About the Book

This week I'm rereading Maya Angelou's incredible book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" through audible.  It is a beautiful, touching book. Even more importantly - it is the kind of book that gives you a new understanding of things.  

I think, for me, this is because Maya Angelou doesn't tell her story in bits and pieces.  She tells it whole.  

It's all there. Dark, ugly, funny, beautiful, shameful, graceful, heartbreaking. But she isn't dark or ugly or shamed or broken. 

And this is an important point.

My Application

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is about life and racism and coming of age and trauma and courage and many other things. But, for me, the most important point it made was about childhood and how it affects us and what we can do about that.

Things can go wrong for us in childhood in about a million different ways. In my case, family problems and my own unique neurobiology made my grade school, and high school, years difficult. I think it's usual for people to carry something of that kind of experience with them into adulthood, as I did.

And then, someone comes along - like Maya Angelou - and clearly shows us that we do not have to hold onto the darkness and the brokeness and that, if we are brave enough, there is another way.

That way is to tell our story. Though not necessarily literally.

Which, for me, is where journaling and blogging and maybe even coming back to fiction writing come in.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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• To buy "Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou please click here (affiliate links).

About Our Lady of Guadalupe  

Our Lady of Guadalupe first appeared to  Juan Diego, an Aztec convert to Catholicism, on December 9th and 12th of 1531 at Tepeyac Hill Mexico. During that first apparition Our Lady requested that a shrine be built on the site. The Archbishop, however, refused to approve construction unless she gave him a sign. 

The Blessed Mother then appeared a second time to Juan Diego, asking him to gather flowers from the summit of Tepeyac Hill, which was normally barren, especially in the cold of December. Juan Diego obeyed her instruction and he found Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, blooming there.

The Virgin arranged the flowers in Juan Diego's tilma, or cloak, and when Juan Diego opened his cloak later that day before Archbishop Zumárraga, the flowers fell to the floor, revealing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe imprinted on the fabric  This is the same image that is now venerated in the Basilica of Guadalupe (below).  The cloak and image have never deteriorated or faded.  

Following the apparitions the people of Mexico converted to the Catholic faith by the thousands.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!