Outside my kitchen window is a Bird of Paradise.

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If playing cowboy at J Bar L was a singular experience, my stay at Mountain Sky Guest Ranch, in Montana's Paradise Valley, felt pleasingly familiar.

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It is paradise without a passport (if you are an American) and it calls my name on every cold winter's day walking around New York's distant archipelago cousin, where I live and work.

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As I reflect on this, I see how the American story is in many ways my story -- a country still trying to negotiate its own identity, caught between the paradise of its founding ideals and the realities of its history, trying to figure it out, trying to "become" even today -- the word hope as fresh on our tongues as it ever was.

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