Nature Walk

I think one of the highlights of the vacation turned out to be when we visited Cades Cove. Cades Cove is this little nature preserve area that you can drive through to see various nature scenery. There are several stopping points where you can pull over to take pictures, etc. There are also hiking, biking and horseback riding trails. There is also a visitor's center/gift shop, where I bought a poster of a waterfall and a book on Cherokee mythology and history. As I learned this year, there are also several historic buildings near the far end of the property - an empty house; a mill(waterwheel shown left) where a man demonstrated old ways of making corn meal; a little river; a barn. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to embrace my inner photographer and take pictures with my digital camera, some of which are showcased throughout this entry. Consequently, there is not as much spiritual "talk" in this entry, but the scenes I photographed definitely bring spiritual matters to my mind.

It started out as a very cool, foggy morning. The fog in these mountains are beautiful - and the reason that they are called the "Smoky Mountains". Although where we went in Tennessee was about four hours away from my parents' house, I grew up just a couple of hours away from a part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I remember many times as a kid, our family getting KFC after church and driving up the parkway for a picnic. Some of my favorite childhood memories took place in Blowing Rock, NC, Grandfather Mountain, and Linville Caverns. I don't think I really, truly appreciated their beauty, power, and inspiration until I moved away. Such is life.

 Throughout our trip to Cades Cove, we saw a total of four wild turkeys, thirty-four deer, and two bears. I personally only saw one bear, but my grandma did see the other one. We've seen quite a few deer before on other trips, but this was certainly the most I had seen in one trip.

 The river running through the cove was quiet, secluded, and peaceful. While my family went on ahead, I took the opportunity to stand by the river for a minute, thanking the water spirits for their inspiration, and just talking with Pleroma for a bit.

Near one of the houses that were open for touring, were some beautiful white flowers. I'm not exactly sure what kind they were. White flowers I find especially pretty. They seem to represent peace and purity to me. My favorites are the white roses. Of the flowers next to the house, I took two pictures - one is my default picture now, the other one is on the left.

This has turned out to be one of my favorite pictures of the trip. This little butterfly happened to land, and I was fortunate enough to figure out the extreme close-up features on my digital camera before it flew away. If it had happened to land on a flower rather than an open window of one of the buildings open for touring, it would have been even more perfect.

 I also experimented with my camera's (no sound) video feature, and I will close the entry with that video, hopefully it will work.

Coming back to North Carolina today was difficult. Along the way we stopped by Cherokee, NC for a little bit. We went into a couple of shops, where I bought a small medicine bag, which will probably be more decoration until I decide if I feel drawn to it for any particular spiritual purpose. 

In a way, the visit to Cherokee also made me kind of sad. Native Americans are the most poverty-stricken ethnicity in the country, and have the highest mortality, alcoholism, etc. rates. As a white person, I don't have to show off aspects of my culture to make money - it's just kind of there, everybody knows about it. On the other hand, I am glad to see that people are working hard to maintain native cultures and pass it on to others, and educate people on how we're really not all that different from each other.

I am now back in North Carolina with the family until Thursday, at which point I will have to make the dreaded return to "the real world".  I hope that this vacation will come to mind when I need to re-center myself in the midst of the craziness of life.

Rainy Days and Museums

 I'm once again sitting outside on our screened-in porch. It is peaceful, in spite of the loud rain and thunder I am hearing. I used to hate rain. It meant I couldn't go outside, and my mother was so paranoid about having electricity on during a storm that I often wasn't allowed to bathe or even watch television until the storm subsided. But I've come to love rain. It's very cleansing. Even the sound of it invokes images of washing away sadness and negativity, watering the seeds of hope and life within. As long as I'm not driving in it, I've become very appreciative of rain. We were planning on going into Gatlinburg tonight for some shopping, but if this rain stops us from going, I'm okay with that. I really am starting to feel more balanced.

Today we visited one of Pigeon Forge's newest attractions, the Titanic Museum. It's one of the largest in the world, and holds not only antiques recovered from the wreckage, but photos of victims, survivors, their families, newspaper articles, and the history around the making - and sinking - of the Titanic. If anyone is ever in Tennessee, I definitely recommend it. It was a very somber experience for me, almost on par with the time I visited the Holocaust Museum, and heard a Holocaust survivor speak in a Raleigh, NC, synagogue with my high school English class.

To catch a glimpse of the passengers' lives and what they went through really affected me. Seeing handwritten letters and postcards that were written by passengers just prior to boarding, telling their families how they would be seeing them soon, I wondered what was going through their heads as they realized they would not be seeing their families alive. What could have possibly gone through their heads? There was an exhibit telling the story of a 47-year old woman offering her space in a life raft to a young cabin boy, stating that she had lived her life, and it was his turn. He subsequently placed her in the boat and stayed behind on the ship. Upon entering the museum, you are given a "boarding pass", a ticket with the story of an actual passenger. The one I received  was that of a Daniel Marvin, I believe(I don't have it with me right this moment), a 19year old newlywed who was returning from his honeymoon with his wife. He guided her onto a lifeboat and stayed behind himself, saying his last goodbyes.  There were photo albums and jewelry, donated to the museum by various historians, historical societies, and descendants of passengers. The only thing I didn't really like was the gift shop had some things within that I felt were a little disrespectful. And they had this woman who took a picture, similar to some other attractions - where they take your picture, put it against a background showcasing whatever the attraction was about, and then you could buy it. I thought those were a little bit irreverent of the people who suffered on the ship, and their surviving relatives, but I digress.

I think there were two exhibits that just really struck me. I was already in a deep, somber mood by what I had already seen, but what almost brought me to tears was the exhibit that contained actual pictures of sailors on the McKay-Bennet, the ship charged with searching for bodies in the following weeks of the sinking. These pictures were actual pictures of an embalmed body, and sailors pulling bodies out of the water. To have seen that firsthand, I can't even imagine.

The second exhibit was this very cold room that was intended to show the visitor what it was actually like on the deck on the night the Titanic hit the iceberg. It was dark, with lights in the ceiling portraying stars. There was a large slab of ice on the wall that you could touch to feel what the ice would have felt like. The room was at the temperature that it would have been on that April night. There was a stream of saltwater that was kept at the temperature of the water of that night(about 28degrees), so that you could feel just how cold the water actually would've been to the people as they fell into the water. My hand felt tingly and had that "pins and needles" feeling in it after just a few seconds in the water. Anyone who actually survived the actual sinking was in the water for four hours, the length of time it took for the Carpathia to reach the site. A display, and a tour guide, explained the symptoms of hypothermia. Most of the people in the water would have been dead within 40 minutes of going in the water.

Maybe it's my own empathic nature. Maybe I've become even more connected to previous generations, since my practice of Druidry includes the honoring of my spiritual and physical ancestors. Or maybe I feel a connection because of my own draw to the sea. But somehow, this museum experience affected me far more than any other I've been to, outside the aforementioned Holocaust Museum. And I think I will end this entry with that. Because I can't even begin to put into words the depth of what this museum experience brought to me.

Life's Lullaby

So after getting to bed at around 12:30am, I woke up at around 4:10am, at which point my parents, sister, and I packed into my parents' minivan and went to the mountains of Tennessee to join my grandparents in a cabin in the wooded mountains of Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge. It was actually a decent ride, for the most part. I finished the book I was reading, which will be reviewed soon in an upcoming book review. We arrived at our cabin at around 10:00am - pictures to come soon, hopefully. The only real incident was when my sister had a temper tantrum, crying and giving me the silent treatment for almost an hour because I grew tired of hearing her talk about the music group Hanson. Don't get me wrong, I like Hanson myself. I have their latest CD, and have posted a video or two of them on my facebook. They are very involved in some humanitarian efforts that I support. But I don't want to hear about them every five minutes. I guess I should mention at this point that my sister is 22 years old! The only other frustration today has been general fatigue and difficulties getting this mobile broadband to work. Now that I have it going(hopefully), it's great. I'm not on the computer as much as I normally am, I mainly got it in case I needed to check email or email my professors or field placement instructor. But it's also great to blog while out in nature.


Like right now. I'm sitting on the back porch of our cabin, tucked away in a mountainous forest, listening to crickets and cicadas singing to each other. The sun will likely set soon. What a great way to celebrate life, to renew yourself, to get to know Pleroma! Though Pleroma didn't exactly have a direct hand in this worldly creation, I feel Its life within it all. I feel anger and sadness over some of the bears that are kept caged up and made into local tourist traps around here. I feel a connection with the trees in front of me and all the miniscule, yet infinitely important, insects, rodents, reptiles.... everything. They all have a place. Without one, the others would not be able to exist either. Only humans seem to have truly been able to, at least momentarily, break away from this connection, at least superficially. Too bad we don't realize yet just what that disconnect has done to everything else on the planet.

It is in this respect that I feel like I am truly beginning to understand Abraxas more clearly as well. I already know that he is the Aeon of balance, the Gnostic version of the yin and yang. But what is more balancing than an evening out in nature? In nature, something dies so that something else can live. Others work together for mutual survival. They live day in and day out, eating, sleeping, mating, giving no thought to the past or the future. The forces of nature threaten life, and life gets right back up and survives anyways, in one form or another. Life seems to seek balance.

And for now, I feel balanced. Even cooped up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a family that is crazier than I've ever known, for this second, with the crickets and cicadas, I feel at home.

Billboard Spirituality

"Abstinence Works!"

"America Bless God"


 On my drive to North Carolina to visit family for my vacation, those are just a couple of billboards I saw. Living in the Bible Belt really is sad sometimes. That last one really had me annoyed. "America Bless God?" I thought, "What the hell is that even supposed to mean?" It seems very arrogant. If God does indeed exist in one form or another, why would said God need America's blessing? Sometimes, I feel like evidence of Pleroma's all-encompassing love for us is found by the simple fact that he hasn't smitten us all for blasphemy like the fundies seem to expect him to. I remember one that used to be up, that was very derogatory of Muslims. I guess someone finally got the ACLU on those people, because I didn't see it coming up this time.

That's all I really wanted to say for today. We're leaving for the mountains of Tennessee tomorrow. I really need the time in nature. Not too sure about being in a cabin that long with the family, though - we're already grinding each others' nerves a bit, and I just got here today. I may post some while I'm there, as contemplation strikes me, if I can manage to get my mobile broadband to work. If not, I'll see you all when I get back!