The Cowboy Church
By Duncan Blair from his Traditional Sail Website
Cowboy Church is a somewhat contrarian take on spirituality. It is simple, non-denominational, entirely self-motivated and is not concerned with time or place.
To attend Cowboy Church you just need to wash your hands, put on a clean shirt and go off, by yourself, into the Natural world, away from the veneer of modern life: roads, power lines, bill boards and cell phones.
You look out onto the vistas of forests, or plains or desert and absorb their stillness and beauty, taking it all into your heart and mind.
This is made easier if you are horseback or in the company of a good dog.
I discovered Cowboy Church years ago and made a point of attending while living on ranches in California and Arizona.
Now I am living on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with water, sand dunes and pine trees. But it is still Cowboy Church
The expanses of ocean, sky, sunlight and shadow provide a lot to see, feel and think about. The ocean contains all sorts of life, not always seen but always present below the surface.
Looking across the surface of the water there are occasional glimpses of the dorsal fins of dolphins, swirls of small bait fish, brown pelicans and laughing gulls flying, ghost crabs on the beach.
The dunes behind the beaches and the pine forests behind the dunes testify to the power of erosion, deposition and longshore sediment transport; all parts of the enormous force we call Nature, which is constantly establishing, erasing and then re-establishing complex webs of life.
The water itself is constantly moving. Whether in two foot wind waves or six inch ankle snappers, it is relentlessly running up onto the beach—sometimes bringing more sand, sometimes taking sand away.
There is always more going on than what meets the eye.
You can understand it any way you wish to, but first you must become aware of it.
This is the basic principle of Cowboy Church, where the door is always open.
Duncan BlairCowboy Church is a somewhat contrarian take on spirituality.
It is simple, non-denominational, entirely self-motivated and is not concerned with time or place.
To attend Cowboy Church you just need to wash your hands, put on a clean shirt and go off, by yourself, into the Natural world, away from the veneer of modern life: roads, power lines, bill boards and cell phones.
You look out onto the vistas of forests, or plains or desert and absorb their stillness and beauty, taking it all into your heart and mind.
This is made easier if you are horseback or in the company of a good dog.
I discovered Cowboy Church years ago and made a point of attending while living on ranches in California and Arizona.
Now I am living on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with water, sand dunes and pine trees. But it is still Cowboy Church
The expanses of ocean, sky, sunlight and shadow provide a lot to see, feel and think about. The ocean contains all sorts of life, not always seen but always present below the surface.
Looking across the surface of the water there are occasional glimpses of the dorsal fins of dolphins, swirls of small bait fish, brown pelicans and laughing gulls flying, ghost crabs on the beach.
The dunes behind the beaches and the pine forests behind the dunes testify to the power of erosion, deposition and longshore sediment transport; all parts of the enormous force we call Nature, which is constantly establishing, erasing and then re-establishing complex webs of life.
The water itself is constantly moving. Whether in two foot wind waves or six inch ankle snappers, it is relentlessly running up onto the beach—sometimes bringing more sand, sometimes taking sand away.
There is always more going on than what meets the eye.
You can understand it any way you wish to, but first you must become aware of it.
This is the basic principle of Cowboy Church, where the door is always open.
Duncan Blair
