“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
Category Archives: Tennessee
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
Perspective
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
Richard Bach, 1936-
American writer,
author of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”
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
Return to Your Roots
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Endless Forgiveness
Millstone Creek Falls, Washington Co., TN
“Love is an act of endless forgiveness.”
Peter Ustinov, 1921-2004
Academy Award-winning British actor
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
Less Alone
Poppy field at Farmhouse Gallery, Unicoi, TN
“That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone,
that we are more deeply inserted into existence than
the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”
John Berger, 1926-
“The Sense of Sight”
art critic, novelist, painter
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
Outside Good for the Inside
View from Round Bald, Roan Mountain, TN
“Truly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man.”
George Wherry, 1852-1928
Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot
Me and My Shadow
My Symphony
Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers, Blountville, TN
“To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;
to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly,
talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common — this is my symphony.”
William Henry Channing, 1810-1884
clergyman, reformer
