Through the Windows of My Mind

When I look at my photo of light and open spaces at Strathmore Music Center, I sometimes see an intriguing world beckoning for me to come there, outside the window.  I think about Alice, who stepped “Through the Looking Glass” and explored a world related to, but in some ways very different from, our own.  In another story, Peter had a wonderful trick of flying in through the window and later flying away through the same window to a very different world.  Wendy loved to listen to his stories about his other world.

The child is father to the man.  Robert Louis Stevenson was an invalid child who spent most of his childhood in bed.  His nurse would carry him to the window so he could look out.  Back in bed, he would play with his toys, sometimes pretending that he was exploring outdoors.  Some of his childhood impressions were expressed years later in his poems in “A Child's Garden of Verses,” which I learned to read on.

Robert Frost wrote a poem about a tree outside his bedroom window.  He said

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. 

Many of Georia O’Keefe’s paintings are about light and open space.  When she was a little girl,  someone told her to build a doll house.  She went outside, found two sticks of about the same size, and put them down on the ground in a plus (+) shape.  Her dollhouse had lots of open space connected to the outdoors.

Wordsworth was impressed with daffodils that he had seen outside dancing in the wind.  Later, in a pensive mood, he saw them with his “inward eye” and found that

...then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

I thought of all these things and will likely think of more just from looking at my photo.