WONDERS OF ENOUGH SPACE

WONDERS OF ENOUGH SPACE Space is healthy to life. Air to breathe . Room to stretch. Space to sleep, walk, run, play, grow. Lack of space warps personality; is confinement, is jail. Containment depresses, represses, suppresses the wingspan of souls. Space is healthy and very necessary. I think of space as I read the mentally stimulating book of philosophy , THE MYSTERY OF SPACE: A STUDY OF THE HYPERSPACE MOVEMENT AND AN INQUIRY INTO THE GENESIS AND ESSENTIAL NATURE OF SPACE by Robert T. Browne (1919, 1977). Thoughts of space animate me again while reading NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS: A DOCUMENTARY PORTRAIT OF AN EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEER, 1900-1959, edited and annotated by Kelisha B. Graves (2019). Therein Dr. Graves summarizing the chapter, “Racial Violence, Social Justice, Politics, and Democracy,” writes “She believed that black people had an equal inheritance in the Bill or Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Even if Burroughs admonished black people to never abandon their patriotism, she simultaneously maintained that African Americans were a unique group with their own flavor and spirit. As she argued , black people needed space and opportunity to express their difference through ‘cultural things’ (‘The Challenge of the New Day’).” P. 94-95. I thought also of the capacious space that I experienced as a child in Mississippi romping on our grandparents’ farm with my cousin, Howard Smith. We watched birds fly , busted watermelons on the ground and devoured them head-first! I thought of Meacham Park where we lived next to a wooded area and a big field where I led my siblings on “explorations;” or where I flew my kites high into the sky. I thought about Rock Hill, Missouri, five miles east of Meacham Park, where we lived a mere four houses away from the green haven of the campus of Steger Jr. High School’s twenty acres, more or less, of: a rocky winding creek, baseball fields, basketball courts , cross-country track, football fields, practice fields, flowers, trees, the architectural splendor of our school building, itself, whose windows let in sunlight and afforded us lush visages. I thought of the Dunbarton Campus where our Howard University Law School moved after our first year on our main campus, off Georgia Avenue. I wrote of the space at Dunbarton, nestled amid mansions, embassies, azaleas & old growth trees, behind which streamed Rock Creek amid a wooded secluded space of brush , fern, moss. An open field behind our law school led down to its Walden-like respite from wearing case law. Our law school was up Connecticut Avenue on Upton Streets in far northwest Washington, D.C. My article was titled “Dawn of Dunbarton.” It appeared in Howard’s “New Directions Magazine” in 1974. I have known space. I love space. I am enamored and predisposed towards space. Our home has lovely space inside and outside for which I give God the glory. As everybody needs love, —oh yeah—everybody needs space: human, plant, animal, mineral, microbe, solar, lunar, galactic, aquatic. Everything needs space! Amen.