Prosaic Ponderings

 In Virginia Woolf's feminist lecture  A Room of One's Own , she articulates what seems to be a common truth for most people, introvert, extrovert and ambivert alike: that people need both the physical and mental space to be undisturbed if they are to generate their best creative work. While critics have pointed out that her treatise on the creative needs of literary women was an elitist argument based on her limited experience which failed to consider women who were not "independently wealthy," as she was, she still broke important ground. Woolf's premise focused on access to a private environment conducive to creating works of fiction, but in this brief musing I will expand upon that idea and ask, what about a seemingly more universal need to access a space which simply affords us peace and quiet? What does that space look like? Usually, when people talk about finding peace and quiet, they bring up a pristine concept of nature in which they can finally connect w...

A short critical essay for an Environmental Justice/Indigenous Studies class: I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be “of the land.” Here in the big city, I find myself thinking a lot about the land I grew up on. I dream of it, long for it, and only truly feel at peace when I return to it. It’s like all of the noise slips away when I am deep in the woods I grew up in, sitting on that sacred hill overlooking the joining of three streams. I think you can, over time, develop connections with other places that you spend a significant amount of time in, but it will never be quite as significant as the land you were raised on. I only moved away from this land four years ago. Since the age of five I lived in an intentional conservation community in the rural outskirts of Clarke County in Athens, Georgia. Named for the white family who maintained the 132 acres as a cotton farm in the century following the Creek nation's removal, Kenney Ridge Community was started in 1993 by a small gr...