Ref Barn Blue Sky Calm - Near Avon, Montana

“Calm and inner peace…Yes, calm and inner peace were undoubtedly important, but did you need to practise yoga to achieve such things? Or was it enough just to be here….to walk along one of those paths…with the sky above you so wide and so understanding of all it witnessed? …Surely there was enough calm amd peace in this land to bring quiet and healing to every heart that was open to it?? Surely.”

- - The Joy & Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith, p. 57

Spring Rain Like Kindness - Missoula, Montana

“Kindness, after all, did not distinguish between those who merited it and those who did not. It was like rain, she thought. It fell everywhere and made everything green and new and alive once more. That is what it did.”

-Mma Ramotswe in To the Land of Long Lost Friends, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, by Alexander McCall Smith, p. 70-71 (lg type)

Looking Through To Beyond - Missoula, Montana

“The sun filtered down through the canopy… Above its delicate, spreading branches was the sky, which went on forever, it seemed, into a thin, singing blue.”

-Mma Ramotswe in To the Land of Long Lost Friends, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, by Alexander McCall Smith, p. 90 (lg type)

May your new year be blessed with eyes to see through and beyond and more than just what seems in plain view, and to what the Holy Spirit is saying. 

Looking Up - Autumn - Leaves - Missoula, Montana

“She looked up. The sky was without cloud, a dome of lightest blue filled with air, great swirls and eddies of it, which you could see — just about — if you stared long enough. She breathed in deeply, and felt the fine dry air fill her with a buoyant optimism.”

-Mma Ramotswe, p. 85 in large type edition, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, a No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel by Alexander McCall Smith

Wisdom On The Wind - Near Alberton, Montana

“His wisdom came from deep wells - from the things that had been known to the generations that had gone before him. It was fashionable to put all that knowledge behind us, to think that only our modern understanding counted for something, but that, she thought, was so wrong, so wrong.  We were not the first people to tread where we now trod;  countless ancestors had come exactly this way.  And although their footprints might have been blown away by the wind, we could sense  their presence if only we opened our eyes and ears to it.  And we could hear his voices, too, if we listened hard enough.  We could hear their warnings, their encouragements, their advice - if only we turned our heads to the wind and heard the voices, faint and distant, that the wind carried.  We could hear.”

- The Joy & Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith, p. 40-41