“When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening
than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?”
Kathleen Norris
Category Archives: Flowers & Plants
Happy Halloween
“Backward, turn backward,
O Time, in your flight
make me a child again
just for to-night!”
Elizabeth Akers Allen, 1832-1911
American journalist and poet
Audacious
“I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious.”
Glenda Jackson, b. 1936
British actress and politician
Not Measured By Reception
“An act of love that fails
is just as much a part of the divine life
as an act of love that succeeds,
for love is measured by its own fullness,
not by its reception.”
Harold Loukes, 1912-1980
Educator and orator
Return to Your Roots
Glad It’s Raining
“Gee, I’m glad it’s raining
There’s always something to be thankful for.
I’m awfully glad it’s raining
Cause no one sees your tear drops when it pours.”
Jim Varney, 1949-2000
a.k.a. Ernest P. Worrell in “Ernest Goes to Camp”
The Mountains Are Calling
Mount Le Conte, Great Smoky Mountains National Park
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
John Muir, 1838-1914
One of first modern preservationists
& founder of the Sierra Club
Be Calm
“Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault,
and truth discourtesy; calmness is a great advantage.”
George Herbert, 1593-1633
Welsh poet and priest
Health and Wholeness
“Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness.
A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.”
Frederick Buechner, 1926-
Presbyterian minister and American author
Sown Into Time
“It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools — that we are sown into time
like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time
and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet,
and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone.
The joke part is that we forget it.
Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras.
We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.”
Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author
Unloved Flowers
Pray as You Can
Bellflower
“When you cannot pray as you would, pray as you can.”
Edward Meyrick Goulburn, 1818-1897
Dean of Norwich
Be Fruitful
Highbush Blueberry
“Every branch that does bear fruit,
He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”
Father Tim, Mitford Series
Presence
“Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.”
(Bidden or unbidden, God is here.)
Carl Jung, 1875-1961
Swiss psychiatrist
Failure
Spiderwort
“I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison, 1847-1931
American inventor and businessman
Thanks
Sunflower
“I can no answer make but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks.”
Shakespeare, 1564-1616
English poet and playwright
Sacrifice
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep
to gain what he cannot lose.”
Jim Elliot, 1927-1956
Christian missionary to Ecuador who, along with four others,
was killed while attempting to reach the Huaorani people
The Danger of Love
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly
be wrung and possibly be broken…The only place outside of heaven where
you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
“The Four Loves”
Irish author and scholar
Perception
“Never confuse your perception of yourself
with the mystery that you really are accepted.”
Brennan Manning, Ragamuffin Gospel
author, priest, speaker
Weaknesses
“The love we are longing for is a love that loves
not in spite of but in light of our weaknesses and failures.”
James Bryan Smith
“Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven”
All You Can
Bays Mountain, Kingsport, TN
“Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can.”
John Wesley, 1703-1791
Anglican minister and Christian theologian
More Than I Can Accomplish
Sunflower at Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers
“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”
Michelangelo, 1475-1564
Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer
The Next Word
Tulip in Walled Garden, Biltmore Estate, NC
“Lord, help me find the next word,
And the next. And the next…”
Father Tim, Mitford series
by Jan Karon
Because This God Exists
“We trust, not because a god exists,
but because this God exists.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
Inferiority Complex
Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers, Sullivan Co., TN
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior,
but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex
every time he looks at a flower.”
Alan C. Kay, American computer scientist
