Building the roads, bridges, and trails for Kentucky

Stairway at Cabin - Cumberland Falls State Resort Park, Kentucky

Kentucky once suffered from the Depression era damage to the countryside.  The landscape was worn out from over cultivation and forest clearing. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built service buildings, water reservoirs, roads, and campgrounds. Near Carrolton, Kentucky the CCC built the terraces, walkways and roads that became the General Butler State Resort Park.  The CCC planted trees.   The CCC restored damaged woods and pastures.  It ended up that the New Deal agencies planted 3 billion trees.  The CCC was at the forefront of the tree planting effort.  The landscape of Kentucky benefited from this work.

 

Franklin Roosevelt had the vision that that the landscape could be restored.  He had a confidence about him that made people want to be involved with him in making things better. He could speak in a way that proved to be enduring.  He set forth the concept that the land could be restored.

It is perhaps fitting that the words of a President could cause change for the good.  By contrast the words written by a person in a monastic order are little heard and quickly forgotten. One exception is a man that lived in a monastic order for twenty-seven years at a location south of Bardstown, Kentucky.

The monk and writer Thomas Merton lived in that monastery. Merton has produced challenging ideas that have been communicated around the world.  Merton wrote that the “plague” of the “modern age” was “intolerance, prejudice and hate.” Merton said the counter to this intolerance was rooted in personal and community labor; “the Christian must labor with inexhaustible patience and love, in silence, perhaps in repeated failure, seeking tirelessly to restore, wherever he can, and first of all in himself, the capacity of love and understanding which makes man the living image of God.”

It is that “capacity of love and understanding” that we want to have. This is that process that we work. 

As Kentuckians we are fortunate that the forests and pastures were restored from the awful situation of the Depression era. It took a long time for that process to have the look of a restored land.  As Kentuckians we are fortunate to have a world-renowned writer that produced his work while living in rolling green hills south of Bardstown. 

It is about the land and the people.   

Hearts weighed and tested

Cliff - Near DuPont Lodge - Cumberland Falls, KY

Here is a poem by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
 

I Loved You Once - Poem

I loved you once, nor can this heart be quiet;

For it would seem that love still lingers there;

But do not you be further troubled by it;

I would in no wise hurt you, oh, my dear.

I loved you without hope, a mute offender;

What jealous pangs, what shy despairs I knew!

A love as deep as this, as true, as tender,

God grant another may yet offer you.


This is but one of many translations from his Russian.  What a very human expression!
This is the work one does in time and at Christmas time.
Not every Christmas is beautiful or fulfilling or warm.
But we work it out.   


Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton - Wisdom

Tree Sections - North Bend State Park West Virginia

These sections of  large trees are in the lodge at North Bend State Park in West Virginia. The note on the large tree section states that the tree was a white oak that lived to be 227 years in age.

"Perhaps I am stronger than I think." - Thomas Merton

One touch of nature makes all the world kin. - John Muir

The Wisdom of Thomas Merton

Water along North Bend Rail Trail - Between Cornwallis and Ellenboro, WV

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.    -Thomas Merton


Oh Thank you.
Let my body rest. Let me walk into silence and appreciate the place.

And say"Oh!"

I appreciate

Morning Mist - Forest- Dale Hollow Lake SRP

"Our real journey in life is interior."
Thomas Merton

"Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of the external self.
There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens
only in contemplation and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with
the first person singular."
Thomas Merton

"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what
I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am
living for, in detail ask me what I think is keeping me from living
fully for the thing I want to live for."
Thomas Merton

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

Now comes the opportunity. Walk. Practice sitting appreciation. Practice walking appreciation. Your breath fuels your heart.  Let your feet walk peacefully on the land.   Hear the notes in the trees. 

Precious land and waterside places

Stream - forest woods - Dale Hollow Lake SRP

The snow melt has fed water to the streams in Kentucky.  It is a time for  being at waterside places. Today is a day of reflection. We appreciate Thoreau, Merton, Berry and Muir. Merton and Berry lived and wrote in Kentucky; Berry continues to live and work in Kentucky.  Now comes the opportunity. Walk.  Your heart beats in resonance to the land.  Appreciate the water and the rocks here. Rocks were in these cliffs five hundred years ago and longer.

Celebrating the 100th Post

Scenic stream Lake Cumberland SRP, Kentucky

This marks the 100th post available in waterside places.  Today is a day of reflection.  We have learned from Thoreau, Roosevelt, Merton, Berry and Muir.  Merton and Berry lived and wrote in Kentucky; Berry continues to live  and work in Kentucky.  I appreciate the water and the rocks here.  The rocks draw one to approach.

Thomas Merton

Historic Church - St. James Court neighborhood - Louisville, KY

The Dalai Lama when speaking of Thomas Merton speaks of him with respect for him as a Christian monk.  He has said that Merton's ideas were very, very important.

The Abbey of Gethsemane

Christian Church - Fourth Street - Louisville, KY

I saw the motion picture, "The Many Storeys and Last Days of Thomas Merton."  I was moved to think that while he was in Allegheny, New York he chose to come to the Abbey of Gethsemane near Bardstown, Kentucky.  Additionally after he passed away during his visit to Thailand his belongings were inventoried.  He was carrying an air ticket to various destinations in Asia and the last place listed on the ticket was Louisville, Kentucky.  There is much to appreciate in the forests and the meadows in Kentucky; Merton wrote of being in and praying in the quiet of the woods.

Kentucky native tree and Thomas Merton

Kentucky Native Tree - Eastern Red Cedar - Grayson County

The trunk of the Eastern red cedar looks like of bundle of stems.  Eastern red cedar was once the only wood used for pencils in the United States.  By the 1940s it was hard to find enough trees to supply the factories and production switched to the California incense cedar, Calocedrus decurrens.  The California incense cedar is a western tree.

Thomas Merton visited the Motherhouse at Loretto, Kentucky.  During his visit he remarked that the trees surrounding the Motherhouse were magnificent and should never be felled. Thomas Merton wrote frequently of the silence of the woods in his writings.  He also suggested that being present in the woods was helpful to prayer and to the spiritual experience. 

Merton wrote pointedly about damage to the natural world, "Much of the stupendous ecological damage that has been done in the last fifty years is completely irreversible.  Industry and the military, especially in America are firmly set on policies that make further damage inevitable."

Appreciations

Bellarmine University - Louisville, Kentucky

Kentucky was home to Thomas Merton.  This Merton statue may be seen on the Bellarmine campus.  Kentucky was home to Robert Penn Warren.
Wendell Berry lives on land in Henry County with ties to family that goes back over 200 years. 
Harry Caudill wrote of the mountains of Kentucky and of the uniqueness of those hills and valleys.
Thomas Barnes knew Kentucky from border to border and celebrated her woods in the books he authored.

James Lane Allen and John Fox Jr. wrote a century ago. Kim Edwards, Sue Grafton and Barbara Kingsolver are Kentucky authors.  James Still, Jesse Stuart, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Harry M. Caudill, Gurney Norman, Janice Holt Giles, Verna Mae Slone, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Silas House write or have written from their Kentucky homes.  John James Audubon, Bobbie Ann Mason and Irvin S. Cobb are all from Kentucky.

 

When appreciating precious things these are some of the things that are in mind.  The place of these people.