From the Laudator:
Donald Culross Peattie, Flowering Earth (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 144:
For every man there is some spot on earth, I think, which he has pledged himself to return to, some day, because he was so happy there once. Even to long for it is holiday of a sort. These visits of revery may be all that he can pay it, for years, perhaps until his shade is free to haunt where it pleases. But some are lucky; some get back, and find it, to every trembling leaf and stanch old tree trunk, untouched by any alteration but the seasons’.
For as long as I live, this will forever be Rome for me.
Reading this reminds me of my grandmother’s village, Trnovac in Croatia, where I once visited. It rests in the valley between two mountains. Everything is green. There is just one road in and out which I think my great great grandfather built. There is a small church dedicated to St. Nicholas part way up the mountain. There is a small cemetery near the church where my great grandparents are buried.
When my grandma was a child, the parish priest and the men of the village built a set of concrete steps starting at the church, leading up the hillside. Along the way, they erected Stations of the Cross. At the end of the walkway was a beautiful little chapel with an altar dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows.
Tamo gdje dom. (Where my home is)
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19134709
St. Andrews, Scotland.
Tahlequah, Oklahoma (30 min. from Clear Creek Monastery)
Drury Lane, Bloomfield Village, Michigan.
Fountains Abbey, outside Ripon, Yorkshire
The campus of Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
See post here: http://brotherjuniperonline.com/2009/09/07/the-garden-of-eden/
Oh man. There are so many places! A great quote.
Cereste in Provence. A wonderful non-touristy village, with friendly people. Not too far from Le Barroux or Aix or Nice.
My hometown, which is a city only a mother could love, but I love it nonetheless. Hopkins might say of it:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
Ars, France
Padova, at St. Anthony’s tomb
Rome, at St. Cecilia’s tomb
almost anywhere in southwestern Ireland.
somewhere on the Ohio River with lots of fireflies, which we don’t have in San Diego.
The wilds of my native Colorado Rocky Mountains
rec ently returned to motherhouse of school sisters of notre dame where i went to boarding high school. the top of the hill motherhouse was welcoming in mankato, minnesota and visiting teachers was so wonderful after 34 years of not seeing them and chapel a great place.
The first place I can truly remember seeing. It was a bright field that had a narrow dark brook along its edge, with tiny, starry yellow flowers on the bank and a deep wood on the other side. There was a small red salamander by a stone at the edge of the brook.
Love this quote – how very true!!
Sacre Coeur in Paris…and I always said my “mansion” in Heaven will look exactly like Bermuda!!
1) Solemn Mass at the Church of the Advent, Boston
2) A hillside near my college in Bennington, Vermont
Northwestern Connecticut.