Our Journey When you take the first step of a journey, you never know what's around the next corner, or where you will end up. For millennia, people have made pilgrimage a part of their life-plan. According to  Books: A Living History by Lyons [1] Pilgrim's Progress , published in English in 1678, has been translated into over 200 languages and is still in print  [2] . So this is a oft-used metaphor and we still take literal journeys which may be pilgrimages to the home places of our ancestors, or retracing their migrations. There is something profound and important about seeing those places now, and experiencing a bit of what those who came before saw and felt. I will never forget visiting the churches that my second-great-grandfather Cowan would have worshipped or traveling over the hills where he herded sheep as a boy.  Some of our journeys are more based on education and practice than travel. Barbara Mattoon has written some wonderful posts about educatio...

Our ancestors in the US faced all kinds of challenges, many of which have been overcome or lessen through time, such as transportation difficulties, food spoilage, lack of medical care, and slow or nonexistent communication methods.  Goldilocks? A common predator which still threatens humans and our pets remains though -- BEARS! Yes, we have bears in south King County! Years ago I used to get milk from a family locally in Black Diamond. One week when I stopped by for my gallon of milk, she told me that a bear attacking their beehives out in the orchard scared the cow which was giving milk and made her dry up! I guess it's true that bears love honey. A year or two after that, as I was coming home in the evening after dark, I saw shadowy figures on the road. As I slowed, I thought, what are clowns tumbling across the road for? As I got close enough for the headlights to let me see just who was crossing the road, I saw a mama bear and her two cubs walk into the woods! No clue why my b...