"All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated." - Maya Angelou


When I talked about mere survival, what I meant was fighting for our lives without a sense of righteousness, inasmuch as a constant turmoil with our self-acceptance, as that of a purposeless life that leaves no name behind to the world before the day you rise up to the sky and face the judgment day.


Today, I received a BlackBerry message from a smart friend of mine, who single-handedly opened his own fro-yo business (as we all know, a pretty hot trend worldwide, and therefore a competitive industry) back in Indonesia right after he moved back from the South Bay here, and he's always broadcasting ruminative messages out of the other thousands of trivial broadcasted messages you and I get from our mobile phones nowadays.


"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." 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


These powerful words came from America's timelessly celebrated memoirist, who had no secrecy whatsoever in sharing her personal obstacles in life, sharing it into the Caged Bird, and let the world see herself through the songs it sings as none other than her own self.


Every rise and shine, by day and through the night, she managed to, very simply, sing out loud, "Good Morning," even under the careful eyes of the public, which by then (January 20, 1993) since knowing why the caged bird sings (1969), has accepted her wholly for her truthfulness, her dedication, her honesty, and ultimately, her eloquent expression we all witnessed as we listen to her songs on forgiveness for herself.


And for that reason, her inaugural address won the 1994 "Best Spoken Word" Grammy Award, thus leaving behind a name imprinted on America as one of the first iconic women, the bravest, earliest African-American voice, and still the best creative autobiographer of our lifetime.