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Poetry

Maya Angelou – 1928-2014 – Honoring a 21C Honesty

Still I rise

“Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.” 

Many are joining the awesome flow of creators in the collective advance of writing, teaching, creating and inspiring humanity to open the windows of perception – consciousness, awareness, emptiness – in order to move to a deeper liberation that will allow global evolution.

This is moving with a passion, a passion born from existence itself in physical form. After an experience of awakening, enlightenment or self-realization – it becomes clear that there is nothing private about this – it is of service to the whole – and as such, a passion is born – a passion to be of service. This rises through the energetic body to the heart where it expresses as compassion – using everything available – our wounds, our breakage, our experience, our gifts, our cash – all resources on deck to advance this shared purpose.

Of course, at any stage we can get hooked and begin a deepening of the circulation of awakening, enlightenment and self-realization – bringing an even richer and more refined expression of passion. This is the dance of freedom.

Sometimes, there appears among us, one for whom this passion is directly flowing in full refinement and power. Born and coded from the pit of suffering in the emptiness – Maya Angelou is one of these.

Embodying perhaps many of the shadows of our generation. Slavery. The female voice. Sexuality. Body size, Maya Angelou rose like a global therapeutic antidote to the consensual neurosis. And out of the rage of suffering in emptiness and through the alchemy of empathy, a global voice began to resonate – a female voice that would change the world through the subliminal depths of attitude and beliefs.

Angelou’s ability to touch us so deeply was born from the nothing-to-lose suffering of emptiness – that space where society and the collective norms throws all its forbidden features out of the collective consciousness. From this space, the ego evaporates and empathy towards this collective pool of suffering emerges. This pool is the space of the forbidden, the banished, the abusers and the abused. A space of cruelty so keen that the world turns its conscious eyes away, packaging the grief and despair emerging anyway in the awareness of the heart in order to diminish its power.

By having the courage to move through the fears collected around these  personal, generational and global demons of the emptiness, Angelou moved like a modern master through a process of self-realization in which each fear is exposed as illusion and the slavery of existence to structures of power, fear and threat is liberated. From this space, her truth is timeless.

Is there sadness  in the passing over today of Maya Angelou? Also. But from one perspective, the closure of this particular, splendid, individual and magnificent life is resonating with a celestial orchestra of victory. The victory of humanity and the victory of truth.

 


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The passion to serve the 'other' in the relief of suffering through processes of awakening is born out of the simple truth that it makes me feel better. Your welfare is my welfare. We never were divided. The love we share is the love we experience. So it is with peace.

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