IT'S NOT OVER by DeAnn Louise Daigle

My art history class transported
me to Rome, the Netherlands,
Greece, France, Holland, Germany – 

But more than cities and countries
with boundaries and languages
were the paintings and sculptures themselves.
Like music, they transcended all borders and
destinations except what led to the human heart. 
Art and the human heart.

These few hours every week were precious and
inexplicably freeing for me. 
When I was there in the evenings at the
university, I left behind W. T. Grant Company. 
I was nineteen years old and totally in love with
the study of art and the worlds it opened for me. 
I soared, I wept, I stayed awake nights writing
and reading about my experience of art
and the world of impeccable beauty and how it
nourished and sustained me
by feeding my imagination with an opening to
endless possibilities.

It was this experience that gave me the wings of
courage to go outside, to work, to speak, to have
conversation, to try to live my life as if there were
someone I could speak with about all I felt
and dreamed and hoped for.

I wrote about the whistler of the night
who walked in foggy footsteps I could hear
outside my window
in the middle of a summer’s quiet evening.
And I wrote, after seeing Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks, about the same sky,
the same sun, the same moon, the same stars
from above my room to other rooms on the
other side of the globe, and how we shared these
together – human beings unknowing, quiet,
apart and yet together.