Caroline McLean
Executive Director & Visionary
Caroline McLean - Executive Director
In October 2017, I traveled to Bhutan on a pilgrimage and I came home with a vision, Bring Prayer Wheels to Crested Butte. In my heart, Crested Butte is a sacred place and Bhutan showed me how to steward the community with kindness, love, respect, reciprocity, and regeneration! The beauty of our mountain vistas, open spaces, and river valleys are community treasures. Our environment at the top of the watershed is unique, dynamic, and fragile. We are connected and our lifeblood depends on how we choose to live in community with Mother Earth. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves and white man’s history tells the story that nature and native peoples are for the taking. Our consumerist culture has subdued, destroyed, and colonized our Mother Earth and she has reached a tipping point and is unable to hold herself in balance. Climate change, drought, and forest fires are game-changers. Our own existence is threatened and it’s time to shift our values.
If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor. - Joseph Campbell
Crested Butte experiences long harsh winters and (I believe) the struggle to survive is the root to our community grit, courage and strength. We are a welcoming tight knit community who’s nature runs wild through our blood stream. We are different and we appreciate and respect our differences. We help each other, we serve each other and we remember how to get along. We know that kindness and love unifies. We know that these shared values and our respect for Mother Earth are the ingredients for a joyful life. We may not have access to big box stores but we have shop keepers who are our neighbors and friends. We are a community and with that in mind, show your respect, make a love intention and spin a prayer wheel for your community, your home, our home!