SavageTimes

I don’t remember when I first discovered Maya Angelou.  It might have been when I was a freshman in high school, during Honors English, when I also discovered Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare and, during lunches, re-wrote Shakespeare’s plays to fit the current events around me because it amused me.  It might have been later in high school, or even in college, although I can’t believe it would have taken me that long.  It might not have been school at all that led me to her: I read a lot of poetry just because I liked to, and there is a good chance I discovered her on the shelves of the library that was like my second home.

I don’t ever remember trying to mimic her writing, which I find interesting.  I have two thick journals full of Emily Dickinsonian poetry that I scribed almost daily for two years after discovering her, and dozens more journals holding poetry that mimicked Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Coleridge, and, again, Shakespeare.  Not to mention the essays I wrote in the vein of John Locke and Jonathan Swift and who knows who else whose names I have forgotten but whose styles I have learned from and taken into my own without even being conscious of it.

But Maya Angelou….she was not someone whose lessons I wanted to understand.  She was someone whose rhythms I wanted to roll over me and through me.

I have experienced guilt that kept me in my head for two years.  I wasn’t silent, like Ms. Angelou was.  In fact, for some reason it was important I maintain a facade, so that no one knew the extent of my pain.  I was fractured; I split my life into different pieces inside my head so I wouldn’t have to face the whole of the guilt that I felt.

And even as I did, I grieved for who I had been.  I longed to be whole again.  And yet did not believe I would ever be so.

She didn’t rescue me.  Not right away.  Emily Dickinson did.  Or, at least, Ms. Dickinson’s words kept me moving.  Gave me motivation to keep my feet striding forward.  I read and lived and breathed and wrote Emily Dickinson for two years and then, one day, I decided I was done, and it was time to wake up and move on.

So I did.

I was still fractured, but I refused to acknowledge it, to give my pain a voice.  I believed that was the way to burn through pain back then.  I didn’t have any evidence that there was another way.

Maya Angelou didn’t heal me then, either.

It took two decades and therapy and a willingness to accept that I had moved on, and had done so well, but I wasn’t whole.  I had a false center, and with the increasing stresses life doles out–marriage, kids–that false center was quickly fraying.

It was during therapy that I began reading poetry again, and it was then that Ms. Angelou saved me.  Rather, she helped me save myself.  Her words, her wisdom, her grace, her love.  She shared, and I listened, let her words roll over me like a summer thunderstorm, full of noise and light and warm rain and an incredible sense of peace afterwards.

I threw away the false center I had built.  I dug deep and found the real center, even though it hurt, and it was difficult, and the transition from who I had built myself up to be into who I really was caused confusion in my long-term relationships.

But I perservered.  Maya Angelou’s words, her wisdom, her grace, her love, her faith: she gave me strength to find the light within again.

Since then, she has been in my head like a friend. I’d always hoped to meet her in person, somehow, just to say thank you.  I know I am not alone.  Her passing, for me, means that will never be a reality.  But I like to think she knows, now, how many of us to whom she gave strength, to whom she was considered a friend, even if we had never really met.

“Nothing can dim the light which shines from within,” is a Maya Angelou quote going around the internet recently.  I can’t find a source for it, and I don’t remember it specifically.  But it makes sense.  It sounds like something she would say to all of us who, at one time or another, just needed a wise, loving friend.