The death of Maya Angelou is a tremendous loss for the
African-American community, but an even greater loss for all of humanity. It is as if a giant oak has been felled in
the forest and looking upward there is a broad hole against the sky. She has been a pillar in literary culture for
over 44 years. Her life speaks volumes
on the virtues of love, human kindness, and the giving of self in order to
facilitate the development of others.
She has been lauded as a poet, author, actor, dancer, playwright, civil
rights activist as well as many other distinguished roles. For me, the most
poignant factor she played was as an educator in Egypt and Ghana and eventually
the world with her artistic pursuits.
She was trying to change the world, by elevating our consciousness:
which to Maya meant mining treasure out of the minds of men and women.
Can you imagine Maya dropping out of high school at age 14,
to become America’s first African American female cable car conductor? Well, she did just that, before returning to
high school. At age 18, she also
balanced being a single parent to her only son Guy, while she worked as a
waitress and a cook. Eventually, she followed her passion and enrolled in
theater school. From such humble
beginnings came an accomplished, poet, memoirist, novelist, civil rights
activist, educator, dramatist, producer, and playwright. She has received 50 honorary doctorates from
universities all over the world, has 30 best selling titles to her credit, and
received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
Did I fail to mention she received the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000,
and the Lincoln Medal in 2008, along with three Grammy's? Where life handed her the baton, she ran an
excellent race forward to achieve great renown, acclaim, and accomplishment.
There are some high
school drop-outs who need to hear Maya’s story, as well as some single mothers
who are actively in their struggle. Many
times when a person is in the middle of a situation it looks impossible, but
Maya is a textbook example, that when life gives you lemons, you add sugar and
make lemonade. There are times that the
situation will look impossible, but it is entirely possible, if a person will
dare to dream. We must know that the
dream is still alive.
As a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and a songwriter,
Maya Angelou has been a integral part of my reading diet, that I have drawn
great inspiration from. The yielding of
her life’s energy and her being memorialized only serves this blogger with the
tremendous opportunity to observe Maya’s life example and legacy; to illustrate
to each reader that the rare and precious Lotus Blossom (flower) only blooms in
the muddy swamps. Beautiful things often spawn from terrible circumstances.
Did you know that this year alone 1.8 million new
millionaires were made around the globe.
Amazingly, 1.7 million of these new millionaires came from America. That’s almost 12,000 more than the previous
year, of 2012. I know the reader is
thinking, you were just talking about Maya Angelou what does this have to do
with that? The answer: Maya was an educator at learning institutions
in over 3 countries, she wanted to change the world and she personally educated
thousands of men and women, but as an activist, writer, and leader who was
successful in business, she impacted hundreds of millions of lives potentially
and more in counting in the wake of her death.
She understood one principle thing: you can’t help anybody if you don’t
have any money. A physical world has
physical subsistence needs. You feed the body and then you can minister to the
mind. Being a new millionaire is not an end, but I assert that it is a means to
an end
.
Maya Angelou, ( Apr. 4, 1928 to May 28,2014), came from
obscurity, yet gave to the world in plurality very choice parts of her heart
and soul. She lived the American Dream and changed the world in the process. Maya is gone now, but her legacy is left
behind, it says: I did it, and so can you…The Dream is Still Alive.
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