On straddling academia and emotions

This was my free write from Joel's class this week.

This week I have been asked to straddle the fence that divides the personal and the academic. It is more of a wall though. A wall with a trench. And a moat. A wall built of stone and steel that towers over and above and beyond. And this week I was asked to climb that wall. To sit atop it and gaze upon all that was there. And then I was asked to deconstruct that wall. To chip away at it, piece by piece, this mass structure that I had spent my whole life building. I was asked to drag blanket after blanket of rolling, green, grassy academia over ragged, raw emotion and I was told to try and make that grass grow. Not just grow, but flourish. In the barren dust and jagged wasteland. I planted perfect, round, little seeds of thought and reason, a futile act, I assumed. For little did I know that deep, wet, fertile soil lay beneath that cracked abyss. And so I planted my grass. And it grew. In rough dry patches at first, but then the roots began to descend, and lo, flowers! Flowers that had never before known light. Neither in the soft, rolling grass of academia, nor in the tattered hot desert tundra of emotion. But here they were now. Flowers dotting that fresh new grass of academia, cracking through the rock and earth of emotion, budding and flourishing and bursting with life and possibility and unmet desire. Desire for more, for passion and knowledge and sorrow and reason, and anger at the lack of reason. It was all there, an entire ecosystem of thought, the heart bleeding into the mind. And I thought, if only I had known this was possible before!