Life is a journey of perspective. We live life as individuals, enclosed in our energetic spaces. When we are babes, innocent and open, we grasp onto those beings who offer us love and comfort us with their embrace. We see the challenges and the obstacles, but they do not defeat us. As we mature, we are blinded, imprisoned by the limitations placed upon us by our belief systems and the belief systems of those around us. We become slaves to our fears and the fears of those who seek to bind us. It is not until we are willing to free ourselves from the limitations of an imperfectly hued perspective that we can become whole, free and reunite with the spirit that gave us life. It is only when our perspectives change that we can travel freely, knowing that this journey called life offers no obstructions that our spirits cannot challenge. The African American journey is a journey of spirit. Many see the journey and all of its atrocities through the lens of pain and struggle. Some cannot bare to look and they deny the significance of or their link to this past. For some, history is the past and their present obstacles are enough to confine them to a world free from understanding life’s truths. It is when we look into our past and study how and why a group of people were able to survive that we can live our lives freely, gaining strength from the knowledge that the human spirit is a force that cannot be shackled by the limitations of a physical impediment or a debase fetter designed to control human form. Be it the gas chambers of Germany or the riotous lynch mobs of America burning down communities in the early twentieth century, the human spirit is more powerful than rage, madness or the belief that man has control. Life is a journey of perspective. When our perspectives are altered, our journey is altered; our interpretation of reality is altered. It is that change, that alteration of perspective that can create a quest for understanding. If understanding is not sought, if the desire to interpret the reality and find the meaning of the moments of discontent is not present, we can easily fall prey to rage, lying in a dormant, frozen, stagnant, sometimes decaying state of morbidity. When perspectives change, one can evolve, grow, walk into that place of knowing, that place where spirit, intuition, the invisible guides this physical form that we call body. It is then that we accept that this journey called life has a purpose beyond that which we can see. It is then that we realize the invisible controls our destinies. We all walk in blindness, not knowing where tomorrow leads, not knowing what the invisible hand of destiny has placed in our paths….What does one see in his individual reality? And why? What do I see? What will I learn on this journey? I do not see. What will I see as I walk through the museum corridors, through books, through the seminars, through the dusty documents, through the pages of history asking why? How?.... Glenda R. Taylor Excerpt from My, Our Journey August 2012