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The Calling My calling came to me while I languished contemplating in my room, while I wasted away my years in jail cells and prisons or in the streets "del Barrio." It brought me back to life, out of captivity from drugs and broken-glass streets, scarred and tattooed places that I once called home: the ghetto. Until then I waited silently to a deafening clamor inside my head, voiceless to all around, hidden from America's eyes -- a Latino boy with no name, trying to make a name for himself, but who couldn't make a sound. I would sing into a solitary tape recorder, music never to be heard or found. I would write down my thoughts in scrambled English. I would take photographs in my mind of planned-out places, people and things, new faces in a park's bushy green, steel-bar and concrete-free, places to play or, perhaps, daydream. Get-away waiting. Then it came: the calling. It brought me out of my cell of a room. It forced me to escape my night captors and prison of gloom. It called me to be a fighter of a writer and march with the soldiers of change. It called me from the shadows of doubt, out of the wreckage of my doom streets, away from those who should not have existed. I've desperately waited all of my life and all of these years for this "wake-up call," still, somehow, unexpected. I was finally called to be free and to be me at last! Few people can see or admit that this world, which they see around them, is really the work of their own creation and imagination. I guess it's true to say that we do, in fact, create and live out our own reality through our actions and reactions to what we imagine or choose to believe is real. Nonetheless, it does seem eventually to become our reality. -- Izzy Beretta |
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