Author Archives: sophiasongs

  I walk somberly with others on the 2nd floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. I see the room where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed and his suitcase with a copy of Strength to Love in it. I look out the window to the balcony. A wreath marks the spot where he wasContinue reading “Memphis and the power of resistance”

The Cherokee described these mountains as shaconage, meaning “blue, like smoke.” The misty clouds dance around them creating an ever changing landscape. The park is home to more tree species than in northern Europe, 1,500 flowering plants, dozens of native fish, and over 200 species of birds and 60 of mammals. A richness of biological diversityContinue reading “Great Smoky Mountains National Park”

  “I’m sick of Google Maps,” I said with frustration. My calm partner, driving the truck pulling our travel trailer, looked quizzically at me. “Just once, I’d like to know where something is without having to look it up,” I whined. We’d been on the road for 4 weeks. Newness every day. Wonderful and exhausting.Continue reading “Rest stop. Allowing time for our souls to catch up to our bodies.”

     I was stunned after more than an hour in the Little Rock Central High School Historic Site and Visitor Center. It gave me a history lesson I never fully got in school about the integration in 1957 of an all-white high school by nine African American students three years after the Supreme Court’sContinue reading “Propaganda in Little Rock”

Beauty and wonder, power and imagination. Arches National Park – Moab, Utah Canyonlands National Park – Moab, Utah    

Elijah was two years old, and Aaron was five. Two brothers in a day care center, dropped off by a loving family member on a beautiful spring morning in Oklahoma City. Killed when Timothy McVeigh drove his bomb-laden truck into the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995 at 9:02 am. 168 people dead; hundredsContinue reading “We come here to remember.”