May 2014 Profile: Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Splenic Manifestor
Born: Marguerite Johnson in Saint Louis, Missouri on April 4, 1928 at 2:10pm
Died: Wednesday, May 28th, 2014 in Winston-Salem, NC at the age of 86
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou, from her best-seller and award-winning book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”.
Poet, author, speaker, activist, teacher, actress, dancer, singer, and more! When you see a list of career titles like that, it tells you first that it was a life well-lived, but it also points to someone who’s a Manifestor. The more I read the obituaries for Maya Angelou on Thursday morning, the more amazed I was with all the things she had accomplished in her life. I knew of many of them, but the more I read, the more titles there were to add. As a young woman, she even worked as a streetcar operator in San Francisco, and in a brothel before she owned it! If you’ve seen her on Oprah, or at the White House, or at Clinton’s Inaugural, or on a stage somewhere, you’ve probably been impressed with her diction, her amazingly deep and resonant voice, her command of the language (she speaks a few), and her incredible presence (she’s six feet tall!). As one commentator proclaimed, “Everything she said sounds like poetry!” She just has the kind of voice that you can listen to while being inspired, motivated or calmed. She was truly a Renaissance woman in all of her actions and words!
It was not surprising then to discover that she was a Manifestor when I ran her chart. As a Manifestor, she did what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it. After a childhood rape (at the age of 7), she stopped talking for six years after the conviction and subsequent murder of her attacker at the hands of her uncles. Very traumatic for a child, but such will, such tenacity, and being okay with who she was becoming are all signs of a young Manifestor finding her way in a segregated and hostile world during the Depression. It’s a tale of courage that few children could have survived so spectacularly. So what was it about her chart that sparked her trajectory from obscurity in Arkansas to world renown?
First and foremost, it’s Maya Angelou’s energy type as the Manifestor, which gives her an extraordinary capacity to speak with people, bring them into her aura and then invite them to be a part of any activities she’s decided to involve herself in. Of course, many of her activities were solo to an extent, but most of know that you don’t accomplish that much success without teams along the way. Whether it was her publishers, her acting coaches, her activist colleagues, which included Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or her business partners, she was surrounded by people who could push her spirited works forward into the public realm. Her strategy as the Manifestor is to inform first, and while I didn’t read any particular instance of her “not informing” the people who needed to know certain things, I got the feeling that she played her activities rather close to the vest and wasn’t looking for others’ opinions to make her own decisions. Her authority was Splenic, which means that she would have an idea in her head, and then decided instinctually whether or not to act upon it. That kind of “knowing” plays well for a leader, a teacher, and an activist. She needn’t consult anyone but herself when making any decision. It likely made her seem regal, assured, self-confident and a little about it all. And she was.
The combination of gates and channels that she possessed added up to a queenly stature that she possessed from her late teens. Her channels (or themes of her life) included: the Money Line (always nice to have), the Channel of Talent – a combination of enthusiasm and depth, and Channel of Initiation – a combination of Shock and the Love of Spirit. Rather simply, then, her ability to bring her students, fans and audiences closer to the love of spirit via her various breadth of talents brought her substantial prosperity over the years.
Maya Angelou was such an icon throughout her life that her contributions will never be forgotten. Through her own initiation into Spirit, she was able to walk the bridge from tragedy to success with her words and her actions time and again as a teacher and mentor for many.
And of course, Maya Angelou had the Gate 56 – the Storyteller. What a fitting legacy she’s left as a storyteller!