Try to be a Rainbow in Somebody’s Cloud
I never followed Maya Angelou’s life or writings much, but hearing of her passing from this life, I was drawn to know more about what made her so endearing. In stature, she was six feet tall, but the imprint she left because of her remarkable life is beyond measure. She was raped by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of seven. She testified against the man, who was later beaten to death by a mob. She said, “My 7-1/2-year-old logic deduced that my voice had killed him, so I stopped speaking for almost six years.”
She dropped out of school at age 14 to become the city’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, graduated at 17, and gave birth a few weeks later. Maya never went to college, but she learned six languages and received more than 30 honorary doctoral degrees. She taught American studies at Wake Forest University, worked with Martin Luther King to advance civil rights, and published best-selling works of fiction and poetry. In 2010, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
When I saw this quote by her, “Try to be a rainbow in somebody’s cloud”, I felt her tender heart. That quote came from a book, “Letter to My Daughter”, she wrote, and dedicated to the daughter she never had. In the book she shared about her tumultuous life that taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex, paradoxically, left her with her greatest gift, a son.
I wanted to share a little about her here because, once again, we see how miserable someone’s life started…..didn’t determine where she ended up. But where she started, was the seed for the harvest of blessings later in life. She put the past behind, but used it to fuel her future. She determined to move forward with a tenacious faith and will to make life better for herself and others. And the moral of this post, is to urge you and I to take the mistakes, failures, disappointments and miseries of our past, and use them to propel us to our future, and to help others along the way. In fact – let’s be the rainbows in other people’s clouds. That would be a grand starting point in writing OUR memoirs!