“I don’t believe in this ‘world sorrow’ — do you?”
“No, no I don’t. Not at all, Mr. Emerson.”
“Well, there you are. Then make my boy realize that at the side of the everlasting ‘why’ there is a ‘yes’–and a ‘yes!’ and a ‘YES!’”
—Mr. Emerson and Lucy Honeychurch

My name is Anna Laura and I live in  Knoxville, TN, with Marshall, whom I recently married.  I think blogs are gaining importance with each passing second, like the number of megabytes of free storage on Gmail accounts, and I want in on the fun. Not that I don’t have fun in my life. In fact, I do. This fun includes things like watching A Room With a View, baking, conjuring green things from the soil in my yard, making leather-bound journals, trying to manage my life as a grad student in Creative Writing, and finding my life continually saved by beauty.

This stage of my life requires chronicling, as does nearly every stage, so blogging has become as much a discipline for emotional & spiritual growth as a fun thing to do instead of Facebook.  In these posts I hope to help myself discover the roads leading to this very point, and away from it; and if I can do that, then I hope to write a sentence that will illumine a moment in someone else’s travels.  Writing is something I have an ear for, and at this point, between school and career, childhood and parenthood, the beginning and the end, I must write about the suffering—and the beauty.  Both of which seem always to lie together.

Note on the writing itself:  Syntactically, or grammatically, even though I prefer the Oxford comma, I almost always revert to the comma with which we are all acquainted.  I have nothing to say about this.  Not that I feel that the Oxford comma is a good and the Other comma is an evil, I’m just actually mostly apologizing for my total lack of respect for the comma in general, which in my case means I splice them and run them through sentences like relayers with batons.  Which is why I may not ace grad school.

This is me. I recently went to this place and this is a picture of me in it, at that time. It was fairly eternal.

Furthermore, the title of this blog is from a poem by GM Hopkins called The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, a poem (and a line) which changes lives. mine, for instance.