Maya Angelou: Inspiring Stories of Healing and Survival
Jan.30.12

As my project gained momentum, I began asking everyone I interviewed, and now I ask  everyone (you can check out and add your own suggestions to our Wish List):

“If you could ask anyone in the world what his or her greatest epiphany in life was, who would it be?”

Maya Angelou had been a name that had been suggested to me many times via my website but when I interviewed Stacey Lannert, she really hit it home, saying that Dr. Angelou’s book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, helped her get through her darkest days and gave her hope and strength while she was incarcerated. It helped her “turn a corner” and know that she too could survive and thrive, no matter what had occurred or was occurring in her life. I was so moved by her request, that I reached out to Dr. Angelou and she generously and miraculously agreed to an interview! I have to say, it was one of the most profound interview experiences of my life thus far.

Last week I posted a blog on PositivelyPositive.com with an excerpt from my interview with Maya Angelou, and received a wonderful email and epiphany story from a reader that also moved me very much. The title of her story is completely the philosophy here at Epiphany Channel – Share Your Story; Give Your Gifts. Thank you, Elisha V., for sharing this with us, and we hope you all will feel inspired and free to share your stories and suggestions with us any time.

Share Your Story; Give Your Gifts 

Everyone has their stories of trials, and through them emerge the Gift of Triumph. It is a part of the Human Experience that no one is exempt from. If you choose to share your story you may not know who your words may reach, but you are all too familiar with the feelings of the pain and sadness, the self-doubt or despair of your experiences. You remember feeling all alone, silently enduring the heartache, coping with your loss.

But you also remember there was also a turning point – a moment of pure determination, of profound insight – that told you everything was going to be okay. And by the time you’d moved completely through the struggle, you came to realize that it had always been okay. The experience you’ve endured was designed especially for you – to bring you to realize your utmost potential and your own unique gifts.

In 1970, a young woman from St. Louis, Mo. chose to share her story with the world. It was an amazingly beautiful story full of history and family; tragedy and triumph. This young woman had endured everything from racism to rape, and she emerged an even stronger and more beautiful being. Her story has truly been an inspiration to many.

I’m not sure why this young woman decided to write her book, to tell her story. But I can say this with certainty: When she first decided to write it in 1969, she did not know that by 1991 her story would become a lifeline for one depressed and suicidal teenage girl in Chicago, IL — a girl who had suffered through her own battles with discrimination, rape and isolation. A girl who decided when she remained alive and well after swallowing a handful of over 20 various prescription drugs, that God may have a plan for her life.

Feeling hopeless and confused, she grabbed a book off her bookshelf and began reading. The connection she felt with this author gave creation to her own personal belief that if the woman in the book could go “through it” and make it out okay, then so could she.

This belief eventually led the teenage girl to re-establish her personal relationship with God. Her faith increased, and her Will to live returned.

To this day, she is extremely grateful to God for the inspiration and the strength she found from reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Your words helped to save my life, Dr. Maya Angelou. A million times THANK YOU for sharing your story. May God continue to Bless you. ____________________________________________

So how will you share your story? How will you give of your gifts?

~ by Elisha V.

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New Epiphany Blog Launch! Positively Positive You Should Check Out PositivelyPositive.com
Jan.17.12

I am proud to launch my first blog, The Anatomy of an Epiphany, as a contributor on the amazing, prolific website, PositivelyPositive.com today – complete with an updated video trailer and story of the epiphany that sparked the idea for this project. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it is a wonderful community of people and a site full of quotes, blogs, videos and photos to inspire, uplift, inform, encourage and CELEBRATE positive thought, and change. Like the Epiphany Channel Facebook Fan Page they post inspirational quotes every day, so it’s a great site to add to your pages/bookmarks for the new year if only to grab the daily great quotes and short posts…a fabulous tool at your fingertips for short, digestible positive food for thought. I mean with a Fan Page of over a million peeps, they must be doing something right–in fact, of that, I’m positively positive.

Check out The Anatomy of an Epiphany and explore PositivelyPositive.com and let us know what you think!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJAVjWpZzKs[/youtube]

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Happy New Year & Happy Epiphany Day! Here’s to New Realizations & New Beginnings!
Jan.6.12

Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany Day! Here’s to a season of new realizations and new beginnings! and a little history and definition of “epiphany”…

Epiphany, from the Greek “epiphaneia,” means “appearance” or “manifestation,” and was first seen in English around 1310. Epiphany, when it’s capitalized, is the name of the Christian church celebration of the three wise men or magi coming to see the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. This is usually celebrated on January 6, which in the Western church calendar starts an Epiphany season that lasts until the first day of Lent. It is a season of new beginnings; after the visit of the magi, church feast days and readings recount the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, and Jesus’ first public miracle at Cana, where he turned water into wine. For about three hundred years, it meant the religious feast day and nothing else.

By the mid-1600s, epiphany—with a lowercase e—was being used to refer to other manifestations of Christ and to appearances of divine beings in other religions. Since the nineteenth century, the meanings of epiphany began expanding. Writers such as Thomas De Quincey (who wrote of “bright epiphanies of the Grecian intellect”) and William Wordsworth, then later James Joyce (who wrote that epiphanies “are the most delicate and evanescent of moments”) and John Updike, helped broaden the definition of epiphany to include the secular realm.

Today it carries a range of meanings, including “an intuitive grasp of reality,” “an illuminating discovery, realization, disclosure, or insight,” or simply “a revealing scene or moment,” or (my favorite) “a moment of sudden or great realization about life that usually changes you in some way.”

Wishing you a year full of great health, happiness, prosperity and amazing epiphanies always!

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Epiphany: The Power of Art
Nov.1.11

In honor of the Day of the Dead (and this being an extra-special Day of the Dead with it’s happening on 11/1/11 – I am one of those people who thinks multiple “1’s” mean something), I thought it’d be fun to post this interview. If you’ve never been to one of these celebrations, you can sort of get an idea of what it’s like by following the links above or watching the video below, but I highly recommend experiencing it for yourself if you can. Feliz Dia de los Muertos!

“Art is capable of reaching across time and space 
to communicate and change us.”
– Samantha Breault

 The Interview

I randomly met Samantha when I went to the Day of the Dead celebration in downtown Los Angeles.  She was dressed up in full Day of the Dead makeup so I still don’t know what she looks like “in real life.”  Like her anonymous tattooed man at the exhibit she talks about below, she is anonymous to me in that I could never point her out in a crowd – she was completely made up & indistinguishable like so many people there that celebratory evening.  I was simply asking people, man-on-the-street style, what their greatest epiphany in life was.  Instead of thinking I was completely insane, and blowing me off (then again, I wasn’t the one in a full skeleton/Day of the Dead get-up), she graciously answered with this very short but interesting epiphany.  The people she wanted to know about their greatest epiphanies were Walt Disney and Jim Henson because she wants to hear from “the people who take imaginary creatures and put a soul behind them.”  Interesting person.  I’m going to do start doing random, man-on-the-street interviews more often…

***

The moment I think I probably had one of my greatest epiphanies was when I was in the Museum of Science visiting an exhibit where there were about 200 people who were dead that were somehow preserved and were presented as art.  It escapes me what the name of this event was at this moment.

This exhibit had a great impact on me.  All these bodies in this it were very anonymous.  You didn’t know who they were, or what they did.  But there was this one body with a tattoo.  I have tattoos so I really started studying it and became fascinated with this one anonymous man’s tattoo.  From the tattoo it was obvious that this man had served in the armed forces.  Suddenly I had this thought, and it sort of shocked me, but I realized, “Wow, he just spoke to me.”  Even after death, as this piece of artwork, he spoke to me through this tattoo, this art that he wore on his body. He said to me, “I am somebody. I was in the Army, and I did something. I believed in something. I did something with my life. I lived, I served.”

This man spoke to me from the dead, and I thought it was beautiful.  That was for me, an epiphany. Someone can speak to me from the dead.  I thought it was gorgeous that he spoke to me through time and through art – the art he had become and through his body art.  I realized, when I get tattooed maybe someone will be communicated with, even after death, and they might see me, or see a part of me, and know that there is or was something that I loved.  Maybe I will tell someone there’s something I did or how I feel or felt in that one image. I don’t know if that makes sense, but anyway, I have even more tattoos than I did then and find them very meaningful in a different, much deeper way now!  I also realize just how important and powerful art can be – any kind of art – whether it be paintings, music, sculptures, preserved dead bodies or art on our bodies…art can reach across time and space to communicate and change us.

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Epiphany: Beautiful Definition & Oral History in Action
Oct.28.11

“At that moment, the whole universe made sense and we knew a sort of peace and understanding rarely found in human experience: an epiphany.”
– Ron Matson

I have an epiphany story from last summer as we were in the Black Hills of South Dakota with our entire set of kids, marriage partners, and 7 of my 8 grandkids.

I was explaining the word “epiphany” to our 9 year-old grandson, Alex, as an outgrowth of a story about his grandmother and me having an epiphany together one day during a visit to the Badlands. She and I were listening to Lakota Indian chants on the radio, smelling the sage and goldenrod, and then drove to the top of a bluff on a dirt road and suddenly found ourselves smack in the middle of a buffalo herd!

I explained to Alex that at that moment the whole universe made sense and we knew a sort of peace and understanding rarely found in human experience: an epiphany.

He listened well. Later, back at the reunion cabin where all of us were staying, Alex’s uncle asked him about the water tubing event that day when he “caught some air” with great elation. Uncle Dave asked, “What was that like?” and Alex responded, “I had an epiphany while I was up there.”

– Ron Matson, Wichita, KS

 

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