Creating a Gallery: On Picture Studies during a MRI
Have you ever been told to sit or lay perfectly still for a designated amount of time? Suddenly your nose itches, or you finger begins twitching, or you have to use the bathroom right away. It’s practically impossible to stay still once someone requires it of you.
As the nurse placed the coil over my face and positioned my body just right on the board ,the tech let me know the first set of images would take about 30 minutes before they would start my IV. I’ve been dreading the IV contrast since I made this appointment 6 weeks ago, enough to almost want to back out of the scan. He pushed the button to allow me into the machine and I realized, I was in a small, enclosed plastic tube, with no opportunity to move. My one thought was, “I have to get out of here.”
Have you had an MRI before? I imagine it’s like being trapped inside a computer modem from 2001 as AOL tries to connect to your internet. The white coil and white backing of the machine makes it feel like you have about 3 inches of space. It’s tight, loud, and for whatever reason, it vibrates. Since there was no option to leave, the only thing to do was forbear it and go somewhere else in my mind.
Charlotte Mason believed that:
“education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…–– in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. (Vol 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education pg 43)
For the last couple of years in our homeschool, we’ve been doing picture study. Each term we have an artist that we study in detail, learn the pictures, narrate them, write the artist on our timeline.
In doing this, I didn’t realize I was equipping myself with a gallery of mental pictures by great artists old and new. As I lay in the MRI machine under orders to not move, I let my mind wander to the pictures hanging in the halls of my imagination.
When I began a Charlotte Mason Education for my daughter, I knew these ideas of creating a large room to plant her feet in was important. I knew I wanted to offer her the beauty of a life giving education. What I didn’t realize was how much I need this education for my own sake, especially in an MRI machine. I wonder what situations my children will be in that will require them to call on their own galleries.
