There is this place I go to, a wondrous setting filled with history’s wake and rife with anticipation. It is a sanctuary away from all manner of trifles, sundry distractions, and sometimes from responsibilities. It is at times a shield against debilitating worries, but more often a haven for inner recharging and renewal.

Introverts by nature are reticent and shy, eschewing most forms of exposure in the limelight. While some of us as children in order to gain acceptance learned how to behave like extroverts as a survival method, speaking in public remains a difficult and terrifying venture. The stereotypical image of one sitting in a darkened living room next to a warm fire reading a book by candlelight isn’t far from the truth.

I don’t know of a scientific explanation for why some people are extroverts, while some of us are introverts. In my wilder wonderings of such questions, I image there is a harmony sequence somewhere in the DNA chain that orchestrates how we function and work at our best. That sequence governs the ability to perceive relationships in all nature, cause-and-effect linkages, and growth patterns in all living things. In the calm spent in going inner, touching the within, it is possible to contact and be infilled with the powers of the universe in the manner of knowledge, of knowing.

All artists are in touch with this harmony sequence, which is the reason each is able to pierce the future in anticipation of what might be. Artists more often than not picture reality as antecedents of a better world. Painters do this with pigment and brush strokes, sculptors with chisel and stone, potters and ceramicists with clay of the earth, and poets with poignant word imagery.

The inner realm the introvert visits is the source of all creation, of knowledge of origins and process, and in the world of human endeavors, of courage and valor.