From These Hills

Beauty & Wisdom from Appalachia


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Ignorance Helps Your Enjoyment

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“You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific
about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft;
a certain free margin, and even vagueness — perhaps ignorance,
credulity — helps your enjoyment of these things…”

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892, Specimen Days, “Birds – And a Caution”
proclaimed the “Greatest of all American poets”
a mere four years after his death

 


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The Best Remedy

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Blue Hole – Upper Falls, Carter County, TN

 ”The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside,
somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God.
Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be…”

Anne Frank, 1929-1945
Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family
during the German occupation of the Netherlands during WWII

 


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Wet and Wildness

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Water Strider, Ramsey Creek Falls, Buffalo Mountain Camp

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, Inversnaid
Jesuit priest and English poet

 


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Blessed Release

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Watauga Lake 

 ”I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.  It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me — I am happy.”

Hamlin Garland, 1860-1940,
American novelist, poet, essayist

 


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The Simple Life

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“To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating;
to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter;
to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest
or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.”

John  Burroughs, 1837-1921,
American naturalist and essayist

 


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Open the Door

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Doe River near Roan Mountain State Park, TN

“As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest,
or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream,
the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.”

Stephen Graham, 1884-1975, The Gentle Art of Tramping
English novelist and travel writer

 

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