From JK Rowling…
I know, I know, I’m on summer sabbatical and I was only going to post at the beginning of the month. But things keep happening and I wanted to make note of this. One afternoon last week we went to see JK Rowling give a speech at the Harvard Alumni Association meeting that always follows the graduation ceremonies. It was an unseasonably cold and rainy day and we discovered to our dismay that we’d be sitting outside in a light drizzle. We arrived early without umbrellas or rain coats but it didn’t matter. Somehow, perhaps by magic!, we were ushered up into the front section of Harvard Yard not far from the podium when it seemed the audience was scant. Minutes later we turned around to discover the whole yard filled with thousands of people. Some were even standing on the steps of Widener Library.
JK did not talk about Harry Potter, except obliquely. What she did speak about was failure and imagination. When she wrote Harry Potter she was in the midst of what felt like a massive failure. Her brief marriage had failed, she had no job, no home of her own, only an infant daughter whom she adored. She had nothing but a big idea and decided to go for it. Failure, she said, was the firm foundation underneath her feet. Though she had nothing, she was still alive, still carrying on. And, I think it’s true, if you’ve not gone out into the wilderness on your own, you don’t get to find that amazing strength that we all have within. What I found inspirational though was the way she didn’t second guess herself, she didn’t come up with Plan B—she hunkered down and wrote the first volume of what became the largest selling series in history.
And it’s not the sales numbers that matter but the fact that she got kids reading and thinking about the presence of evil in the world and how to deal with it. In her speech she said imagination was something only humans have and it’s the ability to see ourselves in the situation of others. She urged the newly minted Harvard graduates to take this to heart as they stepped into the world.
“That is your privilege, and your burden,” she said. “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.”
“We do not need magic to change the world,” she continued. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: We have the power to imagine better.”
We came home chilled to the bones, made cups of tea and put on our wool socks. It wasn’t until I’d thawed out that I thought how fantastic it is that when real magic happens on this planet it’s because we hold fast to our dreams and act on them! Dream on! And now back to work!
The sun is shining, the temperature is now in the stratosphere, five huge pots of tomatoes, beans, peppers, lettuce, arugula and herbs are planted and sitting quite happily on the patio. Peonies and roses are blooming. Summer is here.
I’m on blog sabbatical but promised to check in the beginning of each month this summer. As chance would have it, I discovered today that Yoko Ono is starting a blog called 
