Working cover from the scheduled 2014 book release Journey through the Power of the rainbow . “…We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.” –– Aberjhani, from Journey through the Power of the Rainbow A frequently asked question among readers who took note in 2013 that I was working on a collection of quotations is: have I abandoned the idea? That would have been easy to do considering the reluctance of traditional publishers to invest in books containing any substantial amount of material that has been previously posted on the Internet. The challenge for me, and for the tech angels who get a kick out of throwing whatever pro bono support they can in my direction, was to take a deep breath and dive into the years of published books, unpublished...

                           (digital art graphic courtesy of Bright Skylark Literary Productions) One of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit is the ability to exercise gratitude in the face of grievous adversity. Cultivation of a sense of gratitude under any conditions is advantageous in general because it tames impulses toward delusion-inducing arrogance, soul-numbing indifference, and corruptive malice. During this National Poetry Month 2013 , I have found myself considering all the reasons I am grateful for the presence of poetry in my life and in this world. Among those reasons is the fact that there was a time, in years not so long ago, when I struggled inside a kind of “dark night of the soul”––one that in many ways appeared to reflect an eclipse of the world’s collective soul–– and it was the voices of living poets that called to me from unknown distances and took it upon themselves through th...