Ever Before Me: Your Love

By El Shaddai Gebreyes

Ever Before Me: Your Love is a meditation on the intersection of library science and the arts, particularly dance. This multi genre book encompasses poetry, theater, and religious studies. The author explores themes of love and inspiration in a pensive, philosophical, and comedic way. This book contains poems, monologues, articles and even tweets some never before published. The advent of the Internet has changed how humans access and organize information, requiring libraries to accept global technological shifts and to incorporate the use of social media to remain relevant and viable. Writing this book involved a soulful embrace of library science and the creative arts; it is very interdisciplinary in nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477114964

El Shaddai Gebreyes

El Shaddai Gebreyes is the author of Ever Before Me: Your Love, 100 + Poems for Holidays and Special Occasions by Frederick Douglas Harper and The Last Adam. She serves as a librarian and lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Jay Blackwell aspires to be inspired by his many todays, yesterdays and tomorrows. Which is another way of saying, he strives to be ageless and full of thanks in remembering who he is. He travels around a lot and likes to write about his musings in]between adventures.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Cataloging for Choreographers: Poetry in the form of dialogue

Copy cataloging

Dance for dummies

Cataloging for world peace

Dating the great-grandson of a eugenicist

Hitler was not attractive

My body, your body

Physics

Chemistry

Choreographic notation

Research before you write

Aesthetic

The Messianic secret

No one can afford to do drugs

Dance as a language

Google.edu

Society

Cataloging for dummies

Classification of information

A non-rival good

Going Gaga

Master’s program

Inspiration

The apprentice

Near revival

Dinosaurs

More information, fewer problems

DNA is the new TMI

Will I forget in time?

What to do when love is maladaptive

Careers: Plan A, B, and we’ll see

It’s not all up to me

Monologues

My love affair with yoga

Exposing the truth

You have fallen asleep

I open the door and fall to the floor

Adventures in Journalism

Joel Osteen loves the sinner, not the sin

A Messianic Jew Redefines Love

Twitter

Tweet, tweet

Unpublished tweets

Work-in-progress

Psalm 51:3

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.

Psalm 26:3

For your love is ever before me, and I walk continually

in your truth.

He [Hillel] would also say: If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

—Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers

Introduction

This book is partial revelation and partial party talk. I reveal myself to you in poetic verse and explain my perspective through pedestrian prose. Toward the end of this book I include samples of my writing—articles and tweets.

Join me on this archeological excavation of my wounded psyche. My fractured soul is healing and the purpose of my writing this brief collection of poetry and prose is to show love is still my inspiration, even, if not especially, when I write fiction or creative nonfiction. Unfailing love is the process to achieve social equality and equality is the unifying principle of the universe. I kid you not.

God’s love is my main focus. As for romance, I am blessed with a history of strangers I tried to call my own. Once or twice, I’ve experienced deep friendship and commitment from a significant other, however short-lived the relationship. This has meant the world to me. You’ll discover through these pages that my passion is for verbal intimacy, most often in the form of dialogue or impassioned monologues.

I find in relationships there is a lot of confession and between relationships there is a lot of repentance. Repentance and confession coupled together can lead to liberation from guilt and shame. My Coptic Orthodox Christian background instilled in me the importance of regular confession and the Ethiopian Evangelical Church prepared me for a relationship with my personal Savior. You may have heard of Him—Jesus. I’ve been off and on with Him for years, but I’m feeling certain this time it will last into eternity, forever and ever. He is the only man I would consider marrying metaphorically without knowing His last name. There is something about the way He speaks that is compelling enough for me to know His heart is in the right place.

The tension I feel in my life is between sin and grace. Like the Psalmist King David, my sin is ever before me. Like the Psalmist King David, so is God’s love. Accepting the Truth in the person of Christ is my life’s mission. 2 Corinthians 10:5 urges us to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Messiah. So, I am learning not to condemn myself. I avoid sin-consciousness for instead the consciousness of God’s grace, His abundant mercy, and His loving people (i.e., His representatives on earth).

My offering is my reflection on this state of grace. The wonder I experience when I embrace a God who cares about the state of my heart! I am in awe of a God