From the Library

"Yet when the silence overtakes me, I can almost believe that a life of imagination is close at hand, and is so rich as to put all the glamor and the noise of "real life" to shame."

:: Anthony Esolen

"Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child"

[ just some light graduate school reading ]

page 216

Diana Mini film :: Fall Explorations with Mikey :: 2013

The ironic nature of my grad school life right now is that I am writing a paper on the neurology  of imagination as I sit under the LED lights of an enclosed study room box in front of a lit up screen slowly decaying my corneas. It seems contrary to my topic of research as I find myself so utterly void of imagination as creativity is buried in mounds of research and stacks upon stacks of books. These next few weeks are the last of the semester, but the more I read about imagination, the more I want to set my soul free from this library hole and gallivant upon summer shores. I know that time will be here quick, but my vision is only cast as far as tonight… (until midnight in the library...) which inevitably pushes "the end" forever away.

True Life: My dad came and visited me at Wheaton and took this photo of me at Buswell library.
Quintessential grad life right here folks.

As a child, I disappeared into the simplistic peaceful world of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
When I stumbled upon this quote mid-research regarding rest and solitude, I now understand why:

"Laura Ingalls Wilder looked back upon her childhood spent in the most forbidding places: a deep forest in Minnesota, or the plains of the Dakota territory… There was little noise in that life. And so she heard things: the roar of a snow-melt swollen creek at Christmastime in Kansas, or the plaintive wailing of Pa's fiddle, as he played his favorite old songs of an evening, while Ma was sitting at her needlework, and the children were falling asleep in their beds." 

"Such a place, a home, fit for human beings, and all their endless yearnings, is a place of stillness even when the neighbors come in stamping their boots and hollering their greetings. Its days follow the rhythms of the season and of the hard and noble work to be done. Its nights grow hushed in the sounds of the great word beyond, and the greater world within, the human world, with its quiet breathing, and silent and astonishing thought."

Holding onto the promise of the end.
Finishing strong. Making it. Conquering.
{ photo from Waupaca, WI in Fall 2013 }

Le sigh.