Unveiling Ignacio House's New Library

Buy a Book, Create a Legacy

Article by Ignacio House resident scholar Mychal Pagan

To purchase a book from our wishlist, click here.

I had a goal. For the first two weeks of the new year, I would work to make Ignacio House dream library a reality. For me, working to create this vision was a labor of love. It’s impossible to overestimate what a book means to me. When I was in a dark place, the only light I ever saw came from a word, the only love I ever felt was found in the heart of characters I admired and for whom I wanted nothing but the best. I always connected with libraries as gardeners connected with their garden. Going to the library was like visiting a land full with mysterious trees of unimaginable fruit. As fruits nourish and enrich, so does reading. 

This library project involved reimagining how we wanted our learning center to look and feel. One of the central questions in mind was: how can we build our library in a way that represents both what we collectively value and the processes of our own personal growth and healing. Being that Ignacio House is a house of studies, the learning center plays a crucial role in who we are, what we represent, and how we want to approach life. It’s in the learning center where we meet on a weekly basis to have our council and house meetings. It’s in this area where we come to have zoom classes, workshops, and tutorials. It’s in this area where we come to study, reflect, and share learning. All these considerations, along with another, went into how we went about designing and organizing our library experience.  

When you enter our learning center, you will see five trees with their five names painted on the walls, with eternal green leaves sprouting from their branches. You will also see an arrangement of shelves, shelves that will provide us with all the bittersweet experiences of enrichment. This design was inspired by my reflection on the disciplined way I go about my own personal development as a resident of Ignacio House. It calls attention to the organizing pillars at the foundation of our culture. 

Our community is built on five pillars. Five pillars that support our daily effort to be stronger, smarter, healthier, and more balanced human beings. These five pillars are: the Spiritual, the Physical, the Emotional, the Psychological, and the Intellectual. To ensure that our enrichment culture is being reinforced, represented, and repeatedly encountered, we thought it would be a cool idea to organize our library according to these pillars. And to further enhance their importance, we fleshed out a plan to categorize our books according to them as well. Each tree is named after each pillar. For example, if a member of our community was interested in learning about the teachings of St. Ignatius, he would go visit our enrichment tree of Spirituality. 

Encoded in our library, from how it’s designed to what type of books fill its shelves, is the message of our devotion to enrichment. An enrichment that’s only accessible through reading. Everything we think or rethink, everything we feel, everything we do is nourished and reshaped by ideas; and books are just biographies of ideas. 

This is how our enrichment library will be a resource for our community. It will provide us with the information they need to become stronger leaders, smarter students, and just more informed human beings. Paulo Coelho would teach us how the universe is alive too and how it conspires to help us discover or rediscover our potential for good. Daniel Goleman would introduce us to the importance of emotional intelligence in a world of cold rationalism. Besse Van Der Kolk would teach us how the body keeps the score, how trauma alters us. This is why we are devoting so much attention to organizing our library, to supplying our shelves with books that will continually embody and carry and share with those open to our way of living, a legacy of enrichment. 

I want to invite you to participate in our community’s effort to build a legacy of enrichment that could positively impact current as well as future Ignacio House residents. I want to invite you to be a part of this book project by purchasing a book from our Amazon wishlist. I want to invite you to be a part of the work to supply our community with all the spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, and intellectual resources we require to unlock our potential.  

I remember a few years back, when I attended an entrepreneurship training event. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown because I had to socialize. I remember telling myself that I wasn’t going to learn much by sitting glued to my seat, pretending to be writing when I should be networking. This was an event that was clearly about networking.  So, shaking like a leaf, I went up to a volunteer. I remember clumsily asking her to share with me some insights about entrepreneurial success. 

She told me simply, “never stop reading.”