Helen Keller's Legacy

Helen Keller must be one of the most talented, intelligent, brave, courageous, thoughtful, and influential, activists of her time. 

From the terrible disease of scarlet fever as a child she became completely deaf, blind and mute. In a time where people didn't know how to aid disabled people, she rose above all expectations and taught the world how to live and breathe.

 Her teacher, Anne Sullivan broke through the isolation of near complete lack of language, allowing Helen to blossom as she learned to communicate. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 

                                                     She was an incredible person.

 I encourage you to watch the play or film, 'The Miracle Worker', it cannot but help make you aware of how much you take for granted every single day. 

God will give strength to all who stand up against the crowd and rise above the limitations until there are none.

 "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."

The day I discovered I was a Romantic

The day I discovered I was a Romantic. 

My studying turned to William Wordsworth and I learnt in depth what he began in English literature.

 He began Romanticism.

The word wasn't thought of in the same way then as it is today.

It was a new way of crafting poetry. It didn't care for the rules of the Augustan age before, where writers placed so much importance on how they wrote and not what was beneath their words.   

But William saw the suffering of the poor just as William Blake did, and he wrote about it in his poems.

William's way of looking at the world was through nature. The shapes, colours, textures, and the scale of the beauty of nature had a powerful and emotional effect on him and others who thought like him.

The Romantics pictured themselves as aloof from the crowd. 

They placed significance on imagination, intuition and emotion.

They also believed that childhood was the epitome of who the adult would later become.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge feverishly wanted his children to grow up in the countryside. He insisted that nature should be his children's teacher, and that the urban way of life should be prevented from seeping into the child's existence before it was necessary.

When William Wordsworth was studying in Cambridge, he found that he had hardly any inspiration because he was not surrounded by his wonderful countryside. 

I know that my childhood, rambling freely amid the corn and flowers, trees and meadows was what instilled within me a love for all things natural upon this earth.

 Now that I am at university in the middle of a very big city, I cannot help hungering for the meadows of home, for the soft river, for the sweet and gentle bells tolling from the church.

I knew somewhere within me that I had always known there were others gone before that thought the same way I did. 

And there still are human beings now breathing upon the earth they born into or wanted to be born into.

And we are just the same. 

You are not alone.

Why did all this happen? Why is nature so important? Why was it such a colossal movement?

Because creation is God's own handiwork. It was crafted by him and brings glory to him and will forever more.
And so through it we find splendour, power, spirituality, purpose, and utter wonder.

We too are his,
 and we were made to worship him just as the birds do.

"The earth has music for those who listen"

- George Santayana 

speak

How could I have lived all that time without realising that everything in the world has a voice and speaks?

Not just the things that are supposed to speak, but the others, like the gate, the walls of the houses, the shade of trees, the sand, and the silence.

-Lusseyran,(And There Was Light.)

the secrets of creation

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, 

diverting myself now and then, 

finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, 

whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

 

Look what I have!

                 Not in a silver casket cool with pearls                                           Or rich with red corundum or with blue,

Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls

Have given their loves, I give my love to you;

Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring

Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain—

Semper fidelis, where a secret spring

Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:

Love in the open hand, nothing but that,

Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,

As one should bring you cowslips in a hat

Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

I bring you, calling out as children do:

"Look what I have!—And these are all for you

 Edna St. Vincent Millay