About the Author

From the Mississippi River Blues Beginnings I grew up in as a 14-year-old electric guitar-playing band member in St Louis, Missouri, where I had the pleasure of hanging out at the Lindy Ballroom and Roller Skating Rink where Ike and Tina Turner were playing... Soaked in the Chuck Berry ecstasy of alcoholic rural partytimes... To the Tear-Soaked musical high-altitude musical majesties of the Peruvian Andes... To the Time-stopping hesitation Black Hole musical mysteries of Athens, Greece... To the Divine Feminine Eternal Worship Dance in the Telepathically Jeweled Musical Venues of Cairo, Amman and Damascus... To 70,000 miles of Touring the Amalgam Mix of the Cauldron called the USA... I have had the amazing wild ride of a lifetime spent playing for people to dance... I use the Oud, the Fretless Turkish Banjo, the Egyptian Flutes, my Voice... I weave the magic and the magic weaves me... Come Sing and Dance and Play with me... Cameron graduated with BA in Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, with an emphasis on the study of Quechua, the language of the Incas. Cameron also received a fellowship to attend a two-month intensive immersion program in the Inca language at Cornell University. Cameron also received a scholarship to work on a Doctoral program in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued to study the Inca language and began studies of the Tibetan language. The warmth of his musically-oriented "extended family" in Peru served to draw him away from an academic career toward a performing musical career. It was there in Peru that he began to realize the value of being a musician as well as a linguist.

Reviews

I love that the tone of his Cameron Powers' writing is also characteristic of his speaking tone (obvious for those of us lucky enough to witness his speech firsthand). Not all writers achieve this, and that, in and of itself, IS an achievement! To read his words is indeed a journey beyond fear regardless of the range of your geographic and cultural travel. In fact, the heart of this book hearkens you on an adventure of relating to yourself and others regardless of who the 'others' are (and who 'you' are, for that matter) at any point in time and space. And Powers' approach is unique. The chapter and sub-chapter headings are enough to shake ya awake and getcha moving! I mean, how can you not be drawn forth by such chapter titles as 'Do We Speak Language or does Language Speak Us?' or "'Civilization'--Whose?" or 'Sacred Flirtation' or 'Do We Really Want to Waste this Precious Lifetime?' There's such an immediacy, urgency, insight and exuberance to the content of this book that it should always be within reach. Oh yeah...don't you dare put this book down until you read the 'Tomatoes' poem at the end! - F. Medina ******* 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