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25 October 2014

Walker's Dusk View - Missoula, Montana


“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

24 October 2014

23 October 2014

Red Door Curves, St. Ignatius, Montana

I was drawn to the bold colour and curvy shapes of this doorplate. (Do you see the standing bird facing left? I'm not sure if that's just my fancy, but now I can't NOT see it!)

It turns out there is a fair bit of symbolism to go with red painted church doors.

Here are two of my favourite reasons:

 “Red is the color of the Passion. Red doors say that symbolically we enter the church through the Passion, through death and resurrection in baptism (at an Orthodox baptism, the godparents present the candidate with red shoes as a symbol of walking the way of the cross) and by participating in the passion through the Eucharist.” –Paul Woodrum

“...red doors traditionally mean “sanctuary” — the ground beyond the doors is holy, and anyone who goes through them is safe from physical (and spiritual) harm. In ancient times, no one could pursue an enemy past red doors into a church, and certainly no one could be harmed or captured inside of a church. Today, the red reminds us of the blood of Christ and that we are always safe in God’s care!” –St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church 

Click here for more insight and beautiful photo examples.

22 October 2014

Straining Up-Reaching Down, Missoula, Montana,


“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.”  - Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

21 October 2014

Sunlight-Shadow - Missoula, Montana


“As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.” STEPHEN GRAHAM, The Gentle Art of Tramping, 1926

20 October 2014

Electrified - East Missoula, Montana


“Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.” - Marianne Williamson

19 October 2014

Leaning Left - Missoula, Montana

“As I follow the fence line, I am carried even further back in time to when perhaps my great grandfather, or more likely, my grandfather, my granduncles, or a forgotten hired man did as I am doing.…The wire in my hands goes back to the time when my family still used horses to work the fields and pull wagons, and when steam tractors were the advancing technology.…

In those days, cedar posts were often used to make corner posts. Gnarly with age, weathered by wind and rain, and covered with mold and lichen, they often are leaning, as if rotted out. But I know that if I pull them out of the ground, and scrape the dirt away, the wood will look as fresh as the day they were buried. …

Even though the cedar posts haven’t rotted, the pull of the wire over the decades has been slowly, perhaps a hair’s breadth a year, levering them out of the ground, leaving them barely anchored. Too often, I find myself replacing them with new corner posts that won’t last a faction of the time, erasing the mistakes of the past. “ - from
Harbingers of the Next CenturyBy Wade Sikorski
For further reflection on his family’s ranching legacy and future, you can access the entire essay
here.