Love
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.[1]
She
was a tiny, frail, little prune of a woman with white hair that made her look
like a Q-tip. I thought she was
fantastic. Every Tuesday Mrs. Dolcie
held story time at the Westlake Public Library (Figure 1). She’d open her eyes wide with fright, throw her hands up in
surprise, and suck me into a dream world where bears talked, the sky rained
down pancakes, and bunnies said goodnight to the moon. Of course I read along with her. I had learned to read when I was five and
felt quite above the other children because I was reading chapter books. But even so I couldn’t resist Mrs. Dolcie’s
spell, and every Tuesday I plopped myself down on the green circular rug for
twenty minutes of delight.
Afterward, I’d rummage through the shelves pulling books out at random to take home. I was home schooled and had the luxury of reading whenever I wanted. My mother fed my passion by bringing more and more complicated books to my attention. We began with authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, and subsequently worked our way through Tolkien, Hemmingway, and Steinbeck. My father also encouraged my love of literature by introducing me to the complete works of H.G. Wells, and I threw myself into them with a passion.
I loved it. All of it.
I immersed myself in the pages of every book I came in contact with,
swimming between the lines and bathing in the letters. Originally, books were only a source of entertainment,
but as I grew I began to find meaning in what once were just fantastic
stories. The ideals of truth, justice,
loyalty, and love became important to 
me
as I saw how the books I cherished revolved around them. It was apparent to me that literature, and
the knowledge that came from it, was capable of being “itself a treasure.”[2]
When I was eight my family moved out of the city to a ranch and suddenly I was no longer confined by a fenced-in yard. I was free to make my own adventures instead of reading myself into them. I took to this new freedom like a fish to water. Out into nature we would run, my three sisters and I, down deer trails, through forests, across pastures until we fell over from exhaustion. Our favorite thing was to lie on our backs in a hay field. Surrounded by a sea of golden hay and secluded from the world we would close our eyes and feel the hay waving like the ocean around us. We called this “playing sea-shells”(Figure 2).
As I grew I began to understand myself in relation to this vast world of nature. I found myself spending most of my time outdoors, on horse or on foot, and places began to differentiate themselves for me. The ranch suddenly had a million different locations I knew by heart. My sisters and I would agree to meet at the ‘grandfather oak’ or go swimming in ‘the pond with the turtles in it’ or race each other to the ‘climbing trees in the back pasture’. I valued each place as something sacred and “I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.”[3]
Over time I developed a respect for my surroundings,
guided by the teachings of my parents.
I couldn’t sit down for a week the first time my dad caught me driving a
nail into a tree trunk to give 
myself
a foothold. My mother gave me a plot of
land in her garden, and I watched spellbound when green shoots began to sprout
from the ground. When the apples in the
orchard turned from green to a rusty red, I marveled at their transformation. And the first time I witnessed one of the
horses giving birth, I felt the complete mystery of the natural lifecycle (Figure 3). Nature became for me “a source of inward
joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all
human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection.” [4]
I identified nature as something beautiful and sacred. It helped to mold my character as a child
and taught me 
more
about the world than could ever be learned from popular culture. I cherished it as a part of myself.
Before I left for college I visited all the places of my childhood. I closed my eyes in each place trying to imprint the feel of the air on my skin and the smell of it in my mind. But once in the city, I realized there would be no escape into nature, no retreat from the busy lifestyle for early morning horseback rides or to lie in the pasture and feel the hay swirl around me (Figure 4). I felt swept up into a tornado of people, sounds, and movement. I missed the nature that used to surround me on all sides, and felt that Austin had a severe lack of trees and other green objects. I missed my friends and family at home and felt I had nothing in common with other students in the university. I am a social person to the core, but I felt unable to relate even to the friends I had made. Homesick, I realized that “the grief for a place is not unlike that for the loss of a loved one, and it can be just as profound.”[5]
Separated from my family’s support and companionship, I was set adrift longing to find something to relate to, but the people in the crowds were as unreachable as the heights of the buildings that now surrounded me. Determined to succeed I developed “a passionate desire to find some new center of life.” [6] I redoubled my efforts to do well in college. And as a result, I threw myself back into literature and my studies and rediscovered the joy in “knowledge as being capable of being its own end.”[7]
But even so, I had felt the bitter experience “that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting.”[8] I had found nothing to love in my current situation. It seemed that the University of Texas “was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine rolling on, in its dead indifference to grind me limb from limb.”[9] I felt disillusioned by student who drank instead of going to class and professors who were more concerned with their own research than teaching. Wasn’t this supposed to be a center of learning? Where, then, was the desire for knowledge supposedly found in the students of a university? Unable to answer these questions I came to the conclusion that “the flaw in my life must be a flaw in life itself.”[10]
Throughout my freshman year, I had become
increasingly cynical towards the mass of people living for insubstantial
pleasures and felt “a righteous dissatisfaction of human beings.” [11] I maintained this bitter perspective until
the following year when I met someone who created a radical change in my
outlook on life. I admired Mark’s
passion for life and his constant optimism, both of which I vaguely remembered
as things I used to possess (Figure 5). I began
to examine my own attitudes, wondering where my own child-like passion for life
had gone. I was determined to
rediscover the joy in life I used to feel, regardless of my circumstances. I made a point of spending time outside each
day by taking walks, jogging, or reading under the trees in Zilker Park. As I spent time out among the nature that
was available to me, my cynicism and melancholy slowly faded. This new joy in nature began to affect other
aspects of my life. My smile came more
readily to my face, I laughed easier, and I was eager to form new friendships.
As my relationship with Mark grew I fell in love, and I noticed that he seemed to “inhale happiness with the air [he] breathed.”[12] From his example, I looked inward, to my own self for happiness, and at last reached the day when I came to terms with my journey at this university. I realized my college experience would be what I made it; it would not make me. With this decision in mind I changed my major to study something I truly cared about and began to actively participate in the university. I began to enjoy my classes, especially studying the literature and books I had loved as a child. I joined societies and took classes that were not necessarily major specific, but that I found interesting even though it was not part of my required coursework. I had decided what type of college education I wanted, and therefore made an effort to give myself as wide and varying an education as possible. This was the very thing I desired the university to give me all along, and suddenly I was at ease with my journey at The University of Texas. As Emerson would say, I no longer concerned myself with opinions of others,[13] content within myself to be happy.
But different from the typical pattern of conversion, mine was not a birth of a new intellect or belief. Rather it was a reawakening of the ideals I already knew but had forgotten in the past year. “Instead of bringing her to death, it had been the gently lulling cradle of new life.”[14]
As corny as it may
sound, my passion is love. Love of
literature, love of nature, love of people, love of life. I feel “an ecstatic joy of life in the
living,”[15] or in the
words of Frank Sinatra in I've
got the world on a string, “What a world, what a life - I'm in love!”[16] I live my life through love, because
of love and for love. It took falling
in love to realize that my entire life has been devoted to loving the world
around me. My parents taught this idea
to me from birth. Because they
encouraged a thirst for knowledge, welcomed questions and speculations about
the world, and taught me a respect for my surroundings, I learned that the
world cannot be “disenchanted”[17]
as long as I continue to question and, more importantly, to love. By doing this I hope to “burn always with
this hard, gem-like flame, to 
maintain
this ecstasy, [which] is success in life.”[18]
Being exposed to nature in its rawest form taught me to respect the life that grows all around me. I learned to see my place within the world as it relates to the environment and developed “a pleasurable feeling of blind love”[19] towards any plant, animal, or sky. But literature, being the first on a long list of things I fell in love with, still holds a special place in my heart today. It is not uncommon for me to spout off quotes from my favorite book, pick up the mannerisms of characters I like in order to understand them better, or even play dress up with my favorite characters (Figure 6. "Please sir, I want some more" video).[20] Literature is to me what Wordsworth’s poems were to John Stuart Mill: “in them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure which could be shared by all human beings.”[21]
Because of this I hope to share the passion that living my life through love has given me. At present I want to do this through teaching literature at the college level, but who knows? I may share my passion through writing, by example, through my children or by some other means yet unknown to me. My career goals will possibly change, but my passion for love will not. In the future I may solve the problem of world hunger, win a Nobel Prize, travel the world, save the environment, or any other goals on my ‘to-do’ list. There are thousands of possibilities on the horizon and I am eager to begin my journey. The path I will take to share my passion is still undecided, but as the Cheshire cat says to Alice, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”[22]
https://webspace.utexas.edu/bln252/www/index2.htm
Previous Word Count (minus quotes): 1,476
Adjusted Total Word count: 2,085
Quotes: 277, Words Omitted: 11
Words added: 355
Total
Word Count (minus quotes): 1,808
Picture sources:
Figure 1: Personal picture
Figure 2: Personal picture
Figure 3: Personal picture
Figure 4: Personal picture
Figure 5: Personal picture
Figure 6: Bump, Jerome. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/%7Ebump/E375L2/pics/BethOliverpickingpocket.jpg.