The Bitterroot River valley, at dusk, near Victor, Montana

11 August 2008

Patrick and Kathleen walked down from the foothills, after investigating a small pillar of smoke and a nearby osprey’s nest. They waved from a distance, and twilight's purple rays ran up the Sapphires, giving way to the long shadow of the Bitterroots. We waited, I on my lumbering oak tree of a bicycle. Before we even said hi, Patrick invited us to camp on the grass near the anvil house. We slept there, under the Perseid-filled sky.

Patrick had thrived over stage four throat cancer. Tall, lanky and robust, with the positive worldview of someone who has survived. Kathleen ran rivers, among a life of other vocations. Just as tall. Her face spread from a narrow chin, prominent cheeks, eyes set wide as to cast their reach around the world and wavy hair that followed after the reach of her eyes. They had spent two summers, traveling across Montana and Wyoming in covered wagons. He was a farrier by trade, shoeing horses, the tools of a blacksmith. She now wrote, most famous for How to Shit in the Woods.

Their house a large barn, warm with yellow and purple flowers on the porch. Sweet well water. Filled with the tools and remnants of worthy living. Literature, straw hats, rough hewn beams, jars of tea, oats, and fruit, tree-trunk tables, journals, letters and a place to sit together. Cluttered perhaps, but not the tedious clutter that overwhelms you and pushes you out. Rather the soulful clutter of a vibrant mind, the rhythmic patter of an inviting heart, urging you to stay and feel.

According to Patrick, in nearly every spiritual worldview, the traveler is sacred. You never know who the traveler may be. A traveler is by nature weary, needing rest, and to be recovered. A traveler remembers gifts received, and reciprocates them to the world, as traveler and host may never meet again. And the host, then, the host is divine; firm, rooted, a central point that emanates and gravitates love. Keeping, covering, creating.

Such were the night and morning cast at Romany Forge.

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The Preambulatory Notion

The following posts will reflect a few days of bicycle journey, taken prior to my transcontinental cycling relocation.

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The Bardo

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is the state between one life and the next, the threshold between death and rebirth. Fitting, it seems, in some ways.

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The Mandala