Brain-Mansion: a journal entry from 5/18/08

In the mansion of my brain (not to be confused with my Interior Castle), there is a special room.  I go there to visit the things, thoughts, memories, people, stories and ideas that have shown me love and thus ignited my passion.  I wish I could live in that room!  But I live my thought-life elsewhere within my brain mansion so that I can effectively meet the demands of my outer life.  If I spent all of my thought-time in that special room . . . I suppose it’s the library, yes my brain-library, because THERE is my poetry, my reference collection, my Bibles, my stories, my illustrations.  Yes, if I spent all of my time in there, surely the rest of the mansion would be neglected and I might live in a constant state of mania, never being able to “come down” for the tasks of diapering, tidying, educating my children (or at the very least, introducing them to ideas and events and doing my best to answer their tough questions, after all can anyone truly educate another?), feeding myself and my children, etc.  So, I take tea in my brain-library, so to speak.  I do believe that when my children are grown, I will be able to spend hours upon hours in that library, and then, all of these fascinating and beautiful things I’ve conceived will finally be full-term, ready to be birthed, I can’t wait!  Oh but yes, I can, these children and the accompanying dutiful, outer life, have expanded my capacity for passion and love to a mass of space I never dreamed exists within us all!   

Anyway, in a beautiful chest of drawers on one of the walls in my brain-library, the design of the chest I must research before deciding on (I’ll let you know) there is a drawer.  The contents of that drawer, when first introduced to me, added a quality and sparkle to the rest of the mansion that cannot be adequately described.  And I can never imagine the limit and intricacy of the contents’ impact on the nearby (through the glass conservatory and out its Eastern doors) Garden of my Soul.  In that drawer, I keep you, nicely folded.  I must keep that drawer locked because periodically you have mischievously un-folded yourself, escaped from the drawer and had your way about the Mansion of my Brain, leaving it excessively untidy, to say the least.  I do believe that I am still working daily to clean up the remnants of your most recent havoc.  Perhaps a little starch and a hot iron would keep you folded, in your place, only now I am too afraid to open that drawer at all for the pleasure I feel in abandoning all other responsibilities of the Mansion in order to obsessively, delightedly clean up after you.

So yes, in view of the drawer’s contents’ significance to me, every aspect of the immaterial me, I most definitely will research the style of the chest of drawers as its function, era and design must be just right.  Though I’m beginning to think a trunk, or better yet an entire wing of my Mansion’s library might be more suited for the job of containing you, glorious, wonderful, frighteningly beautiful, you.