The Spirit of Marion is a picture of Marion Morse MacKaye, taken in 1910 by Old Spirituals favorite, Arnold Genthe. She would have been around 38 years old at this time. Unlike most professional photographs from this time, Marion doesn’t look exactly presentable. She appears to be wearing an older blouse, with wrinkles clearly visible, and her hair is a bit unkempt.

Hood Museum at Dartmouth University

The spirit reference made me think of someone confronted with their own ghost. But was she looking at the future or the past? Marion doesn’t look frightened but she’s looking upward and to the right. Some body language experts will tell you that indicates creative thinking. Marion was a poet and a playwright so she had lots of creative thoughts.

Eleven years later, in the summer of 1921, Marion and her husband Percy MacKaye went to the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky and wrote poetry.  You rarely hear of people composing poetry together, do you?

OLD LOG

Here we are in a rough-hewn old log cabin in the heart of the mountains. The bobwhite’s call floats up to us, the creek murmurs, the holly-hocks flash their pink and brilliant stalks. Around, up, and far away, the hills are dusted with the chestnut bloom which the wind brings to us as faint odors.

Next door, in the dog-trot, are the looms and spinning wheels, and going by the lovely mountain children, so fresh and wild and new. The water splashes into our pitcher, clear and sparkling; the hillsides are strong with great trees; and I hear a child repeating his Sunday text:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God . . .

In the distant field, with long, crooning lilt — uncertain in its plaintive wildness, speaking of isolation and of meditation, ancestral, real — breaks a mountain ballad from a childish throat.

On the porch last night, with yet but one star shining, the murmuring creek, the noises of drowsy birds, the call of the whippoorwill, and the distant hills drifting into the darkness — the dross of life fell away.

Here is a new world and an old, untouched by the groping of man for two centuries, unemeshed by our faltering blunders, our stumbling existence, the turmoil and moil of our abortive and tangled efforts, Here is God, humanity, and the mountains.

May your week be lovely and full of wonder.