Hart House Vision

Hart House: Who you are is welcome; who you are becoming is why we’re here

Hart House stands as a proud champion of education outside the lecture hall, and is a gathering place for all.

For more than 90 years we have been showing that something magical happens when you bring students, faculty, staff, and alumni together, beyond the classroom walls, in an atmosphere of common fellowship.

Hart House is a place to dream. To imagine. To act. To create. To turn inspiration into action. Many of those who are drawn here come to experience the sounds in their souls and the voices in their hearts. They come for the experience of the deeper and the richer and the more enduring.   

Some with company. Some in solitude.

Hart House’s primary mission is educational. The great spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “To understand life is to understand ourselves and that is both the beginning and the end of education.”

This is a place where we negotiate our identity. Where we discover what calls us and what holds us back. Where we take risks, confront barriers, deal with disappointments, handle irritants, learn what pushes our buttons, discover patience and find our voice. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an elected position on one of our many Clubs and Committees; at the bridge table or on the archery range; in the Debates room or in the pool; in a conversation in the Arbor room or at a lecture in the Great Hall; or at the Hart House Farm in the Caledon Hills. All of these spaces are fertile ground for further understanding ourselves. 

Our vision challenges us to adopt a self-aware consciousness – paying a particular quality of attention to how we are engaged in the activities that engage us. It asks us to survey the inner landscape as much as the outer, attending to physical sensations, observing our thoughts, gauging our emotional responses. 

Sometimes our perceptions blur our vision. Hart House is the crucible in which our perceptions are examined and possibilities are explored.

This is your House. We warmly invite you to make it your home.

A Poem by Ronna Bloom, Writer in Residence

What's Inside

Every few feet there is another door.
You might wonder which one to enter.
Pick one. It doesn’t matter. You are
in.
The house was made with you in mind.
Did you ever see such a place?
Did you ever wonder
when you went into a public park
or through a field or over water
what you’d find there?
Did you ever pick up an album, the plastic
slipping through your fingers, as you tried
to get to sound?
Did you ever go somewhere thinking you wanted x
only to discover a totally different y?
You don’t have to know in advance.
There are rooms inside and people,
instruments of voice and light and creation; cameras,
music, microphones. There are yoga mats and squash rackets
and towels. There are conversations and contradictions and capoeira,
whispers, words and gestures. And how they meet,
how they blend and fizz and activate the goods you bring,
the mind and matter of all your selves, this
you won’t know, can’t know, don’t have to know
til you come in. Pick a door.
                   
Ronna Bloom,
Hart House,
Writer-in-Residence

Who are you Becoming?

Hart House is a place for inspiration, engagement, reflection and action. Who you are is welcome; who you are becoming is why we are here. See the becoming in this slide show. Thank you to all the participants.

Images captured at Hart House in September 2010 by Day Milman.