Spiritual Traveler:
Journeys Beyond Fear

by Cameron Powers

What do we learn as we travel and sing with ordinary people in the Arab world?
Complete with photos.

Scroll down for review:

Cameron and Kristina, pursuing their own brand of diplomacy as “Musical Ambassadors”, were on the streets of Baghdad singing popular Iraqi music with Iraqi citizens during the spring of 2003.

They have now made four trips to other Arab-world nations as well between 2002 and 2005 carrying their “Musical Missions of Peace” through Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.

Cameron and Kristina were invited to perform for an audience of 60,000 Egyptians in the Cairo stadium in October of 2003 to help raise money for an Egyptian Children’s Cancer Hospital. Subsequently traveling through Syria, they sang on the streets and in the homes of Palestinian refugees in a large camp near Damascus. The photo on the front cover shows some of these Palestinian children who spontaneously joined in the singing.

Back in America during parts of 2003, 2004 and 2005 they drove more than 40,000 miles to bring their uplifting musical and multi-media presentation, “Singing in Baghdad,” to thousands of American citizens in more than half of the states in the union.

Recently returned from more musical adventures in the Arab world, Cameron has written this “People’s Guide to Basic Decency” to help others who desire to go through the personal process of spiritual soul growth which accompanies experiencing oneself as a truly global citizen.

Promoting a natural state of compassion which can easily exist between people in the absence of fear, author and musician Cameron Powers presents a glimpse into a very modern world with extensive internet connections but which simultaneously drinks from the ancient wisdom of the Dervish-populated realms of the Middle East.

An angle on the Middle East which goes deeper than most current media analysis: this is the book which can open another window for you.

Excerpt:

In Baghdad, Kristina and I were singing songs which had been popular in Iraq at least since the 1930’s. “We need to see more people like you!” an Iraqi man was jubilantly exclaiming to us while hugging me with delight. Again, I felt like a genuine ambassador. People looked at us: we were not wearing uniforms or carrying guns. We were carrying a musical instrument, an oud, and we were singing popular Arabic songs on street corners in Baghdad with whichever Iraqis cared to stop and sing… Another Iraqi man lovingly adjusted my eyebrows for me as I sang. Kristina led the vocals for the next song and then I passed my oud to an Iraqi musician in the crowd who treated us to another popular song.

We were transported into a street-corner, market-place world beyond fear and anger; beyond the symbolism of choosing between the “good guys” and the “bad guys…” We had been doing this on street corners in Jordan and the West Bank and Egypt for months and it was perfectly natural for us. The sound of gunfire around the corner and the smoke rising from the high-rise buildings was a dramatic tragedy. But it was a drama being played out by other players in another reality.

Review:

           I have had the good fortune of reading two of Cameron’s books.  Just like his and Kristina’s visionary simplicity in connecting with peoples our culture habitually misconstrues, they are replete with profound insights.  It is not often that I get entirely new perspectives on how our world is shaped through culture.  Cameron’s works are chock full of them.  For example, so many Americans take the oppression of women in the Middle East as a given, without ever imagining that below the head scarf, the veil or the burka there is a human being and a feminine expression of Life that deserves to be discovered before it is summarily and casually dismissed under the reductive epithet “oppressed.”  Cameron’s books speak of the amazing power of feminine presence in the Middle East, a feminine enchantment that, in the United States, people hardly have an inkling of, much less deep, experiential appreciation for.  To read Cameron’s books is to feast upon delicious new territories of the heart, it inspires taking the next flight to the Middle East so that we ourselves might become a little bit more roundly human.

            I recommend Cameron as someone who is an expression of the change our world inspires.  When you meet him, you realize that he is the change wherever he is, always ready to sing and travel widely with spirited gentleness into the landscape of the human heart.  And all of his words lead toward that knowing that there is a realm which is fully human that we can dwell in together in a way that words can’t express – but a voice, a drum or an oud can...  And that is the disarming genius that Cameron expounds; rather than taking us through more thought processes about how we might think ourselves into having a different perception of other, Cameron takes us directly into ecstatic song, directly into shared ecstasy which, once shared, radically softens the very sense of other and opens us to mutual discovery through the bliss that inhabits our core and is yearning for release and connection.  He is not out in the world resisting fear; he is out in the world inviting fear directly to the party and the feast which always awaits us in the communion of hearts.

            Cameron’s vision of turning the “missionary efforts” of the West inside out is brilliant: rather than sending Western young men and women out to the far corners of the Earth to spread Jesus and Tupperware, Cameron has a vision of sending young men and women out to learn songs, wisdom and culture from global inhabitants.  When I think of that, I am astounded by its brilliance: nothing to teach, nothing to propagandize – simply the willingness to learn from others a new way of being human together.

Olivier Tryba