The Flight of the Mind” by Virginia Woolf is aptly titled for an artist whose life’s work was a celebration of creativity, whose passion was freedom of thought and whose deepest commitment was to the power of the imagination.
It is not surprising that the book was her first – Volume One of her collected letters, some of which were written before she entered her teens – for it is in children that we see the most vivid evidence of the imagination at work. Reality and the press of daily life take their toll and many of us have given up creating new worlds well before we reach adulthood.
It’s sad, but understandable. Real life is serious business – there are tasks to be completed and bills to be paid and we aren’t all destined to be dreamers or visionaries anyway.
But what if we are? What if we are actually meant to build castles, not in the air but right here on earth? What if the plan is for us to soar, to mount up as eagles, to capture the wind? What are we doing to ourselves when we squash our dreams into boxes, and persuade ourselves that growing up means abandoning the courage and the visions we had when we were young?
Here at Karuna Vihar, we know that the dreams of the young are the hope of the future. We know that nurturing a child’s imagination is the best chance we have of creating the kind of world we want them to grow up in.
The 2007 calendar is dedicated to the memory of our friend Linda Upadhyaya, Karuna Vihar’s pediatrician for nearly a decade and a believer in the world of play and the power of the imagination. When Linda died early last year at the age of 46, we lost a grownup with the soul of a child, a woman who never forgot what it means to be young and full of promise and a doctor who understood that magic and delight are as crucial to a child’s health as vitamins and fresh air.
In this, Karuna Vihar’s eleventh calendar, we celebrate the imagination. We honor the life of a woman who helped children and their parents discover how to dream and we give thanks for spark and fire and the flight of the mind – who can say where it will take us next?
-–Jo Chopra
