Lent Photo-a-Day: Near


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Gratitude Day 25: Tenderness

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Mighty Little II Little Pigeon River at Greenbrier, Great Smoky Mountains National Park © 2014 Kristina Plaas, All Rights Reserved I am a tender-hearted soul. There's no getting around it, my feelings live very close to the surface and I have only a limited ability to keep them in check. I am not, by nature, an angry person so when my feelings come bubbling up at inconvenient times they usually aren't harmful, they just spill out and make it hard to function for a little while. I wish I had better self-control of these things, but I do not. Since my mother's death last summer my tender soul has shed a lot of tears, many of them at inopportune moments or in places where I'd rather maintain my composure. This afternoon was one of those times. Earlier today I received a phone call from a member of mortuary staff informing me that mother's crypt plate and vase were now in place. I was pleased to get the news, but knew the time had come for me to go back to the cem...
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Gratitude Day 17: Knitting

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Snow Angel Knitted Lace Shawl with bead embellishment I was just a kid, 9 or 10 years old, when my mother taught me the basics of knitting. Having been raised in Germany and the Netherlands where almost all women  knit, my mother could whip out warm woolly things with stunning speed. I was OK at knitting but preferred crocheting because it was easier for me and I could produced finished items much faster with a crochet hook than with knitting needles. By the time I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt, I was firmly entrenched as a crocheter. That is until my dearest friend in school, a passionate knitter, made it her personal mission to convert me to the other side. She took me to my first real yarn store and helped me find a sweater pattern and suitable yarn to knit it. I knit my way through the stress of a Master's degree, producing several sweaters and other small items. I moved to Utah after graduate school and continued to knit and crochet, though my crocheting was far ...
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Lent Photo-a-Day 2/26: Place

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"Evenglow" Sunset at Clingmans Dome  Great Smoky Mountains National Park © 2014 Kristina Plaas, All Rights Reserved Over the course of my life I have enjoyed an intimate relationship with special places -- places that have significant meaning and importance for me. As a phenomenologist I have explored the relationship of space, an infinite expanse, and place, a "center of significance or meaning that may be used as a guide" (Thomas & Pollio, 2002). A phenomenological geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, talks about place as space "made into an object." We attach names to objects, we can describe the characteristics of objects, and often we are able to express our feelings about objects. We do all those things in describing our experience of special places, also. There are a number of places on this planet that are very special to me. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of those places. I have favorite locations in Cades Cove, along the Little River, an...
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