Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

Tinker Creek

Tinker Creek

Ok, so I read this book, but where is Tinker Creek?

I looked it up.

Turns out, it is just outside of Roanoke, Virginia.

The creek looks like it starts north of Roanoke (at: 37.439955, -79.960900)
and ends where it feeds into the Roanoke River (at: 37.266414, -79.904515).

If you stuck to the nearby roads, it looks like you could walk end-to-end of Tinker Creek in about 5 hours.

I sort of like the idea that a river or creek is “fresh every hour.”

The philosophical implications of this are haunting though.

For where does all that change leave us in our short little lives?

I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Tinker Creek

Grace And Beauty, Even If We Miss It

Grace And Beauty, Even If We Miss It

Grace and beauty flourish and grow around us.

Much of it is in contrast to pain and suffering and order, because well – if not – you lose the context of it all.

Clumsiness and ugliness compared to what?

Now you may have your head down about work or bad fortune or family, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

All there is to do is wake up.

Nearly everything around us is bordering on the impossible.

I mean, every breath sometimes feels like a miracle.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek