69 ~ This time of prayer

Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.    -Thoreau

Stream trout fishing in the Driftless Area certainly has that quality for me, especially in this time of spring and early summer, when all is fresh and novel again.

I’m not quite sure what it is I’m after, but I know that if I cling to finding it, I never will. Better to let go. Yes, cultivate and apply skill, and knowledge in the ways of streams and trout, but also accept that the outcome is ultimately up to the trout, and to the stream if it be in a generous mood that day . In this way, on my best days, each cast with my fly rod is a prayer – a prayer to the stream and to the trout.  On such days, the grace and beauty with which I offer a cast is enough, and ‘success’ won’t hinge on whether a trout comes as the answer to that prayer. On my best days...

Gardening is much the same. Working the soil is a humbling experience and lesson in powerlessness and the risk of attaching to outcome. In fact I - inappropriately capital ‘I’ - don’t grow anything. The seeds and the sun do (with some help from the soil, and the million things living there and the more millions that died and now nourisht). Photosynthesis is the Higher Power of my vegetable garden.

As in trout fishing, all I can do is prepare, and push a seed into the ground (or cast a fly onto the water), with as much mindfulness as I can muster, and a willingness to accept with grace whatever gifts are eventually returned, or not. This is an ongoing spiritual practice, for which trout streams and gardens are fine and willing teachers.

Yesterday, I planted the melon seeds. On each of four flat mounds of soil mixed with compost, I placed several tear-shaped seeds, more than needed as a hedge against the caprice of germination.

On the first mound, I picked a number, and on a whim laid down a spiral of 12 seeds in honor of the 12 Apostles and the 12 steps of recovery, then added three more - one for each of my late brothers Jack, Doug and Jim. And with a small prayer each time, with my finger I pushed each seed into the rich soil of the mound, and wished it well.

For the other mounds I considered planting 21 seeds for Uvalde, and 10 for the Buffalo supermarket, 17 for Majory Stoneman Douglas, 26 for Sandy Hook, 13 for Columbine, and…  But I do not have enough garden space for them all, nor for the others probably yet to come.

We have to initiate the young men.  If we don’t, they will burn down the village. -West African elder