Dear Maya
~~~
Dear Maya (aka Dr. Angelou),
I have to say I feel stupid. For a few reasons.
First, I somehow made it all the way through my formal education without reading any of your work beyond a poem or two. I was in school when you read at the inauguration of Clinton, and even though I remember that moment and your presence in the halls of my schools I never came into contact with anything of real gravity until Oprah foisted it upon me. My second shame is that although we lived on this earth together I was ignorant of your true impact until you had already passed. I just feel stupid.
Last year was a particularly challenging year for me personally for a multitude of reasons, not least of which was waking up to love for the first time in nearly a decade and doing so too late. The refrain I keep hearing from those wiser than me is, “It’s not your fault,” and as much as as I understand that intellectually you know the heart and the mind operate at different speeds and from slightly different information. My heart has broken before, so deeply and so fundamentally that it reshaped my own dreams. It’s happened twice before, actually, and each time it’s taken me nearly 10 years to recover. The process was familiar: love shattered into heartbreak, curdled into hate and resentment into cynicism, wrapped into a self identity that actively killed any new love until enough years passed that I would forget. I committed to myself that it wouldn’t happen this way again. And, Sister Maya (if I may*), that was the work.
I committed that I would not let love turn into hate for expediency. Every time anger crept into my heart for this man, I turned it away. I chose to not kill that love because I knew doing so would break my heart doubly and spin me right back into a cycle that brought me to my knees yet again. I know today my love for that man may even be stronger today than it was the day he told me his biggest No, but separate from pining it is merely alive in me, brother to the other loves that live inside me that I refuse to strangle in any way.
My mother has played audience to parts of this battle against a closing heart my entire life, and knowing I’m never one to take direct advice she slipped a refrigerator magnet in my Christmas stocking this past holiday. “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time,” it says, attributed to you. The truth of it struck me immediately, but each time I see it again it opens me again. Because it is our only job here on this world: to love and love again and again. And the times that we don’t love are just spaces between.
My heart is broken but it is not closed. I like to think of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, wherein they repair broken plates and bowls with gold foil, highlighting the breaks instead of hiding them and in the process creating a new piece that is even more beautiful than it was before it shattered. Perhaps if it’s broken enough it will turn to pure gold.
Reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for the first time as a white man at 32 is at once a tragedy and also an education. I’m finally having questions answered (you saw god as a white man when you were a child!), but I’m finding that what’s sticking with me of your wisdom (that you told Oprah (twice!) that you were en route to while the rest of us firmly saw you there) is your lines around forgiveness.
What has stuck with me that you’ve said, even deeper than trusting love one more time and always one more time, is what you said to Oprah when you forgive: “I’m done with it.” At one point you painted the image of laying resentment, or anger, at the foot of the person who inspired it and leaving it there. At the beginning of this year I learned that Love is Forgiveness, and what you teach is Forgiveness is Freedom. Forgiveness as an act of love is to create space for everything a person is, to recognize that we love people not illustrations of who they are or who we want them to be. But rather that they are as petty and broken as ourselves and if we harbor love for them we will forgive them for the very things that would cause us to beg forgiveness, and all the other moments we can’t even imagine. That was a true lesson to me.
But your lesson of Forgiveness as Freedom is an adjacent lesson, or perhaps the same, in that Forgiveness is also an act of self love. To be done with a vampiric force, anger or resentment, it saps endlessly until we set it free. And not always like a caged bird, but also like a sick pet whose time has come if only we’ll let the suffering end.
Finally, Sister Maya, there’s one more lesson that will be hardest for me. Trusting love one more time and always one more time is a muscle I know, but must challenge myself to reinvigorate. Forgiveness is within my reach. But the story Oprah told of being in your home for a party and while the party percolated an attendee began a racist and homophobic joke. You plucked it out of the air from across the room (Oprah recalls astonishment that you could hear what was being said above the din, and so far from it) and asked the guest to leave. What you say about words that are made to make someone “less than,” and how they are poison and will always be poison (“you cannot pour that into Bavarian crystal and call it otherwise”) brings voice for me my feelings about “faggot” and how I won’t let my gay brothers speak the word around me. But further, the purity of space — your abject avoidance of vulgarity — feels so far from where I am right now and as much as I love the ideal it will require a divorce inside myself that I don’t know if I’m ready to make.
I know from when your mother’s boyfriend assaulted and raped you you learned the power of words because you saw your own words bring his death. And as much as they didn’t — his actions and the chosen family of your mother did — they also did, because in speaking you brought the light to the darkness he created. There’s a lesson there that few of us will ever learn as deeply or as clearly. The way to start it for me would be an overhaul of lazy humor and relationship building, but the aspiration is grace. A certain level of vulgarity, sarcasm, and humor are how I operate on a daily basis, and like my angers and resentments, I almost don’t know who I would be without them. RuPaul Charles tells us that we’re born naked and the rest is drag, so I guess I need to put on a new persona while I learn this last lesson. I will have to get closer to your example.
Sincerely,
Pete Forester
(*When you describe how you got your name “Maya” from Bailey calling you “my-a-sister” I felt like I was invited into a secret, and can now only think of you as “Maya,” not out of familiarity but out of the intimacy bourn by hearing your closest stories.)