Mountain Home Veterans Affairs Center, Johnson City
“Life is a great bundle of little things.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., 1809-1894
One of best regarded American poets of 19th cty.
Category Archives: Scenes
Sit and Watch
“Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.”
Elizabeth Lawrence
Shadows of Words
Country road on Unaka Mountain
“Love and business and family
and religion and art and patriotism
are nothing but shadows of words
when a man’s starving.”
O. Henry, 1862-1910
Native of Greensboro, NC
Creativity
Bass Lake, Blowing Rock, NC
“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing,
taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
Mary Lou Cook
Orderly
View of Buffalo Mountain from Powder Branch Rd, Carter County
“Life is not orderly.
No matter how we try to make life so,
right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg,
fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.”
Natalie Goldberg, b. 1948
Author, “Old Friend From Far Away:
The Practice of Writing Memoir”
Ecstatic
“The soul should always stand ajar,
ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886
Used Things
Shady Valley, TN
“Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture,
grandparents’ pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of
human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms,
transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.”
Susan Sontag, 1933-2004
American essayist, novelist, photographer
Fill A Need
Looking towards Beacon Heights and Grandmother Lake from Grandfather Mountain
“Find a need and fill it.”
Ruth Stafford Peale, 1906-2008
Writer, speaker, editor
Wife of Norman Vincent Peale
Bittersweet October
Boone Fork Bridge, Blue Ridge Parkway m. 296
“Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause
between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.”
Carol Bishop Hipps
“October,” In a Southern Garden, 1995
Ministry
“Ministry is the spiritual act of seeing and helping others see the
face of a loving God even where nothing but darkness seems to be present.”
Henri Nouwen, 1932-1996
Dutch Catholic priest and writer
Seasons Change
Bass Lake, Blowing Rock, NC
“The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August,
and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair
amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., 1809-1894
One of best regarded American poets of 19th cty.
Harvest Time
Shady Valley, TN
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
William Blake, 1757-1827
English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker
Carry It With You
Boone Fork Trail, Blue Ridge Parkway m. 296
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882
American essayist, poet, and
leader of the Transcendentalist movement
Changing Colors
Price Lake, Blue Ridge Parkway m. 297
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Flannery O’Connor, 1925-1964
U.S. author
Letting Go
Cloudy evening on Round Bald, Roan Mountain
“Nothing has taught me dependence on God like letting go of people.”
Connally Gilliam
“Revelations of a Single Woman”
Something to Say
Looking towards Johnson City from Horseback Ridge
“I write because I want to tell something that makes me glad and strong.
I want to say it. Things come to me in gleams and flashes, sometimes in
words themselves, and I want to weave them into a melodious, harmonious whole.”
Andrew to Alexa in “The Elect Lady” (1888)
George MacDonald, 1824-1905
Keep Learning
Bass Lake, Blowing Rock, NC
“Ancora imparo”
(I am still learning)
Michelangelo (at age 87), 1475-1564
Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer
Patience
Doe River near Roan Mountain State Park, TN
“Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains,
losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and
we shall soon see them in their proper figures.”
Joseph Addison, 1672-1719
English poet and dramatist
Empty or Full
“The Lord sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves.”
Dwight L. Moody, 1837-1899
American evangelist and publisher
Sacred Idleness
Dennis Cove Falls, Carter County, TN
“Work is not always required…there is such a thing as sacred idleness,
the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”
George MacDonald, 1824-1905
Scottish author, poet, minister
What if?
Beauty Spot sunset, Unicoi Co., TN
“Look at the many ‘if’ questions we raise:
What am I going to do if I do not find a spouse, a house, a job,
a friend, a benefactor? What am I going to do if they fire me,
if I get sick, if an accident happens, if I lose my friends,
if my marriage does not work out, if a war breaks out?
What if tomorrow the weather is bad, the buses are on strike,
or an earthquake happens? What if someone steals my money,
breaks into my house, rapes my daughter, or kills me?”
……
Jesus says simply, “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you.”
Henri Nouwen, 1932-1996
Dutch Catholic priest and writer
(as quoted by Brennan Manning)
Desire
“I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness,
as that…I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden,
with very moderate conveniences joined to them,
and there dedicate the remainder of my life
to the culture of them and the study of nature.”
Abraham Cowley, 1618-1667
English poet
Patches of godlight
Rocky Fork, Unicoi County, TN
“We — or at least I — shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions
if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason
will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so,
not have ‘tasted and seen.’ Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you
something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.
These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of godlight’ in the woods of experience.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963, Irish author and scholar
“Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”
“Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes”
by Jan Karon, author of the bestselling Mitford Years Series
It is Solved by Walking
“Solviture ambulando”
(It is solved by walking)
St. Augustine, 354-430
Theologian and important figure in the development of Western Christianity
When You Don’t Have To
Sunset at Horseback Ridge, Unicoi County, TN
“What you do when you don’t have to,
determines what you will be when you can no longer help it.”
Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936
English author and poet born in India
