Last weekend, under a Montana sky that stretched in every direction, we marked 50 years of the Feathered Pipe Ranch — a gathering of old friends, yoga pioneers, and kindred spirits in celebration of a shared vision: conscious living rooted in love, service, and community.
There were tears. There was laughter. And there was the quiet sense that something rare and enduring had once again made itself known.
A day or two later, driving off the land on a simple errand, I was reminded — again — of how the sky here plays tricks on perception. Or maybe it reveals something truer. The term “big sky” isn’t just poetic flourish. Out here, the sky is bigger. Scientists say it’s a function of low humidity, clear air, long sight lines. But anyone who’s been to the high plains or the mountain West knows it’s also something else: a felt sense of scale and spaciousness. A shift in the inner weather.
If you stop and take a full circle view, you’ll see it all at once: storm clouds rumbling in one quadrant, dazzling blue in another, and in between — cottony swirls dancing over pine-topped ridges. It’s never just one thing. Out here, you can hold it all in a single glance. Darkness and light. Storm and calm. Stillness and movement.
Back home, wherever that is, the sky feels more binary. It’s sunny or it’s cloudy. But here, the horizon teaches complexity — and with it, a kind of grace.
Geographers say “geography is destiny,” usually in reference to power and politics. But what if it's also true inwardly? What if our inner geography — our capacity to perceive and to hold many truths at once — is shaped by the land we walk, the sky we live under?
Maybe that’s why places like this, born from a wild and hopeful dream in the 1970s, still matter. Maybe they stretch not only our limbs and lungs, but our imagination. Maybe they help us remember that life isn’t either/or. It’s always all of it.
What becomes possible when we allow for that?
When we remember that light and shadow can coexist — not just out there in the sky, but in us? That it’s not weakness to hold grief and joy in the same breath, or to let awe live beside uncertainty?
In times like these, when the world feels brittle and noisy, it’s easy to narrow our gaze, to forget that anything new could still emerge.
But maybe that’s the quiet teaching of the big sky — that multiple truths can be present, that storms pass, that beauty and trouble often ride the same wind.
And maybe places like this, dreamed into being by a few bold hearts long ago, help keep that aperture open — not just for escape, but for remembering what it means to live with curiosity, courage, and care.
What becomes possible when we give ourselves room to see the whole sky?
What does your sky hold?
