Gone Fishin'

BE
BACK
IN
8

DAYS.

I must be excited.

Why We Wait

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

It's been a long winter, but moments like this are not far off. My girls and I will be outdoors enjoying long days, short sleeves, long walks, sandals, rain storms, rivers, a world changed, the world charged, cottonwoods, fiddleheads, tents, campfires, kisses, wild salmon, wild berries, wild flowers, first times, sunlight naps, ball caps, catch, clapping, open doors and windows, barbecues, butterflies, buttercups, beauty, breezes, bugspray, bears, birds, new words, new life, and especially each other. It seemed like a dream from another life, but it's been a long winter. Now we're waking with the world, and it feels right.

Miracle Complete

Her name's Emily Anne. She was born last night at 11:30. I think she's beautiful. Rosy cheeks, puffy lips, dark hair, and chosen for us by God himself.

Mommy's doing well, baby's doing well; answered prayers and dreams coming true.

Miracle in Progress

My little sister is in the hospital right now waiting to meet her second baby. It's a battle and she hurts. But for nine months, she has been giving life to her child. Her body won't give up that privilege without a fight.

Tonight I pray for my sister and her little one. May God give them both the strength to separate physically and to begin the unbreakable bond of mother and child.



Sorry about the picture, Sis. I just figured you'd rather be riding a scooter in your pajamas than active labor. It's the least I could do.

Fish of a Lifetime

"...It's well known that in the room
or in the woods
or in the hut in the fishermen's district
or in the crackling canefields
there is a very unusual silence,
a moment as solemn as wood,
and a woman gets ready to give birth.

It's well known that we were born....."

-from Pablo Neruda, Births

I'm not sure when fishing became an obsession or even if it is one. But I know I loved it then, and I know what it means to me now. It may have started thirty one years ago today in a bright but solemn room.

God said, "Let him love fishing, then give him Katie so he can know what love really is. Then give him Sophia to teach him that love is a voluntary, joyous sacrifice. Then let him go fishing again and watch what happens."

Fishing for me has become a means to an end.

Applying the Scriptures IV

"...afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks."
Jeremiah 16:16b

Applying the Scriptures III

"Behold, I will send for many fishermen, says Yahweh, and they shall fish them up..."
-Jeremiah 16:16a

A Contemplative Man

"Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him."
"His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world."

"Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes."

"There are fishes wherever there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds and in melted metals we detect their semblance."

-Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

I don't know why fish are so good for friendships. Maybe the answer is in Thoreau, but I prefer to believe it's on a river with my buddies.