Montana Festival Reminded me of my Purpose
This is the first time I’ve talked about our home, Buffalo Jump Ranch, what we are building, and why. Montana Festival helped me find the right words.
I went to Montana Festival because I recently started Buffalo Jump Forge, it is in startup mode. So I signed up for two days in Bozeman, 1,000 people, as many conversations as I could find. What I came home with is much different than what I went to find.
While I was there something broke free - something broke in me. Not fracture, not damage, but surfaced, breathing the air like a diver surfacing after a long swim. I felt truth flowing in a way I have missed for a very long time - from deep within my heart, delivering clarity, to my mind.
George Packer’s Four Americas
During his talk, Packer referenced his Atlantic piece on the Four Americas. The frame is four ways of being American that don’t talk to each other: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America.
What stopped me was his description of Just America: it’s organized around grievance. The moral engine is a catalogue of wrongs. Identity is built from who has been wronged and by whom.
I’ve been trying to name something since 2016 and that frame broke something free in the stalemate of my thinking. I am beginning to see how to move from grievance and fear to hope - and I think it’s a move we need to make together. In fact, I think it is best done in community - with other.
Yo-Yo Ma and the Bison
Later that day, Cristina Mormorunni and Kirk Johnson did a panel on bison and Indigenous land stewardship. Cristina screened a film showing Yo-Yo Ma playing Amazing Grace as bison listen. The setting was the Blackfeet Nation — bison returning home to rejoin their brothers and sisters after more than a century.
Together with Packer’s frame, that image finished a thought I’d been working on for a long time.
We’re running on the urgency of fear. Fear of what we’re losing, fear of what’s coming. It energizes — fear is urgent, fear mobilizes, but doesn’t build anything; eventually it destroys us - separates, isolates, terrifies, and paralyzes us.
We have to move from the urgency of fear to the urgency of hope. Not just a belief the future will be better, but an intentional investment in making the future better for everyone. And it will require us all to work together - in community, as a family - e pluribus unum - as “A many, One”.
The urgency of hope requires work, believing what you’re building matters and will make a difference, not just that what you’re fighting against is wrong. It requires having something to invite people into, so I am inviting you into this conversation, this moment, this shift - from fear to hope.
What the Ranch Is
Buffalo Jump Ranch is 150+ acres in the lower Madison Valley, 45 minutes west of Bozeman. We are building Buffalo Jump Forge there, and turning the ranch into a place we can use to host, enable, maybe catalyze transformation in others.
The Ranch is (and has been for us) a place to retreat into the vast quiet of rural Montana — not metaphorically, literally. A place to stop and be somewhere. The valley is big and the noise falls away faster than you’d expect.
We are creating a place to do the work inside ourselves, individually and together. Eventually we will have space for classes, workshops, and groups. The premise: nobody is the expert in everything, and everyone is humble enough to learn from someone else. You come to teach what you know and leave having learned something you didn’t.
The elk in the hills, the blackbirds in the field, the fish in the Madison create the community. They welcome us to remember who we are, we are created to create, and that we exist in community - with the earth and all living things.
What we want the Ranch to be is a place for people to do the work of turning fear into action to realize hope. That conversion may mean a new vocation, a newly discovered passion to create, or rest and respite to return to the existing passion or calling you already have.
Why I Came Back
I moved back to Montana 18 months ago after 10 years in Seattle. I went to the festival to figure out how to build Buffalo Jump Forge. I came back knowing why we’re building Buffalo Jump Ranch.
None of this happens without Yarrow Kraner, Padden Guy Murphy, and Lumay Wang Murphy and the Last Best Future team creating the conditions for 1,000 people to think together. Thank you for building Montana Festival.