Standing in Wildfire

Yesterday, my husband Gary and I began a drive to Montana.  We live there parts of the year.  Just outside a really small community tucked into muscular folds of the Intermountain West.  With water and trees, with big mammals like Elk, Moose and Bear – with Eagles and Hawks, and this past spring, with a mama hummingbird nested just outside our window. It was early when we left Portland – the place… Read More

Merry Christmas to All

…and to All a Good Night. With gratitude and finest possible wishes to each of you ~ MC –Red Lodge, MT

Fracking — Any Hope of Listening Here?

NOTE:  Here’s a brief statement by a conservation writer and a response from a person with another opinion.  Both are residents of the same area of Montana.  My question to myself – to all of us – is how can these two people listen to one another?  How can they be in conversation toward some level of understanding – even action?  Is it possible? And before I leave you to read their… Read More

Wolves, Humans and the Errors of Fast Thinking

  So, a few years ago a Nobel Prize winning economic scientist named Daniel Kahneman took a pretty astonishing look at cognitive, biological and psychological habits of minds faced with the need to make judgments or decisions.  His observations show up in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Needless to say, there’s a lot in this book.  One powerful trend Kahneman found in human decision making indicates that when we make quick… Read More

Human Parades: A Sampling (…read to the bottom)

Last Saturday, Portland Oregon had a clustering of human processions.  Every year this time the Rose Festival hits its climax with the Grand Floral Parade — the second largest floral parade in the nation next to Pasadena’s Rose Parade on January 1.  Typical to Oregon’s modesty and as true to its chutzpah, the Rose Festival was established a mere 17 years after the first parade in Pasadena way back in the first… Read More

Day after Memorial Day in Montana

The past few days have, for me, been filled again with Montana.  Specifically the valleys just northeast of the Beartooth/Absaroka range of the Rockies.  Yesterday our country gave an entire day to a remembrance many of us make far more often during the year in honor of the people who have given their lives in service to this country.  On that day I stood in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone, the country’s… Read More

Montana Reprise — the Renewal of Uncertainty Easter and Beyond

It is Easter morning.  A black cat walks across a bright green stretch of lawn each step a caress as silken and clear as the the early morning air that holds it all. I’ve driven 1800 miles in the past week.  Even though that’s a thing I’m known to do, the particular kind of presence demanded by the road continues to offer surprises that, upon my return, make the miracles like cat… Read More

Independence Shared

On the day the only living Pinta Island Giant Tortoise was found dead, fires raged in the foothills of the Colorado front range and the Supreme Court of the U.S. decided the state of Montana could not assert its 100+ year old legislative policy stating the corporations are not people.  It was raining in Portland, OR where today the sun peeks regularly between clouds making for dappled shadows instead of monochrome.  That… Read More

Saving Grace

3-19-2009 Near the Airport Salt Lake City, UT It’s a long way from Chicago, IL to Salt Lake City, UT – especially in two days by car – tiny car. Fortunately, there’s been saving grace – lots of it. One certain sign of this abundance is the fact that I’m sitting here right now, safe and sound after so many miles through all kinds of weather and, in the instance of I-80 through Iowa… Read More