Last month, I attended The Stafford Challenge Writing Conference in Portland, Oregon with my dear writing friend Glenda Funk. She and her husband Ken were kind enough to take me to Multnomah Falls before I returned back to Georgia. I made such fabulous memories on that trip, and the Pacific Northwest holds beauty that is second to none. But as I write this, I’m reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s words about Rome from Letters to a Young Poet:
Finally, after weeks of daily self-defence, though still a little bewildered, one comes to oneself again and one says, “No, there is no more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, which generation after generation has continued to admire and which the hands of jobbers have repaired and restored, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value”; but there is plenty of beauty here, because there is plenty of beauty everywhere.
Multnomah Falls Etherwe
smiles
postcards
sunglasses
National parks
rolling suitcases
things that make travel fun
in the Pacific Northwest
and anywhere else in the world
where fresh discoveries in nature
take our breath away with striking beauty
Common Threads 