Thought for the day - September 12, 1999

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: WyoWoman
Date: 13 Sep 99 - 08:41 PM

Changed, reaffirmed or just opened wide, I'm never certain. But something surely happens, and it's what makes so much of the other, less worthy experiences seem like nothing to trouble oneself about.

Thanks for your good words,

WW

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: Allan C.
Date: 13 Sep 99 - 12:09 PM

I have often thought of what it must have been like for John Glenn to have looked down upon the Earth from so far away. I think: "How could he see that and not be changed?"

But I have also seen things down here (sometimes through the eyes of others,) for which the same question could be asked.

Thanks, Katlaughing and WyoWoman for the glimpses of your part of this world.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: WyoWoman
Date: 12 Sep 99 - 05:57 PM

Yes, it's a heckuva place. Some days, I just want to hit the highway and not look back. But others, I look around me and can't imagine living anywhere else. I may be forever spoiled for "real" places -- at least for urban areas...

WW

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: Peter T.
Date: 12 Sep 99 - 02:49 PM

Beautiful landscapes, ardently captured.
yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: Escamillo
Date: 12 Sep 99 - 02:08 AM

Let me say thanks to Kat and WW for sharing their feelings.

Andrés Magré

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: WyoWoman
Date: 12 Sep 99 - 12:02 AM

Lovely, Miss Kat.

I had a breath-taking day today, too. Y'all out there in Mudcatland should have been in Wyoming today. I drove up to Buffalo for a meeting and put in a CD of Schubert's Mass No. 2 in G Major as I left Casper. I cranked it as loud as it would go and as I drove north, I watched this boiling gray norther pushing the clouds down over the mountains toward me. Out front were fluffy, white clouds on a forced march, propelled by the almost charcoal gray heavier clouds behind them.

The vastness of this land simply cracks open my heart sometimes, and I was in a deep state of the Most Holy, Grateful Wow as I watched the textures of the clouds and the magnificent shadows and layering of colors where the mountains met the plains. As I came over a hill, the Big Horn Mountains came into view just as the "Agnus Dei" started. Regardless of religious orientation, you couldn't be in the middle of all that geographic and musical drama and not feel your cells being rearranged.

Glory, glory, glory.

ww

Subject: Thought for the day - September 12, 1999
From: katlaughing
Date: 11 Sep 99 - 11:44 PM

The giant machinations of nature are so evident out on the high lonesome prairie of Wyoming. Today, we traveled for an hour and a half, down and up long, bumpy, rock-strewn roads to the remote site of yet another television transmitter, on Shirley Mountain, down near Medicine Bow. The very same Medicine Bow made famous in Owen Wister's The Virginian and in Art Thieme's Cowboy's Barbara Allen.

On the way we saw Chalk Mountain, a stark sheer wall of a mountain rising up in brilliant white, a kind of wild West "Cliffs of Dover". The contrast of the brightness, with dark green ponderosa pines, blue gray silver of the sagebrush, along wtht the various wheat coloured prairie grasses was emphasized by huge, billowy white clouds, the sun peaking through in fits of hot, high altitude brilliance.

All of the hills and mountains lift up in one direction, like giants' tilted tabletops, looking as though everything on them should come sliding off, crashing to the plains below. Wyoming is a geologist's dream garden.

Shirley Mountain is the highest point in that area at about 8,500 feet, rising straight up from about 4,000 feet. On top, one can see for hundreds of miles in every direction with no impediments...just clear, long distances of rolling prairie full of muted reds, yellows, blues, and greens.

The noise of our truck and rising dust behind us, scared up many prairie dogs, as well as small hawks and an eagle or two. Large bands of antelope crisscrossed the road in front of us, back and forth, in a ground-eating pattern of evasion, while four elk didn't even let us get close, running, melting into a small arroyo of trees, blending so well they were invisible.

The transmitter on Shirley is located on a huge, private ranch of 100 square miles, approximately 200,000 acres. It was evident by the animals' behavoir they know their seasons well. The cold nights and pleasantly cool days bring the noisy long sticks which mean their death; all they can do is keep watch, be alert and try to outrun the manufactured death, the most unnatural thing in this landscape of timeless beauty.

I feel blessed with the sights of today, by the ceaseless rustle of the wind through the dry and scrubby brush, and the sharp, tangy scent of crushed sage. They and creatures assure me of the rightness of all creation and I am thankful.

kat