Spring is usually a long time coming here in the mountains. This is a good time to reflect on the good in everything.  Lingering winter is like the calm before the storm of high energy unleashed with ranching activity, construction starts, and the tourism industry which accesses the North Gate of Yellowstone Park through Paradise Valley.
 
We had a brief blizzard blow through here a few days ago. Mountain snow pack for the Yellowstone watershed looks good.  With warming temps, the river rises, irrigation work begins, and ranchers move cattle to greener pastures. You know spring is here when a trip to town gets delayed by a herd of cattle going down the same road.

The mountain bluebirds arrive here in Paradise with warm southwest Chinook winds. They brave Spring snowstorms to fly North and build their nests around my home, a passive solar straw-bale house by the Yellowstone River. Written on the utility room wall is the dates when the bluebird fledglings took wing over the years. I've learned to whistle their sweet chirping, and 'talk' to them as they flutter around the gardens.

In one short summer, the fledglings grow to fly south in the Fall, returning early in the Spring, braving the frequent snow squalls, to have their own families here. 

Now is the time when local folk get ready to 'Spring Forward' even as the nation gets ready to reset clocks an hour forward on Sunday night.  This artificial time manipulation causes heart attacks nationwide as you can read HERE.

Teepee rings of stone circles are found all around Paradise Valley.  Indian families apparently staked out their mobile teepees this way, returning to the same circles for hunting grounds and wintering grounds.

When settlers came to Montana, they found Paradise Valley populated by large herds of elk, deer and bison.  Buffalo jumps, where Indians herded them over cliffs, rim the valley. This was good hunting, and giant springs still provide open water, thick with trout, even when the river freezes over.

As printed in one of the first Rand McNally U.S. map books, there is an old Indian legend that two tribes met for war here in the valley, but the Great Spirit spoke to them in no uncertain terms that there would be no war here.   So among the Indians, and later settlers, this area became known as Paradise Valley.

The Indians understood Nature intuitively. The Great Spirit spoke to them in ways that their shaman were especially known for. It is natural that indigenous cultures worldwide knew this Great Spirit. But unnatural man in industrialized nations become disconnected from Nature. In their arrogance they call native cultures 'primitive'. The moral compass of modern civilization has lost its true North.

Witness the unabashed greed on Wall Street,
the grid-locked power struggles in Congress,
and the thinly veiled propaganda in the media.

Common folk worldwide have an instinctive love of Nature that reflects the love for the 'Creator' in Nature's Creation. That's why Yellowstone Park is the most visited nature preserve in the world.  There are almost as many foreign visitors as Americans.  It's not just the spectacular geysers and the giant Lake Yellowstone at 8,000 feet in the mouth of a super-volcano.

Just about every year, national newspapers carry the story of some city-slicker in the Big Park who gets gored by a bison or falls a few thousand feet into Yellowstone Canyon because they are clueless about Nature. I've heard stories of kids who grew up among skyscrapers and went into shock when visiting, curling up in a fetal position when traveling through the vast scale of geological drama in Yellowstone Park.

 Nature was just too 'loud' for them.

The habit of unnatural living tunes out Nature until 'unreality' becomes normal.  This is the dis-ease of Western civilization - the disconnect from Nature's law and 'language' as speaks to the soul... out of the 'boxes' we live in.

Indians lived in circular 'pyra-mids'. Their teepees were a circle, with a "fire" (pyra) in the "middle" (mid).  Tribes would group their teepees in a circle, with a fire in the middle... like the planets of our solar system around the sun.  Natural man lives like that, creating a space that shapes 'spherical consciousness' around the fiery spirit that matters... centered and connected with the seasons and cycles like natural clockwork.

 
What goes around comes around.
 To every action there is a reaction.
   Each of us reaps what we've sown.