The Resilient Mind - The Courage to Love - Maya Angelou

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, popular poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The Courage to Love with Maya Angelou. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. I mentioned courage and I would like to say something else about that, finding courage in the leaders and in you who will become leaders. Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You see?

You can't be consistently kind or fair or humane or generous. Not without courage, because if you don't have it sooner or later, you'll stop and say, ah, the threat is too much. the difficulty is too high. The challenge is too great. It's an African-American song, 19th century, which is so great. It says, when it look like the sun,

wasn't going to shine anymore. God put a rainbow in the clouds. Imagine. And I've had so many rainbows in my clouds. I had a lot of clouds. But I have had so many rainbows. And one of the things I do, when I step up on a stage, when I stand up to translate,

when I go to teach my classes, when I go to direct a movie, I bring everyone who has ever been kind to me with me. Black, white, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American, gay, straight, everybody. I said, come with me. I'm going on the stage. Come with me, I need you now.

Long dead. You see? So I don't ever feel I have no help. I've had rainbows in my clouds. And the thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so that you can be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud. Somebody who may not look like you,

may not call God the same name you call God. if they call God at all. You see? I may not eat the same dishes prepared the way you do. May not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. You know, I believe that self-love is very important. If you read my work, you know I'm always talking about loving oneself.

I never trust anybody who tells me he or she loves me if the person doesn't love herself or himself. There's an African saying which is, be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. I mean, if he had something, he'd cover himself first, right? So I like to look at self-love. It is very important that it comes from within, that you have a sense of yourself,

so that when you walk into an office, You don't go alone. Bring your people with you. Bring everybody who has loved you with you. Say, Grandma, come on, let's go. Great grandpa, you've been dead all this time. Come on, let's go. I have to go in here and have an interview.

Come on, Auntie. Come on, my friends. Come, let's go. And when you walk in, people don't know what it is about you. They can't take their eyes off you. You may not be cute in the given sense. You may not be fashion model size in that particular sense. You may not be any of those things,

but they can't take their eyes off you. And they say of you in this incredible way, which I don't understand, they say, I don't know, but she has charisma. You know, what you have is all those people around you. So think of that. Anytime you have anything to do, bring everybody with you, that you can remember,

who has loved you. And then you have that sense of having been paid for. And when you walk in, people will say now, I think you're overqualified. There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine, clean so that nobody has the right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody, no mother, father, no wife, no husband, nobody.

because that may be the place you go to when you meet God. You have to have a place that you say, stop it, back up. You must not know. No. Absolutely. And that's one I told you 25 years ago. Yes. Say no when it's no.

Yeah. Say so. Back it up. Because that place has to remain clean and clear. And that has to be a place within yourself. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. When I was seven and a half.

I was raped. I won't say severely raped, all rape is severe. Rapist was a person very well known to my family. I was hospitalized. The rapist was let out of jail and was found dead that night. And the police suggested that the rapist had been kicked to death. I was seven and a half. I thought that I had caused the man's death because I had spoken his name. That was my seven and a half year old logic.

So I stopped talking for five years. Now, to show you again how out of evil there can come good, in those five years, I read every book in the black, School Library. I read all the books I could get from the White School Library. I memorized James Welland Johnson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar County Cullen, and

Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allan Poe, all the poetry. Never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guillaumeau person, I had Bozac, Rudyard Kipling.

I mean, it was a Catholic kind of reading and Catholic kind of story. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say and many ways in which to say what I had to say. I listened to the black minister. I listened to the melody of the preachers. And I could tell when they would start up on that kind of thing, when we know they mean to take our soul straight to heaven

or whether they meant to dash us straight to hell. I understood it. So out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person, more often than not introduces cynicism and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic

because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness you see in the Sorda I was saved

and I was able to draw from human thought human disappointments and triumphs enough to triumph myself. We don't understand talent. We don't understand electricity. We probably use one billion of one billionth percentage.

A less, I mean, a degree so infinitesimal that we couldn't even say how little it is. You can plug into two holes in, wall, you can light up a cathedral, you can light up a synagogue, you can light up a temple, you can light up a surgery, or you can electrocute a person strapped in a chair. Electricity makes no demands. It says, I'm here. If you are stupid, you will ill-use me.

If you're intelligent, you will use me for the furtherance of your kind. I think talent is like that. We don't know what it is, but a painter maybe he or she is born with the eyesight to see depths and you understand to have...

But that's physical. Maybe she is born with the throat that makes her sound like a bird, you know, a claratura, lyric soprano, baritone. But singing has very little to do. with voice. It is okay.

But if it really was about voice, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson wouldn't be mentioned. That's true. And I just did a story on autism. And it was the people who couldn't write, couldn't express themselves, but sang in pitch.

In pitch. And beautifully. And can compute 40 columns of three numbers each. Right. How do they do that? That's talent. That's talent. I don't know it. I mean, I thank God I have it, but I think every person born is born with talent. When you're writing poetry, are you writing to express your experiences or do you write to inspire other people? No, I write to try to say what I see, what I've seen. And of course, I hope that

It's inspirational. When you were writing phenomenal woman, did you realize how many millions of women would be inspired by that? No. I don't realize any of that. I just do the best I can. You may write me down in history

with your bitter twisted line. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust, our eyes. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? Just because I walk as if I have oil wells pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns with the certainty of tides, just like hope springing high.

Still I ride. Did you want to see me broken, bowed head and lowered eyes, shoulders falling down like teardrops, weakened by my soulful cries, Does my assess upset you? Don't take it so hard just because I laugh As if I have gold mines Digging in my own backyard You can shoot me with your words

You can cut me with your lies You can kill me with your hatefulness But just like life All right Does my sexiness offend you? Does it come as a surprise that I dance. As if I have diamonds

at the meeting of my thighs. Out of the huts of history's shame, I rise. Up from a past rooted in pain, I rise. A black ocean leaping and wide, welling and swelling and bearing in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise. Into a daybreak miraculously clear. I rise, bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave. I am the hope and the dream of the slave and self. If we've been able to stay alive at all, alive and future thinking,

alive and having enough courage to care for each other, enough courage to love, and know that we're probably 1% free, I mean, less, 1% of 60 million free of complaints. Imagine who would we be? Who would we be if we were 1% of 600 million? 6 billion. What would happen?

I tell you one thing, I think war would be laughed out. of the room. I think the very word, if somebody said, war, another person would say, you mean am I supposed to kill somebody because he doesn't agree with me? I don't think so. Just imagine. People would speak kinder, more kindly to each other.

Courtesy would be invited back into the living room, into the bedroom, into the children's room, into the kitchen. If 1% of our world was complaint-free. We would care more about the children and realize that every child is our child. The black one and the white one, the pretty one, the plain one,

the Asian and the Muslim, the Japanese and the Jewish, everyone is our child. If we were just one percent free of complaint, imagine that we would stop. blaming other people for our mistakes and hating them because they caused the mistake in our minds. Just imagine if we laughed more frequently. If we had the unmitigated courage to touch each other, it would be just the beginning of paradise, you know. Thank you for tuning into this episode. the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening

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