eunoia: u-NO-ya. beautiful thinking; a well mind.
I believe in the power of the written word. I wrote that in an essay for admission into my MFA program, and I think it will always hold true.
The word eunoia is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels (though if you want to get picky, the OED doesn't actually recognize it as a word). Such a small thing to hold so much. I like this word for two reasons. First, because of the meaning. A well mind is one of the greatest gifts we can receive (take it from the girl whose mind goes racing like a pro far too often), but a well mind also requires effort. It requires corralling damaging thoughts and resting on true things--beautiful thinking, in other words.
Secondly, I like eunoia for its brevity and capacity. This first year in the program we are focusing on memoir--reading it, analyzing it, writing it. I am already steeling myself against the thought that I have no business meddling in memoir. It feels like a joke to write memoir when you're 24. I keep batting away this thought like a fly: you don't have anything to say. It's not true. Something small can contain a wealth of meaning. My past two years alone may not look like much from the outside, but I know how I've been scraped and bolstered and cleaned and bandaged and pushed forward into light. I know God's done some major work and that any story I tell is ultimately a story of God's movement in me.
Our stories are inexhaustible if we remain curious and humble, and if we tell about the power of God in us, the God who can do wonders and is likely at work on you now, on me.