We all write what we know, the places and senses and remembrances that make us who we are:
C o n n e m a r a
The home of poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), “Connemara” sits on a 260-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 sanctified 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
M o n t r e a t
Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Montreat (the abbreviation of Mountain Retreat Association) is a town, college, and conference center of the PC(USA) near Asheville, North Carolina. The 4,000-acre cove, established by the church in 1897, has welcomed thousands over the last century as they sojourn here for rest, reflection, and spiritual renewal.
Many are the pages
I have penned here,
Many are the people
I have met here,
Many are the prayers
I have prayed here,
And many the answers
I have heard here.
My soul always
Will return here,
My heart always
Will remain here,
My life forever
Will begin here,
‘Til it is no more.
First, ever and always, we are struck by the beauty of this place: it simply takes our breath away. Then, however, we are taken with its people: those who serve here, those who live here, those who visit here, each radiates within us the beauty of its landscape personified. Finally, and most fittingly, we are captured by the thinly-veiled presence of the Holy God in this place, Montreat. God’s presence here among us intoxicates our every sense and intensifies our every experience; God’s presence defines this place, yet defies simple explanation. Holy God, Righteous Savior, YOU are here. All praise, glory, and honor be unto Thee.
—M B H, Montreat, summer 2009 (as penned in my journal)
C a t a l o o c h e e
An isolated village forgotten by time, Cataloochee (from the Cherokee, meaning “tall trees standing in rows”) was once the most populous valley in western North Carolina. All that changed in the 1920s, when the U.S. Department of the Interior purchased Cataloochee and made it part of the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Forced from their homes, Cataloochee’s residents left behind them a way of life suddenly abandoned. Empty houses (like the one pictured above), churches, and school houses—untouched for nearly a century—mark their presence still.
Trees hold a mountain of memories,
A history and place and time all to themselves,
Somehow cold and forgotten
Out in the middle of nowhere.
(“Cataloochee,” by Mark Horner, 2006)
