On Reading and Walking - Missoula, Montana

I appreciated the deft connecting in this quote of two favourite things - well-written books and long walks producing layered good results (including some lovely spring things).
 "She told me once, when we read a story, we inhabit it. 
 The covers of the books are like a roof and four walls.
 A house.
 She, more than anything else in the world, loved the moment when you finished a book, and the story keeps playing like the most vivid dream in your head. 
 And after that, she loved taking long walks to clear her mind of all the emotions and feelings the book had started within her."
-Opening lines of movie The Bookshop, based on 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald

PS Scroll down the right sidebar to see my Recent Reads - & let me know what's on your list!

Summer Clouds In Motion - Missoula, Montana

"But maybe Leo felt the same shakiness 

when he made it back to Sandusky...And my father, too,

 when he brought me to the Galaxy that first time,

 to show me how to be humble about what we love.

The point is not that you get away from fear, but that 
you move along with it.
 You don't let it freeze you in place."

- from Midnight Bowling by Quinn Dalton

Blue Skies - Missoula, Montana

"Blue skies....smilin' at me..." from behind sun-whitened cotton candy wisps of cloud...

We are revelling in these perfect spring days while they last, knowing that more rain is in Western Montana's forecast.

"...Blue days...all of them gone...

Nothin' but blue skies from now on..."

River Rush - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"I grew up in this town, 
my poetry was born 
between the hill and the river, 
it took its voice from the rain, 
and like the timber, 
it steeped itself in the forests."

- Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

On Seeing - Missoula, Montana

"I have been so young till this moment that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was being carried, and behold, I was walking."

Ransom asked what she meant.

"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. 
But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. 
And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

- from Perelandra, Chapter Five, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

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!)

Time's Long Shadows - Yellowstone National Park

"Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

(Note: If you didn't read the earlier Yellowstone posts, please read disclaimer here.)

Along The Fountain Paint Pot Trail - Yellowstone National Park

"Colour in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic."

 -Antoni Gaudi (1852–1926)

(Click here to read more about the energetic Fountain Paint Pot area of Yellowstone National Park.)

High, Wide and Handsome, Shelby, Montana

The grandeur of ‘high, wide, and handsome’ is ever present in Montana’s skies - it could be a daily photo series all on its own. Rolling grasslands outside of Shelby, Montana
, bring their own reflection of vastness beneath the spreading skies. Zoom in to just above the horizon and you’ll better see the far mountains that we wind through to finally arrive home.

Fenceline, Shelby, Montana

"Three long days of dust behind him, 
at least that many more to go. 
His job it is to ride the fences, 

to bend the wire and mend the posts...

Another sunrise finds him mounted 
ready to begin the day. For now the sun 
is at his back, no wind or rain to cloud 

their way. 

He loses count of what he mended on his 
journey east to west. He knows the 
corner post will greet him; three more 

lines until they rest."

From  "Riding Fences" by Alexander Beebe

Up To Sky, Missoula, Montana

"The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? — it is the same the angels breathe." - Mark Twain, "Roughing It"

What better motivation to keep climbing to the top of the hill - to inhale deep of God's big, wide sky? Keep going, step by step - you can make it - we're cheering you on!
(Plus, we can stop for real ice cream once we're back down in town.)

Sky Lines of Power, Missoula, Montana

Holiday Repost: 23 May 2013
“Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.”
- James A. Garfield, 20th president of US 1881 (1831 - 1881)

Spring Skyscape 1, Corvallis, Montana

Sky Lines of Power, Missoula, Montana

“Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.”James A. Garfield, 20th president of US 1881 (1831 - 1881)