Dancing With The Mountains

When the cosmic tumblers click into place and the universe opens its vault, miracles can happen. Inspired by his dying father’s dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail, Paul Travers hits the trail and finds that miracle in the healing power of America’s sacred mountains. Dancing with the Mountains… Alzheimer’s, Angels, and the Appalachian Trail – A Journey of Spirit chronicles Paul’s thru-hike to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association and prove that “60 is the new 40.” More than a travelogue, it is a love story about fathers and sons, families battling Alzheimer’s, and the people and places along the Appalachian Trail. Sprinkled with humor and humanity, It is the spiritual response to Bill Bryson’s bestseller A Walk in the Woods. On his pilgrimage, Paul eludes the FBI, meets his guardian angel, survives a lightning strike and a near drowning, encounters the ghost of a relative, acquires a trail name (Sondance), finds a Field of Dreams, walks off the war, solves the death of a Hollywood starlet, discovers Saint Francis and the Buddha in New York, embraces a religious cult, visits ground zero for the 60s hippie movement (Arlo’s not Alice’s Restaurant), receives a sacred stone from a Lakota medicine man, meets a female apostle, discovers his father’s parallel spiritual journey, and copes with the death of his parents. His adventure ultimately reveals nature is not only the handiwork of God but the hand of God that leads each of us on a unique spiritual journey.

A poetic description of various kinds of mountains and how they are formed. Includes factual information on mountains.

Heather Caldwell's feet are ugly and she is proud of it. Long hours of dancing have hardened huge calluses and blackened her toenails. But has she danced enough to get a major role in Viva El Paso, an outdoor theater staged in the mountains? A dream she has had for years. Her dream becomes a nightmare when an unknown enemy kills her boyfriend and threatens her. She flees into the mountains where there is far more to worry about than her dreams.

This collection is the first comprehensive, cohesive volume to unite Appalachian history with its culture. Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen's High Mountains Rising provides a clear, systematic, and engaging overview of the Appalachian timeline, its people, and the most significant aspects of life in the region. The first half of the fourteen essays deal with historical issues including Native Americans, pioneer settlement, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization, the Great Depression, migration, and finally, modernization. The remaining essays take a more cultural focus, addressing stereotypes, music, folklife, language, literature, and religion. Bringing together many of the most prestigious scholars in Appalachian studies, this volume has been designed for general and classroom use, and includes suggestions for further reading.

Insiders' Guide to North Carolina's Mountains is the essential source for in-depth travel and relocation information to the region that includes Asheville, Biltmore Estate, Cherokee, Blue Ridge Parkway, and other nearby environs. Written by a local (and true insider), this guide offers a personal and practical perspective of the area and its surrounding environs.

The Great Smoky Mountains, at the border of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, are among the highest peaks of the southern Appalachian chain. Although this area shares much with the cultural traditions of all southern Appalachia, the folklife here has been uniquely shaped by historical events, including the Cherokee Removal of the 1830s and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park a century later. This book surveying the rich folklife of this special place in the American South offers a view of the culture as it has been defined and changed by scholars, missionaries, the federal government, tourists, and people of the region themselves. Here is an overview of the history of a beautiful landscape, one that examines the character typified by its early settlers, by the displacement of the people, and by the manner in which the folklife was discovered and defined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here also is an examination of various folk traditions and a study of how they have changed and evolved.

Text and photographs capture a young girl's feelings about dance.

When Gary Snyder’s long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End was published in 1996, it was hailed as a masterpiece of American poetry. Anthony Hunt offers a detailed historical and explicative analysis of this complex work using, among his many sources, Snyder’s personal papers, letters, and interviews. Hunt traces the work’s origins, as well as some of the sources of its themes and structure, including Nō drama; East Asian landscape painting; the rhythms of storytelling, chant, and song; Jungian archetypal psychology; world mythology; Buddhist philosophy and ritual; Native American traditions; and planetary geology, hydrology, and ecology. His analysis addresses the poem not merely by its content, but through the structure of individual lines and the arrangement of the parts, examining the personal and cultural influences on Snyder’s work. Hunt’s benchmark study will be rewarding reading for anyone who enjoys the contemplation of Snyder’s artistry and ideas and, more generally, for those who are intrigued by the cultural and intellectual workings of artistic composition.