Daily Journal #127 - Maya Angelou

I can count on one hand the women who have changed my life.

My mother, Mrs. Martin, Mrs. Murry, and Maya Angelou.

My mom for obvious reasons - a real life role model of strength.  She never went to college, worked in a dry cleaners and served her community as a 9-1-1 operator for over 25 years.  She also raised two girls as a single mother.  Mad respect.

Mrs. Martin for being the retired schoolteacher who lived in the house behind ours.  She took me and my sister under her wing and each day after school would invite us into her home to play board games, read books, and eat sweet and salty snacks.  Her presence in my life is one of the main reasons I could read before I started school and why I love books so much.

Mrs. Murry for being THE TEACHER who changed the trajectory of my life and led me to a deeper understanding of what learning really is.  Being in her Autonomous Learners Program for two years in middle school taught me so much about my passions and creativity.

And Dr. Maya Angelou for being a poet, author, teacher, and spiritual guide whose books introduced me to a minority female whose battle scars didn't define her.  She was as magnificent in person as she was in my imagination.  She was true blue.

Her words are etched in my heart forever, and it is one lesson she taught that rings in my ears as I type and reflect on my day.

Angelou often said that words are things and that you must be careful about the words you use.  She said that words can get into the carpet, the furniture, the walls of your house.  She believed words could get in your hair, on your skin, in you.

Stories were often recounted about Dr. Angelou hosting dinner parties and crossing the room to invite a guest to "leave her house" for bigoted jokes, racist comments, improper use of words.

Can you imagine?  That six foot tall woman crossing a room to come over to you because you misspoke in her house?

I know I say things that are stupid all the time and I am a conscious, aware human being who values the other.  I shudder to think what is said in the halls of our school, whispered in the back of class, or better yet, splashed across social media in a nanosecond.  I mourn the social hierarchy that ensnares even the loveliest of you.

You MUST watch what you say and to whom you say it.  There is a palpable power in each of our hands to plant information, distort facts, chisel someone down to size, spread lies, spill secrets.  But why?

Why do some people feel such a need to belittle, to bully, to be unkind?

Why do some people fear love so much that they are willing to push away daily offers of kindness and acceptance, of understanding, empathy?

I know I'm supposed to teach you English.  Nothing more, nothing less.  But I cannot in good faith sleep at night being a willing participant in this experiment in which you are the case subject.  English skills are important but they don't hold a candle to teaching the next generation about sympathetic joy.

Our natural state is one of survival.  Eat or be eaten.

But just know that every word you speak out of turn to hurt someone else is a stain on your hands.  And just like Lady Macbeth, that "damned spot" won't come out easily once it sets.

(Any of you interested in this beautiful woman, click here to watch some clips of her speaking in 2011, 3 years before her death.  A full length episode of this exists on a somewhat sketchy site that you can find by googling Maya Angelou Master Class Full Episode.  It's 42 minutes and worth every one.)