Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Day Sixty Three


As I'm facing the end of my residency, I'm contemplating what has transpired since I first left Kalamazoo for Memphis. I'm also looking at what my expectations were and what has actually transpired. Was I missed? Will I be missed? Why is it important to be missed? Have things improved because of my absence? What things have lacked luster because I've been gone? Will my return be met with joy? And so on and so forth. Its almost too soon to tell the overall affect my sabbatical has had on my work, the organization I work for, and the people I have worked with (both at home and here at the Metal Museum). Here are a few quotes that have struck me as pertinent to the situation at hand.


“When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home” Thornton Wilder


“It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home.”  Jalal ad-Din Rumi


“I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.” Sidonie Gabrielle


“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you” Christian Morganstern


  “Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.” Albert Einstein