Summer Throwback - Kayaker Duo - Placid Lake, Montana

Another summer shot I didn't post at the time....Lingering wildfire haze delineates mountain layers and adds an other-world-liness to Montana lake outings.

Summer Throwback - Paddleboard Pup - Placid Lake, Montana

A peaceful Placid Lake, Montana, moment from this summer. Kind of a nice winter reprieve when longing for sunnier skies. (Also totally vicarious, by the way...not my people, OR our pup...just serendiptous strangers drifted into the hazy view i was sizing up!) 

Water Lilies & Holiness - Placid Lake, Montana

“I think what people build can be very beautiful, but what God builds goes beyond beauty. 

You stand outside Notre Dame, say, and you marvel at the accomplishment, but you can't really connect. It's artificial, do you see? It's only a representation of something. Spirit, holiness, maybe even God. But it's not the thing itself. 
Out here, it's all there before you, around you. You're steeped in it, the real thing. Spirit. Holiness. God."
- Maria to young Henry Meloux in Thunder Bay, p. 127, by William Kent Krueger (Book #7 of Cork O'Connor Mystery Series)

Twilight Reflections - Placid Lake, Montana

 "It seemed to her in her solitude that she had always sat on this step, in this twilight, with this contentment."  -from A Prairie Heritage: The Early Years by Vikki Kestell

Water Lily Pad Tiles - Placid Lake, Montana

 ...like so many roof tiles overlapping atop a mermaid family's cozy home...

Still Water Lily Pads - Placid Lake, Montana

"....I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water...."

-from The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

(Listen here - even repeatedly, as I did! - to the author read this dose of utter loveliness and calm. I try not to gush, but Wendell Berry is SO gush-worthy...)

Water Lilies - Placid Lake, Montana

"....Fair beds they seem’d of water-lily flakes

Clustering entrancingly in beryl lakes...."

-Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), from "A Vision of the Mermaids"

Leave Room For The Unknown -

"We don't really actually have that kind of control... our utter impatience with the unknown is, I think, a real liability for having the stamina to deal with this extraordinarily difficult time. I mean, I don't begrudge anybody, their terror of the unknown...remarking as a historian, I think there's a kind of shift... nobody has any idea what's going to happen next, you know, from the weather to anything else." - Jill Lepore, in CBC's The Current 6/9/2020 interview