"a magic beyond all we do here"

Many of you know and many of you don't--I am currently working on my Master's Thesis, in an absurdly time crunched effort to walk across the Ferrell Center stage in May with a white hood hanging around my neck. My thesis on the idea of a spiritual community/church in the Harry Potter novels has been quite a few years in the making, taking on different approaches, different ideas and different tacks depending on where I am sitting on that particular day. It is one of the many projects that I imagine I will never fully finish, and I am okay with that. My life is full to the brim with unfinished, half started, half baked ideas, and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Seeing something completed is nearly as fun as knowing that everything (even that which is "done") is still in process.

Regardless of that tangent, I wanted to share this with you. The creator of the boy wizard, Harry Potter, has given precious few interviews since the release of the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and yet, as far as authors go, she has been remarkably accessible. I imagine that one day I will have a chance to sit down for coffee with her, and discuss her time at Amnesty International, which is how she paid the bills in her early 20s. In doing research for my thesis, I have been subsequently doing a lot of research on her, and have found the following video quite moving and pertinent to what I do with my life. Even if you are not a fan of The Boy Who Lived, you may be interested in hearing about the imagination that created him is something far much more than words on a page.

Listen, think about what she has to say, and imagine what we can do.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. (via http://harvardmagazine.com)