Inspiration
What inspires a poet to write? Where does he get his salt; where do the words come from? Here are my answers:
Connemara
The home of poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), Connemara sits on a five-acre farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where Sandburg spent the last twenty-five years of his life and wrote a third of his life’s works. Built by Christopher Memminger before the Civil War, Connemara remains as it was the day Sandburg died, untouched by time and fortified by peace.
“I may keep this boyheart of mine… I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.”
“There is a place for me somewhere, where I can write and speak much as I think, and make it pay for my living and some besides. Just where this place is I have small idea now, but I am going to find it.”
Give me a quiet garret alone
Where I may sit for a few casual callers
And tell them carelessly, offhandedly,
‘This is where I dirty paper.’
Thus each poet prays and dreams.
The eternal hobo asks for a quiet room
with a little paper he can dirty,
with birds who sit where he tells ‘em.
—Carl Sandburg, Breathing Tokens, 1945
Montreat
A conference center of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Montreat (the abbreviation of “Mountain Retreat Association”) is a 4,000-acre cove in western North Carolina purchased in 1905. For over a century, Montreat has symbolized a “thin place,” where thousands have come for rest, reflection, and spiritual renewal.
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“First, always and ever, we are struck by the beauty of the place: it simply takes our breath away. Then, however, we are taken with its people: its staff, its inhabitants, its short-term residents radiate in us the beauty personified of its landscape. Finally, and fittingly, we are caught by, captured by, the thinly-veiled presence of the Holy God in this place, this Montreat. It intoxicates our every sense and intensifies our every moment here; it defines this place, yet defies simple explanation. Holy God, Righteous God, YOU are here. Praises be unto thee.”
—M B H, summer 2009
