Looking for the Yellow Spring...

This past weekend was my birthday so my husband and I took a short vacation to Yellow Springs, Ohio. While it is only 20 miles northeast of Dayton it is miles away in attitude. Yellow Springs is an activist community and has been for years. It is the home of Antioch College, one of the first - if not the first- coed institutions in the US. It was the first college to have a woman as a full professor. It was one of the first colleges to eliminate race as an admission requirement. Antioch, little Antioch in the rural fields of southwest Ohio, was a special place for forward thinking folks. Coretta Scott King, Leonard Nimoy, and Rod Serling graduated from Antioch. One of my favorite novelists, Lawrence Block was a graduate. Louis Sachar is an alum.

In the ensuing years, it hit on hard times and closed about five years ago. However, like a phoenix, it has risen again, due to those activist graduates - alumni - who refused to let the dream die. It reopened and this year welcomed its fourth class since its rebirth. This must tell you something about this unique school and the village where it makes its home.

Yellow Springs is really named for a yellow - today it's more orange - spring that can be found in Glen Helen Nature Preserve, just outside the village proper. We decided to find the yellow spring from which Yellow Springs sprung.

It took us three tries. Three. And we had been given directions. We were starting to feel a little desperate, not to mention a little hot and sticky too. But after the first two tries we just couldn't give up. After all, two well-educated people could surely find a little spring....

Well, we did finally locate the yellow spring. And we have pictures to prove it. Turns out we had been given some slightly faulty directions: just keep turning left. The problem was, the first turn was to the right...

Now, I want to relate this experience to art. Sometimes you have to try more than once. Sometimes you get faulty directions. Sometimes instead of always turning left you need to turn to the right. Then you just might...find the yellow spring.