Spring Snow Peaks - Near Three Forks, Montana

The one thing you can predict about springtime in Montana: it’s never boring.  Ides-of- March storms ousted the beatific sunny days of early March, adding much-coveted snowpack to many of our mountain ranges.

Breaking Through Frozen - Rattlesnake Creek, Missoula, Montana

”They have no idea that sadness can freeze more than just your joy and break more than your heart.”

 -from The Letter: An unforgettable novel of love, war and secret kept for generations by Ruth Saberton

Pathless Woods - Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

Here's another tea tag saying to go with your cuppa (& I must say, it's a serendipitous match for this photo): 

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods."

 -Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Winter Contrasts - Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

Being sick is NOT my cup of tea! But these past 5 days, I've been thankful for tasty tea while fighting off some annoying bleh-ness with sleep, homeopathy, and herbal concoctions (Throat Coat and Gypsy Cold Care teas - yum and good!). 
My main reading in between naps has been the fine print quotes on the tea bag tags, so that's what you get for deep pondering the rest of this week. That and some winter photos that need to get posted before they expire due to lovely sunshine melting every crusted snowflake in sight! 

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."
 - Lao Tzu (6th century BC)

Winter Tranquility - Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

"There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It's a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene [my father] was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama."

-Tara Westover, "Educated: A Memoir", p. 27

Lovely Moment - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"Sometimes it is enough to be near something lovely.
It doesn't require possession;
 nothing has to come of it,
 nothing need be created from it.
Let its purpose be
 to exist solely as a thing of beauty
 and provide joy."

- From Tony's Wife by Adriana Trigiani, p. 428

Frozen - On Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

Stream ice is mesmerizing.
& crazy in how fast it changes. 
This view is along same stretch of creek as in the previous post, but on the very next day, and looking back toward the bridge.

This daily drastic-change aspect observed during my lunchtime walks is making me think how cool would be a photo flip book of the same view, every day, for a year. Bzzzzzp! - you would traverse four seasons in under 5 seconds, and then do it again - bzzzzzzzzp! - and then again, flipping slower - bzzp-bzzzzzp-bzzzzp-bzzzp... pausing to examine a particularly drastic shift....

Years ago, I checked out from the library a small, hardcover book (but not a flip book) of photos taken by a shopkeeper. For years, he walked out in front of his store and snapped a 35mm photo of the same view directly in front of him. His photos illustrated not only how his neighborhood changed - and didn't change - over time, but also how the culture and country shifted and adapted and was at turns neglected and reinvigorated.
It was mesmerizing. 
And so was his commitment.
I personally find it a bit daunting to consider 365 days all at once...BUT maybe even 30 days would still provide enough flippy shift.....the pondering continues...

Waiting Winter Dock - Polson, Montana

“If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” 

-Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274)

(Unless he lived in snowy climes....but let's stick with the bigger idea & imagine a sunny and romantic southern port!)

Passing View - Near Lakeside, Montana

“Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on… across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. 

All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched.“

― from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Sound Judgement: Stay Indoors - Near Lakeside, Montana

Here's a thought - from a favourite thinker - with potential to spark vigorous dinner conversation (& has absolutely nothing to do with today's photo): 

“If one’s judgment is unsound, their expert advice is of little use.”
 
- Wendell Berry, from "Damage, stanza 1"

 (& just as a teaser, here's another deep thought from stanza III of the same poem:

"...It accepts the clarification of pain, and concerns itself with healing.  
 It cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature
over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation
of a limit.

To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound..."

Bone Cold - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"A damp wind was sweeping across the flatlands, carrying moisture from melting snow and ice, for hundreds of miles, and depositing it in their bones."

- from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, page 96

Sky Post-Sorrow - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"If it were possible to render sorrow, it would look like a November gale.

But, then like sorrow, it too passed and the new day arrived almost impossibly clear and bright, the sky a perfect blue."

- from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, page 14


Tucked away as they are, the villagers in Louise Penny's fictional Three Pines community probably are not burdened with rampant power lines cluttering their views. But then, neither do they enjoy the compensation of Montana's ever-splendid sky. (And not just because they are, after all, fictional characters, natch!)

Nostalgia Slough - Missoula, Montana

Winters of my early years featured a ritualistic layering on of socks and thermals and outerwear and toques and winding and winding and winding of a very looong hand-knitted scarf until only your eyes showed. This allowed you to see what there was to see once you waddled out the door for a long snowy ramble - in below-freezing temps  you welcomed because you'd begun to sweat by the start of all that winding - across fields, around frozen sloughs, and through barbed wire fences thanks to an older sibling who held the strands apart so as not to let your snowsuit get snagged. Good times.

All these years later I realize sending us thus adventuring was a valuable tactic for preserving my mum's sanity while preventing cabin fever amongst her brood - and, of course, with the underlying intent to instill in us a sense of independence and confidence in our own capability. (Yah, that''s what Mum was thinking about by the time she was shooing little Number 7 me out the door into the brilliant Alberta winter sunshine and snow.) Modern patois labels this 'free-range parenting'. In our era, it was commonly called, 'Go outside and play until I call you in for supper'.

The pictured mini melange of grass and ice reminds me of the bunchy grass edging a winter slough. Ah, nostalgia! Days I wouldn't trade. It may not keep your eyelashes from frosting on a day like today, but it sure makes for a toasty heart.