From the Ashes I Rise: The Wisdom of Maya Angelou

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

~ Maya Angelou

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month.  Join me in blogging to erase the stigma of mental illness so our loved ones can seek the help they need.

I

f it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” is some of the silliest advice I’ve ever heard.

I understand what’s being conveyed by that statement: if it’s worth doing, get out there and give it your best shot.  Don’t just sit there worrying whether it’s perfect.

But sometimes, when it’s worth writing, or talking about, it’s worth marinating, editing, tweaking.  Leaving and returning to it later.

My post today was going to touch on one of my hot button issues.  But then I read an epic post on the blog of my virtual writing mentor, Mary Jaksch. Basically, the author, James Chartrand, posits that if it’s worth publishing, it’s worth spending more than an hour or two to write it.

The Epicness of Maya Angelou

Instead, I want to talk about someone who was epic all by herself.  Someone with grace, poise, talent, and a heart the size of North America.  Someone who rose from the ashes of childhood abuse and trauma.  Someone who turned her tears and her sorrow and her pain into words that comforted, inspired, motivated, and called to action.

Dr. Maya Angelou.

I am not a weepy person, but having slept poorly and for only a few hours last night morphed into the world’s most nauseous migraine and exhaustion and when I saw the news about this beautiful national treasure, I almost broke down and cried.  Almost, because you know crying in public is embarrassing and shameful.

Phoenix
Image credit: Redeyesa, Deviant Art

And still I have much to learn, and much to heal from. 

Still I Rise

Every one of her poems has touched me deeply in some way.  Despite our differing backgrounds and experiences and ages, each one touched on some human experience that I could nonetheless relate to and feel and absorb. 

It’s difficult to believe she’s gone.  And as you know, death is not an easy subject for me.  But I believe that in the end, she will rise.

And because she embraced her destiny, because she embraced both past, present, and future, she has left behind an incredible legacy.  Of words and poetry and literature; of love and life and wisdom.

Her life was not easy one and yet she used it as grain for the mill; turning tragedy into something else.  Learning the hard way that you can’t change what happens to you but you can change how you react to it.

“My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry;

to get my work done and try to love somebody

and have the courage to accept the love in return.”

If only we all strived to do the same ~ what a wonderful world this would be.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

Have you read any of Maya Angelou’s books?  What touched you the most about her life or her work?

I'm Not Dead. . . Yet

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
~ Rumi

 

A

lthough apparently on Sunday night, I did go gently into that good night for a few minutes.  Note to self, remember to let the nurse know that a double shot of dilaudid equals a quick trip to the pearly gates.  Thankfully, my mother was with me and realized that not breathing and having the skin colour of a zombie is probably not normal.  And so, I woke up from a really deep snooze, surrounded by frantic nurses and doctors poking and prodding me and shouting at me to wake up.

I really hate to be woken up.  Even from the dead.

But I suppose the good Lord isn’t finished with me yet and I have still have miles of mischief to make, so here I am – alive and with one less organ in the new year.  My holistic side is very disappointed in me for not keeping my gall bladder another year.  But honestly, I was just tired of ending up in the hospital yet again with pain that would make the Pope apostatize.  It is still early in my recovery to see whether I will be one of the 34% who still have pain and can’t eat fried food (if that happens, I may lose my Southern membership card.  I will however, be going back to my 75% raw food lifestyle and have already purchased the Sticky Fingers sweets cookbook to celebrate my return to the land of the vegan living.

Which is the long way of saying – this is why you haven’t heard from me for over a month.  It has been a month of pain and slow healing, and pain dries up my creative creek.

Here’s to a new year of a raging river of creativity and no excruciating pain.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

P.S. Thanks for the all the well wishes and prayers posted on my FB page.  Y’all are the best!

What I Did for Art: Poetry and Pain

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings,
but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them,
they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: 
“Sing for us soon again;”
that is as much as to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard

 

E

ach person we meet bears a secret pain.  Just because they don’t walk with a limp, or bear an ugly scar, or have blood dripping from some horrific gash, does not mean that all is well in Wonderland.

We blessed breed of writers, we get to live our pain twice: once, while it’s happening, and the second time, when we write it down.  Hopefully in the retelling, the sting of it is mellowed, and understanding blossoms in place of bitterness and agony.

This poem was written back in May when I was feeling particularly harassed by artist responsibilities.  And as I’m feeling that way again, only with even more pressure and angst this go ‘round, I dusted it off and present it to you for your reading and empathetic pleasure.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

What I Did for Art
What does it mean

When you dream

That you have no pants

And the party is starting?

Unprepared for the future

Of tonight’s event

And what it heralds

For growth, prosperity –

Responsibility.

I don’t want to grow up

I want to remain blissful,

Ignorant

Of marketing, SEO, and twitter feeds.

The artist craves silence,

Solitude

And the space to create and just be.

She will starve if she doesn’t let others

Know of the beauty inside her;

But she will starve is she doesn’t tend

The fire alone when she needs to.

I walk along the edge of a dam  –

Defying the falls of demand and domain,

Gazing into the quiet pools of creative contemplation

That keep the river fed.

How to walk between them

without slipping on pride and place

And drowning in exhaustion?

Although I’ve heard the artist

Is more valuable

Once she’s gone.

©May 2012 Mikaela D’Eigh

On the Road to Recovery: Or Why You Haven't Heard From Me

It is in human nature to relax, when not compelled by personal advantage or disadvantage.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

O

r when one is flat on one’s back

Wretched writer, leaving my dear reader friends alone both Friday and Monday with nary a word!

Rude, I say!

Such it is in the age of instant messaging, tweets, etc.  However, it was not for lack of wanting, but for lack of both cell service [which runs my home internet] and general physical equilibrium.

Thursday and Friday I wrestled with some demon food that held me up in knots.  I finally calmed the monster down with some medication.  But by then it was Saturday morning.

Blight it!*

Then Sunday, I fell in the garden [yes that garden!] and brusied by back and few other choice bones and was, literally, flat on my back [and a heating pad] until this morning.

I’m still sore and still a little cranky for having lost four good days to do something creative or useful.  But glad to be on the road to recovery.  I promise a full report tomorrow, on Hobby Farm day, as the agony and the fury happened there.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

*One of the things I did do over these past four days is read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Knife Sharing series.  If you like fantasy stories with a whisper nod to the Shire, take up and read.  I couldn’t put them down!  One of her main characters loves to say "Blight!" A lot.