It’s been a frenetic past week, finishing my 168th monthly column for Colorado Central magazine, putting last-minute touches on a book called “Healthy Brains, Healthy Children” by Dr. Coralee Thompson, M.D., and Phil Maffetone, and trying to keep pace with a training manual that I’m editing for Transportation Technology Center Inc.

Somehow during all this I found time to round up, sort and move our cows off the school section and over to the main ranch for the winter. Two days later, two of them were back at the school section looking for their calves, thus another small round-up.

While I was out for a run the other day, I was followed by a raven. The black bird drifted over my shoulder, flew off ahead and then circled back to follow me for quite some distance. Other birds that have made their presence known to me recently are the jays — both Stellar’s and Clark’s Nutcrackers. The crows and the jays are related, and speak to self-sufficiency and opportunistic feeding habits. Their existence is conspicuous in an area that, especially for humans, does not support life. So the symbolism is not lost considering everything I’m doing to piece together a living these days.

Remarkably, the birds manage to maintain a sense of humor about it, and even spare some energy to play with the humans. There’s a lesson here.

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