Slow down and think about the lessons of the elders.
Maya Soetoro-Ng
You really need to love something or someone in order to work hard enough to be very successful. You have to believe in something and have a certain optimism. Faith and optimism come from love.
I'm a teacher, so much of what I'm doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.
We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.
My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.
My mother would have enjoyed the idea that her name was being used to build bridges. She cared a great deal and was very thoughtful and passionate about education and young women.
One of the things that I have my students do is to take a look at English-language newspapers from all around the world in order to see the different ways in which the same story might be told.
I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.
Barack himself is very much a regular guy, not a silver spoon, incredibly smart, but, you know, he's a scholarship kid, made good use of the resources that were available to him, worked incredibly hard.
It was as a mother that I needed my mother back, and I needed to conjure her anew and think about what she would have counselled and what she would have given.
This is not a family of privilege by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is very low key.
I think we could benefit from world history that is specifically taught in a multi-faceted fashion that allows for an understanding that perspectives on truth can be very different.
My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious.
I ended up very American and very Indonesian and a little bit of a lot of things.
My mother was a courageous woman, and she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep.
I'm half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I'm Latina when they meet me. That's what made me learn Spanish.
Philosophically, I would say that I am Buddhist.
Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.
We can do much to help our communities loosen their boundaries and begin to welcome a multitude of ways of being to make sure that individuals of mixed race, religion, or ethnicities don't feel the need to choose one or the other but see their layers as a gift, something that adds beauty.
Being told that I looked like I belonged everywhere and to everyone helped me feel my fledgling pride in my own multiracialism.
The rich emotional tapestry of being a mother, becoming a mother, connects you to your own mother. I didn't realize how much I'd become her. I pass a mirror, and am surprised by how much I look like her.
I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.
The facts are simply that my brother was born in the United States at the Kapiolani Hospital for Women and Children in 1961. His birth certificate has been authenticated by a number of sources.
I think it's true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.
We need to teach our children empathy and care and love and communication and social responsibility in preparation for adulthood.
I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people 'othering,' when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.
I think you can have varied and seemingly contradictory depictions of a single person because we all have many facets and, in a way, many selves.
We all have a limited amount of good judgment.
As children, we develop some scorn for our parents and their imperfections.
I like that there are young people being given opportunities to explore and learn and grow and become themselves with a path that is associated with my mother. She would have liked that very much.
My brother loves this country deeply. He has laid down roots, and he has always been incredibly patriotic and committed to this country.
Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.
Government should exist in order to help fortify the country and make those who are in need better able to meet their own.
Government is supposed to lead by example in many cases. Government that's not particularly caring and is hands-off is not particularly inspiring.
My hope is that I can continue writing and, in the future, I can just be Maya Soetoro-Ng.
I absolutely do believe that we need to not be so myopic. We ought to throw open widely the windows on the world in order to learn more about it.
