Posts tagged Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou’s verse on Common’s track.

Once you find your shoulders dropping

And your speech gets slow and hazy

You better change your way of being

Before you found your brain got lazy

You can build a better future when you join the winning team

If you desire a bright tomorrow, you must build a brighter dream

Dare to let your dreams reach beyond you

Know that history holds more than it seems

We are here alive today because our ancestors dared to dream

From Africa they lay in the bilge of slave ships

And stood half naked on auction blocks

From eastern-Europe they crowded in vessels overloaded with immigrants

And were mis-named on Ellis island

From South America and Mexico, from Asia, they labored in sweat shops

From all over the world, they came to America

Many shivering in rags, and still they dared to dream

Let us dream for today and for tomorrow

Let us dare to dream.

I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
Maya Angelou.