Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

6-18-2023

Retiring and moving have their powerful moments.  Yesterday was one.  We have returned to Union to move (Tuesday).  Home building, studio building, and dorm rental have all converged, so we are at it full tilt.  I had gone to the art department to return some things and I found it the way I always loved it in the summer, totally empty, the sweet quiet I had always cherished, filled with the possibility for my most imaginatively creative endeavors.  However, this time I was a stranger.  The house I had built was taken over by others.  I was out of place in my own palace, built perfectly to suit my creative efforts, my every creative need thought of and solved, everything created for my creativity, a 27-year tailoring to fit only me.  Now I felt oddly awkward, unsettled, I didn’t want to be here, too much loss, given over, taken.  I have no explanation—I have never felt it.  Sitting here now, the following day, I have tried to tell myself the story, to examine it as to know it but nothing is ringing my heart’s bell.  Here is the best I can do.  It was much like this must feel; being gifted a mountain meadow to make your home and 27 years gently pushing back the wild to allow you to live in creative peace, the earth, God, you alone being as creative as you can imagine. Then one day you were called away to another mountain.  After a brief period, you returned to get the last of your belongings only to find they had “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

The first time I came to Union I entered at the other
end of this hallway and walked to the Art Dept. at this end.
I thought it was the longest hallway I had ever seen.