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

Nestled - Bitterroot Valley, Montana

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words  - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

-C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory

On Value - BItterroot Valley, Montana

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) from Walden

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

GroundWater Rising - Near Victor, Montana

"The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Keeping Watch, Corvallis, Montana

Gracefully aged barns are not necessarily common in the Bitterroot Valley, but there are quite a few fines ones still in use on family farms. The way this barn is perched on a slight rise overlooking the pasture makes me wonder at some numbers: how many seasons of hay has it stored? How many litters of kittens sheltered in its stalls? Has it lost track of the number of hawks observed hunting small prey in the field below? I often wonder at the stories old houses have to tell, but I think the tales a barn could share might be earthier, warmer, versions of beginnings and endings, small joys and sorrows.

Red Barn, White Snow, Blue Sky, Victor, Montana

Here’s my visual Red, White, and Blue Montana homage to the Fourth of July.
(Hats off, hands to hearts, please, and sing the Anthem with feeling.)