I taught they may have deleted this one. Its a bit fishy. But sums it up:
Quote:
Setting them free is the key... It will also begin to set YOU free...
Any thoughts?
I have heard many people say "I don't want to look back and say that I didn't try everything"
A fish poem.
There was nothing to do in Missoula. We went to school, read about evolution, hiked, and drank at the Iron Horse, or Rhino, fished. Easily 3 friends flunked out in fall or skipped Winter quarter for a long ski season, and who spent their nights tying flies and smoking. There were 12 of us in '91 hitching rides up to Snow Bowl. No problems. There was no problem getting a handful of buggers, nymphs or tinys for cost of materials and some beers.
Fly fishing was an addiction, or maybe a substitute for an addiction, or just a reason to walk along the river bank, but we did. Daily. Years worth of hours spent waist deep in the Blackfoot, wading, casting back and forth for trout, smelling of DEET and sweat and tobacco, thinking about GXE interactions, and philosophizing about the tree that fell in the woods that no one heard and changed the dynamics. The confidence interval in our equations. The fuzzy reason at the end of the chromosomes. The reason for those unmapped genes.
"The river ran through it." It ran through me. Became me. It was silent. Sometimes I just watched the flies hatch and began learning about life; then live a really strange existence. If they got too close, I caught them in a net and tried to memorize them. Some days, I just fished, but I was never really good at it. I could never imagine myself killing and eating another living creature. So, I usually fished left handed. Eventually caught one or two. I would reel them in real slowly. They would fight me. Its their nature.
If my wife is right they are souls that are young to this earth experiencing their way through the levels of existence. I don't know. To me they looked like underwater killing machines. Maybe they were angry, or jealous. Or I was weird to them so they stared at me funny. Sometimes I would get two wander by me. Always 2, underwater, handsome like two Italian hit men looking at my green "legs" in the water, from the corner of their eye. I was too big for food and moved about to much so shelter. If I looked one in the eye they would look away. I wasn't one of them.
I would reel them in real slowly, the fish. To me it was a game, to them it was their life. It mattered more to one of us. I handled them like I did my newborn daughter, gently, scared, lovingly, looked at them, let them go and said goodbye. I had a life that was so important to me and they had theirs. I realized I could never be as brave as them grasping at anything to survive. But I made decisions. Wise decisions. I just let them go, swim away. There was a reason for what they were doing, and so was I. Something bigger and better but still the same.
