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Could we be moving towards a passenger rail line along the Northern Front Range?
Written by Elliott Johnston
Thursday, 29 April 2010
The picture looks beautiful: a passenger rail system that connects Fort Collins to Denver. To be able to ride along the Northern Front Range car-free, glancing up from your magazine and looking out towards Longs Peak through big windows, watching the towns roll by, all the while skipping all that stressed-out I-25 congestion.
The reality: it could be enormously expensive and it could take decades to complete. Despite the speculation, citizen-powered non-profit Front Range on Track wants to give reality a push. FROT is promoting a plan for a passenger rail line for Northern Colorado that will run on existing track along the 287 corridor, stopping in the city centers of Fort Collins, Loveland, Berthoud, and Longmont, enroute to Denver. The plan is separate from the costly, high-speed rail plan recently put forth by the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority.
FROT will be holding an informational session on Sunday, May 2nd, at Avogadro’s Number in Fort Collins, from 5-7pm. In between the free pizza and bluegrass music, Fort Collins-based Larimer Country Commissioner candidate Adam Bowen will give a presentation called "Vision for Passenger Rail on the Front Range."
Matter Daily recently spoke with Bowen about Front Range on Track, how their plan differs from the high-speed rail proposal, and what citizens can do to get involved with supporting passenger rail travel in Northern Colorado.
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Written by Beth Kopp
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Photos by John Kopp
Wednesday, 07 April 2010
A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age
it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes.
-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanc
You hear them before you see them. Their ancient, rattle-like call rising up from the river bank is audible well before the sun begins to peak above the horizon. There are half a million sandhill cranes waking up along this sixty-mile stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska. Fossil records show their presence here dates back at least nine million years. As I sit near the river on this chilly March morning, it's hard for me to imagine that far back in time.
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A Personal Quest for Wisdom: Travels Among the Maya |
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Written by John Major Jenkins
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 16:00 |
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 Years ago, maybe in some previous incarnation, I fell in love. I was attracted, entranced, by something I couldn’t quite grasp but had to pursue. Her name: Sophia. She has led me on many journeys into cosmological mysteries, inner reveries and revolutions, classrooms, courtrooms, jungles, jails, and the vaulted Hall of the Mountain King. Exchanging food for famine, money for metaphysics, and books for knowledge, I have pursued this love until I was shoeless in Gaza, shorn of my backpack in Brazil, and interviewed on the red carpet in Hollywood. It--she, that is (Sophia)--has sustained me through plagiarisms and poverty and guided me to beatitude and windfalls.
The 16th century Christian Hermetic mystic Jacob Boehme wrote: “I will set down here a short description how it is when the Bride thus embraces the Bridegroom … to enter into the inner choir, where the soul joins hands and dances with Sophia-the Divine Wisdom.” The Divine Wisdom, you say? Capital “D,” capital “W”? Why yes, I reply … the Divine Wisdom. You know, the transcendental Buddhi Mind, the Philosopher’s Stone, the eternal and infinite unmanifest Ground of all Being. The All Radiant Mother of All Buddhas. Sophia. She is the goal of the Philosopher, lovers of wisdom (philo-sophia) who seek to unite with Truth and Wisdom, to be swept up enraptured in the ultimate epiphany, to experience one’s soul stripped bare, down the eternal source, and imbibe for once and for all the profound Truth--that all true knowledge comes from an ecstatic immersion in the transcendent. And the world, ultimately, is embedded within the transcendent--to transcend the world is not to leave the world, but to enjoy and celebrate the world at its core.
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Mongolia! Mongolia: Evolution of an Ancient World |
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Monday, 24 August 2009 04:32 |
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Photographs and Essay by Julie Larson
Deep in the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park in central Mongolia, a 70-year-old man proudly pointed to a black dot on his index finger, eager to tell me its significance: he had voted in the national election.
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