach and Chopin with the same intensity she brought to protest music. Her original dream was to become the first Black classical concert pianist in America. The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia had rejected her application. She believed the rejection was racial. She spent the rest of her life certain that the institution that should have given her a platform had denied it because of her skin. She built her own platform and used it to say what Curtis would never have allowed.

The cost was total. By the early 1970s, she had left the United States. She lived in Barbados, then Liberia, then Switzerland, then France. She struggled financially. She struggled with her mental health. She never achieved the commercial success that her talent warranted.

She wrote about it once. One sentence.

"I had to express what I felt about what was happening, or I would have gone crazy."

08/27/2025

“Colliding Clouds” Photo: r LaRue 08/26/25

08/12/2025

“Your vibe attracts your tribe” means that the energy, personality, and behavior you project will influence the kind of people you attract into your life 🤎