Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

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“If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death . . . If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life. The heart is what makes us human . .”

-- Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy.

I attended a “Circle of Trust” retreat focusing on the work of Parker Palmer, learned about the power of the “broken open heart,” and came home to my cat of fifteen years whose body suddenly felt like a sack of bones. The change was so profound in the two days I had been away, I couldn’t take in what I felt when I held him. A week later he died with his head craddled in my hand and my heart broke. If there is power in that, I don’t feel it. I don’t know if my heart broke open or simply broke. His death is perhaps too recent, the experience of loss still too profound. What I do feel is an empty yearning for his presence, wonderful, annoying, compelling, and comforting, a gift to my mornings when he would walk over and around me, or simply sit and stare until I got up and let him and Conner-the-dog outdoors.

Now Conner learns that waking me is his job. I watch him as he explores how to live in our household without Max.

Max’ presence rewarded me at the end of the day when I felt my efforts since morning had been inconsequential, invisible. His presence rewarded me on days that had been rich and full, when I came home spent and weary and retreated to our couch where he settled his full-bodied warmth on to me, anchoring me, and then all my effort seemed worthwhile.

He came to us a kitten, adopted from the Humane Society, a kitten who immediately filled our household with Presence. He was never afraid of Timber, our 100 pound German Shepherd. She was surprised by his gutsy playfulness. Timber had carried the weight of our household, the responsibility for our safety, for nine years. When four years later she died at thirteen, Max naturally and gracefully assumed that responsibility.

“‘Heart’ comes from the Latin, cor, the core of self, that centerplace where all of our ways of knowing converge . . .”

Max moved in with us just as a business I had grown and nourished died at eighteen. I would return home every day from that process absolutely heart-broken, heart-sick with loss, failure, defeat, betrayal and death, and Max would charm me back in to the world with his wild pleasure, exploring every centimeter of the household, finding the most mundane items endlessly fascinating and entertaining.

He stayed like that, curious, engaged and full-out alive. Gorgeously grey, he was a solid and supple twenty pounds. Dominant in every sense of the word, he ran the household, patrolled the yard, yet came running when friends visited, was often there at the gate waiting when I came home at the end of the day.

When I was studying to become a BodyTalk practitioner and offering in-home practice sessions, friends would come for their session, we’d start, and then suddenly there was Max from wherever else he had been in the house or yard. He wanted to lie on them during their session, or under the table, or on the couch nearby. I never was certain if he was offering healing, receiving healing, or both.

These last two years I had used my training in BodyTalk for Animals with him, focusing on helping him to live to fifteen. Now I wonder what stopped me from imagining a healthy-hale seventeen year old cat.

Since his death, I have spoken with others, with both old and new friends, about cherished four-leggeds who were so much more than “pet,” neither surrogate son nor daughter, but full-on companion and friend. Animals you were incredibly gifted to know and live with, sharing time and space, and yes, love.

For years, I’d gotten ahead of myself, afraid as Max aged, savoring the time, watching it as if it truly was the sand in an hour glass running out, wishing I could add more sand, hedge the inevitable. I knew however much time we had, it wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t imagine my life without him, living without him. And now, I am.

“There are some human experiences that only the heart can comprehend and only heart-talk can convey.”

My daughter picked Max from his litter mates, something I have thanked her for so many, many years. I thank her now again for the amazing gift to our lives of his full-out presence.

We all have deaths we chronicle, deaths that form and shape and unalterably change, define us.

I am changed. Our household, changed. Our hearts, changed. Broken open or apart? I don’t yet know. What good may come of it, I don’t yet know. A hug with my daughter, shared tears, shared stories, cherished memories bring us close. We watch Conner-the-dog adjust, watch as he expands his presence, trying to figure out who he is after eleven years of having his life shaped by Maxwell the Maximum Cat.

The leaves from the raspberry bushes that shaded Max as he lounged under them this past summer still clung to the plants as he died, dark and red and dying themselves. We gathered them along with lavender and sage to honor and protect him on his journey, wrapped his body in towels and in love and appreciation.

Always a full-bore sensualist, Max would have reveled in these recent magical days of November, redolent with sunshine and warmth. The cold, long days of winter, he simply endured -- the coming long days of winter, empty of his footsteps in the snow.

~ Thanks to Parker Palmer’s “Healing the Heart of Democracy,” and to non-profit Hopa Mountain for hosting the retreat that introduced me to his work. And, always, thanks to Max.

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We at DM love our ‘Cats and our Griz! Whether we tailgate and go the game in person, or gather with friends to catch it on TV, few events bring the state together like a good ol’ fashioned ‘Cat/Griz matchup. On the eve of the 112th meeting of these two great rivals, we thought it would be fun to share some trivia from the past. Enjoy and Go ‘Cats and Go Griz!  

MORE>>> Distinctly Montana

After serving nearly a decade in prison for a gruesome murder he didn’t commit, Ryan Ferguson walked out of the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri a free man last week.

And that’s cause for celebration for one Missoula author, who worked tirelessly for two years writing a book proving Ferguson is innocent of strangling the Daily Tribune sports editor in Columbia, Mo.

Brian D’Ambrosio started working on the book with the Ferguson family when he heard about the case from a friend in Columbia.

He became intrigued by inconsistencies in the case against Ferguson – a case that, D’Ambrosio said, was predicated on the shaky testimony of a troubled teenager named Charles Erickson and the false testimony of an eyewitness to the crime.

MORE>>>The Missoulian

Built primarily to serve as a major railroad center, Havre is the largest city on the Hi-Line of Montana. Incorporated in 1893, it's a community that was instrumental in the harnessing of the Wild West. Indeed, there are many voices telling multitudinous stories in this old rebellious railroad town.

A century ago the picture here was profoundly different: Railroaders and bootleggers, mountain men and cowboys, living midst common violence, with barrooms and saloons as the stage and marker of tested manliness. Close your eyes tightly and it's almost as if you can taste the city's rambunctious past.

Throughout the decades much of old Havre has been razed or fallen into utterly unrecognizable disrepair. One preserved piece of evidence testifying to the city's unique history, however, is still very much apparent.

On this slate-gray November morning, small, lustrous grids of purple colored squares can be seen embedded in the sidewalks of Havre's downtown area -- a short six-block section enveloping the north side of the city. At one point, these "skylights" -- transformed purplish over time due to the sun's frenzied rays -- supplied and controlled the ebb and flow of illumination for the underground city built below more than one hundred years ago. Throughout its history, this underground expanse has been host to riotous debaucheries, including a bordello, a Chinese laundry mat, a saloon, a drugstore, at least three opium dens and rooms used for smuggling alcohol during Prohibition.

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Welcome to a new online initiative featuring the sounds of some of the West’s most iconic species and places. The Acoustic Atlas will collect the sounds of Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, along with habitats and species from throughout the Western United States.

In the coming months, we will be adding many new recordings to this website. We invite you to listen to samples from the collection on these pages, as well as featured recordings from around the region.

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“...We must understand that we are all in this together . . . we humans are a profoundly interconnected species -- entwined with one another and with all forms of life . . . “.

-- Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy

Imagine you had the best mentor in the world. What if that mentor isn’t a person but is the life all around and within you?

At the October Montana Non-Profit Association Conference in Missoula, Certified Biomicry Specialist Toby Lynn Herzlich suggested looking to nature for guidance, invited those of us listening to study nature’s “best practices,” something that we here in Montana are ideally situated to do. On her website, Herzlich writes, “We are learning to live sustainably on planet earth – why not turn to the Earth, itself, and gather insight from the 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success?”

Most Western institutions are based on a Newtonian world view, seeking to understand the world by breaking it in to parts. The result? Fragmentation and brokenness. Biomimicry and the study of nature’s best practices invite a shift from a linear approach to one that’s cyclical and adaptable, one that moves us from isolation to an awareness of being part of an interconnected whole.

“Life already does what we are trying to do, creating conditions that are conducive to life.” Herzlich said, “An attitude of awe is the first step to becoming a student of nature.”

In that study are time-tested solutions for the complexity of challenges we face, challenges that are systemic, global. She said, “We are called to rethink our basics, to think less like a machine and more like an ecosystem,” to reshape society in ways that are healthy, regenerative & just. We need to be open to discovery of how we can organize ourselves differently, need to shift our attention from what we knew and look to the natural world as a mentor.

For instance, nature cooperates; builds community; saves water in times of drought; invests in the next generations; educates; and protects. It finds opportunities even when conditions are tough; its purposeful; collaborative; adaptive; resilient; constantly confronting new possibilities. It models shared leadership.

Nature is a feedback rich, criticism free zone. Herzlich said that we need to listen for messages in our system, try a lot of things, fail fast,integrate the unexpected, institutionalize what works and let go the rest, let go of what no longer works. We need to learn to work with nature, not exploit it or force it.

“Nature is not ‘out there,’” she said. “We are it, part of it.”

"Be part of a new story of living on earth, humbling ourselves to sit and listen and learn and be grateful for what is all around us.”

How might you make that invitation a part of your Thanksgiving celebration?

Resources to learn more:

http://www.asknature.org

http://biomimicry.net

http://www.bio-sis.net

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When you envision Montana, you probably think wide open spaces, horses and cowboys, right? Well, Missoula will surprise you. Lots of green space and a university campus makes Missoula an unsuspectingly cool town. Missoula is surrounded by mountains and is home to art galleries (the first Friday evening of every month is "First Friday Gallery Night"), lots of outdoor adventure and the yearly River City Roots Festival. Missoula is also the host of Hempfest, if that's your thing.

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