planning my circle of quiet

The books traveling back to school with me...

1. Letters to A Young Poet
2. A Room of One's Own
3. The Awakening
4. Wuthering Heights
5. I Am the Clay
6. The Power and the Glory
7. My Name is Asher Lev
8. Stories (by Katherine Mansfield)
9. Orthodoxy
10. God In the Dock (Essays by C.S. Lewis)
11. The Color of Water
12. Paris to the Moon
13. Miriam's Kitchen
14. Father Brown
15. Finally Feminist
16. Writing Tools
17. Anne of Green Gables

Whether or not all -- or any -- of these will be read during what is set up to be a hectic and trying junior year, we shall see. But I'm hopeful.

I have noticed a recurring pattern: each year I head back to school with every intention of holding to my ideals of self-reflection, reading literature, weekly times of solitude, and maintaining an interest in those things that spur me on towards the sort of person I hope I am becoming. Yet every year it seems I let my ideals slide -- due to fatigue, peer pressure, and busyness. This year, I hope, will be different.

Awareness and intentionality are the stepping stones to success, hence I hope this year will evidence a change. I am aware of how I struggle, where I fail, and I have planned in times to read, times to be alone, times to self-reflect and evaluate.

Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody--away from all these people I love most in the word--in order to regain a sense of proportion.... My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. There's a natural stone bridge over the brook, and I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the water, and things slowly come back into perspective.... If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, pg. 4