Reflections on My 40 Years in Umbria

Mar in her office as Director at the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities (http://www.iah.psu.edu)

Many of my blog friends know that our daughter is a tenured faculty member, a musicologist, at Penn State University after her many years of studies for her B.A. at Williams College and for her Ph.D. at Yale. But you may not know how over the years she has "found her cause", has become very active as an advocate of the arts and humanities.

Among her numerous activities aimed at advancing this cause, she is the Penn State representative to the national consortium/association of "Imagining America" which is dedicated to the advancement of the humanities in the American society; she was a recent member of the Oxford University Think Tank on the same subject;
as Director of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities she represents the university along with the Pennsylvania delegation in Washington D.C. each spring during the National Advocacy Days for the Humanities and Arts, meeting with congressmen and senators.

She also just served on the 2009 five-professor-national panel of the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) to select the most worthy research projects for NEH funds. She is an active member of The Big Ten consortium dedicated to the same advancement of the arts and humanities and promotes and supports this cause in myriad other ways as well.

Today she shared the following statement with me, a beautifully written statement of hope for our future.

"The fact of the matter is---and this is like the 600-pound gorilla, sitting in the corner, that no one talks about---if our economy resets, we're going to have to think about defining a high quality of life in a way that doesn't have a new house, a new car, an expensive vacation at its core. And I think cultural vibrancy, a new connection to cultural heritage, a new connection with the sense of achievement that comes from creativity and artmaking---those can be a key to a high quality of life, even if our financial expectations have to be lowered."
--Bill Ivey, Director -- Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy -- Vanderbilt University

I share this with you. I share the hope that we can redefine much of what constitutes a high quality of life, the hope that "cultural vibrancy, a new connection to cultural heritage, a new connection with the sense of achievement that comes from creativity and artmaking" will become central and of utmost importance to our lives.

Could it be that this demon of a financial crisis will turn out to be a new golden opportunity for the fine-tuning of our values?