but i was feeling a little bit scattered and your love was all that mattered.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to our ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tete-a-tete for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married... Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us. Freya Stark

Morning y'all,

It's another beautiful, clear wintry morning up top. The high yesterday reached 45 degrees. The overnight low was 31 degrees. It was 36 degrees and clear at 7am observation. The mountain received no new precipitation and the abundant sun melted 2 inches, leaving us with about 2 inches of snow up top. The trails are sure to be slick, so traction devices would be recommended if you inted to summit. Get out and enjoy another sunny Smokies day!