the silver king from a float tube in the mangroves. incredible.

more…

the book is a work of genius and beauty.  if you haven’t read it, you should.  it’s short and there’s no better place to start with hemingway.  if you have read it, this amazing stop-motion by marcel schindler is even more moving….

http://vimeo.com/39473645

the old man and the sea from Marcel Schindler on Vimeo.

i wonder how your tiny body can hold your mighty soul…..bethany lynn flett, 4.2.99

sneaking in a half hour on a favorite stream one evening last fall.  variety show.

i’m not a good enough guitarist to play this the way it should be played, but i love this song.

the deep

spring is a good enough metaphor for what’s happening in our home as we look out on a new day and a new chapter of life as cody and i chart the way for our family.    things are changing and i sense that kind of discomfort in myself that i’ve come to see as a sign that i’m outside my subconscious beliefs about who i am and what i can be or do, and that i now have the choice to dig in my heels and return to comfort, or struggle up to growth and leave old habits behind.

traherne said nothing is so easy as to think, nothing is so difficult as to think well.    thoreau said i had two pieces of limestone on my desk, but i was terrified to discover that they required to be dusted daily, while the furniture of my mind was all undusted still….and i threw them out the window.  we’ve been noticing things that are keeping us from greater things, noticing ways in which, through fear, we have been trading the greater for the lesser.  and we’ve been noticing that when you are tired and hurting, what’s already a real challenge (to think well), can become almost impossible.

another of my favorites from traherne, paraphrased: to enjoy the world and hate the world are ideas which seem in conflict, but truly there are two worlds: that made by god, and that made by men.  the world made by god is full of holy and natural treasures, free to all, and instructs the soul in what has value.  the world made by men is a babel of confusion, full of invented riches which have no value other than what we place on them, and which invite greed and conflict.  leave the one that you may have the other.

here’s to forsaking what we know to be false, that’s the easy part right now.  and here’s to forsaking what others deem universally good but what we do not value for ourselves, that’s uncomfortable.  and here’s to forsaking what we have held as truth for a long time, but are coming to see is not part of the way forward, and therefore the way forward is paved with a question we thought we knew the answer to.  now we are leaning on faith and each other, reading more, hoping more, listening more, risking more.  loving more.  here’s to the way ahead, to spring, to morning, to new waters, and old hope.

i’m inspired by my wife almost every day in her guileless belief in the good and the right.  i’m so grateful i have a partner and friend who is so true.  i love the shema: hear oh israel, the lord thy god, the lord is one.  i’m not a hebrew scholar, i just hear integrity in that, i hear wholeness and integrity.  same stuff through and through.  certainty, selfhood, clarity, identity.  my wife is that way, and her integrity as a person and friend has been an anchor for me as i’ve seen so many bold claims show themselves as the works of men.  we are made in the image of god.  he is one.  we are one.  we can only be ourselves.  the spring is for leaving behind the falseness of being someone else, and of pursuing someone else’s path.

the spring is for risk, it’s for planting and trusting and hoping – and working.  my weak soul wants, in the brilliant words of paul simon, soil as soft as summer, and the strength to push like spring.  but it can’t be summer and spring, so the strength will have to be found, and it will have to be used.

behold, i make all things new

between the ages of 12 and 15, fishing in solitude saved me.

song of the red winged bird

it’s here.  the kids and i had a lot of great afternoons and nights at our local lake last summer catching fish for the tank and just for fun.  it’s close, it’s got a decent array of species in it, and once the early season triploid chasers dissipate in a couple more weeks, we should have the place relatively to ourselves.  i geared us up a little better in the last few weeks so now we’re armed with a little row boat, a float tube, a decent net, a dip net for minnows/tadpoles/insects/frogs/crawdads, and lots of flies.  the pumpkinseeds and bass should be building nests as we speak and i can’t wait to toss flies to them when the water gets just a little warmer.  the kids are going to love it.  here’s a few shots from last year:

we like to shop at goodwill.  while i was browsing for funky/cool t-shirts at the back of the store last week, ben came running up from the front inordinately excited (could never happen at a store where you know what you are going to buy) and exclaimed “dad, look what i found!” and then, in a mixture of thrill and confusion, “what is this?”.  and there it was in his hand, an extant copy of the tape i made in 1993 (i had to check the j-card for the date).  ben had never seen one.

it’s funny the things that are so much a part of who you are that you just assume your kids know them – cause they know you.  this made me realize, as i have for so long about my own dad, how not knowing me as a young man leaves my kids really not knowing me or my story in a very complete way.  this was a very big deal in my life at the time, and my kids didn’t even know it happened.

the year before i got married, friend tim meaney connected me with kip johns at kcms and he agreed to put the recently completed demo of farther up and further in into rotation.  tim and larz urged me to make put something together to sell in conjunction with the opportunity, and we took the 3 song demo larz and i had been working on, along with a pile of two-track stuff, and put it together.  jim dantzler and tim donated art and other help, and it was lamely dubbed overview because i am so artistic and creative.  i can’t remember how many we made, no more than a couple hundred i guess.  for years i kept a shrink-wrapped brick of  the hundreds of extra j-cards that were printed and never used.  now i reckon this is the last one.  i paid 10 cents for it and shared the beautiful coincidence with the clerk – i think he was more excited than we were.

“there is in all things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.” – merton

thinking about this today.   the passion i’ve always had for feeling a tug on the end of my line, and a desire to get that in some artful or interesting way.  in seclusion, in secret, surrounded by beauty or so distracted by it that i am mindless of the ugliness around me and inside me.  a line.  the will to live at one end, the will to feel alive at the other.   the urge to survive pulling against the urge to see and capture and touch and know.  an analog to the longing i have always had to know what’s behind the life i have on it’s many levels?

“when first I came among these hills like a roe i bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led: more like a man flying from something that he dreads, than one who sought the thing he loved”  -wordsworth