THe practical...

🤔💭It was 7th grade... My music teacher got some recording keyboards and tape recorders. I stopped going to lunch. Every day I would go in and experiment making beats, recording tapes that at the time I thought was going to land me a deal and I would not have to go to school anymore.

On my way home from Harlem back to the Bronx with my younger sister each day, we would stop at the bodega first for a quarter water and some chips and then jump on the 6 train for about a 30 minute ride. Standing over my younger sister I had these tape cassettes that I would play on my Walkman from what we had created at lunch and as I got home I would blast these bootleg Cd’s I bought from one of the guys on the street. For a few months my biggest rotations were The Eminem Show, and Get Rich or Die Trying. 💿 
On one end, my very introspective and self reflective art continued to be fed, and on the other this entrepreneurial ambition began to form. My identity as a man began to form in these pre teenage years, and this idea of the hustle - or being self-sufficient; the goal of not working for someone else but being able to provide by building your own brand was implanted.

At the same time walking through the streets of Harlem and the Bronx I started to become aware of the social inequalities and the conditions in which we minorities lived in.... Somewhere in my subconscious the idea started to form that those who held the money didn’t care about us and the only way to change our conditions was to compete with them in the marketplace. 
Years later coming to my faith, I thought I had to put these things aside as I would be told things like “this is being worldly” or it is “being attached to possessions”... Poverty was seen as an ideal, and to have less as a form of humility. After being purified and finding it in its truest form learning poverty from a spiritual perspective is not having less or more, it is about proper care of the things God has given to is. In all of my experiences, I know this was all for a reason - “I gotta make it to heaven, I’m going through hell.”
🕊✝️🗽🌇

- The Symbol
- All is Love